"A few days ago, as Samay Raina staged a comeback following the controversy around India's Got Latent, brands did what brands do best.

They rushed in.

Among them was magicpin, the hyperlocal commerce discovery platform that has quietly built a business around deals, discovery and everyday spending.

Its response was not a glossy film or a barrage of digital ads but a billboard.

It read, “Samay badalta hai.

What a comeback bro!”, paired with a cartoonish illustration of Raina back on his set.

The billboard then found its place as a separate post on the brand's social media handles.

And that, in many ways, is magicpin's entire advertising playbook.

The platform does not always try to start conversations.

It tries to find the ones already in motion, slip into them with a line that feels native, and rely on the internet to do the rest.

Or, as co-founder and CEO Anshoo Sharma puts it, the goal is simply “to be talkable, to be talked about”.

Anshoo Sharma, co-founder & CEO, magicpin Talkability as strategy In a marketing ecosystem dominated by dashboards and attribution models, magicpin"s north star is unusually simple.

“At the heart of what we do for marketing is to be talkable,” Sharma says.

“More than any other metric, that is the only metric we look towards.” Instead of deciding what the brand wants to say and then forcing that message into consumers" feeds, magicpin starts with what consumers are already talking about.

It then looks for ways to insert itself into those conversations in a manner that aligns with its identity, which the brand defines as fun, quirky and rooted in going out and experiencing life.

Trial and error has shaped this philosophy.

Since its founding in 2015, magicpin has evolved from a check-in and rewards app to a full-fledged omnichannel commerce platform spanning local retail, food delivery, brand offers and ONDC-enabled commerce.

Along the way, it has experimented with multiple advertising formats, including television and large-scale sports integrations.

Not all of them worked.

“When we ran television ads, people called us and said they saw us on TV.

It felt nice, but it didn"t make a good impact on the business,” Sharma says.

“Our Google Trends went up, but customer acquisition did not.” That gap between visibility and impact led the company to rethink its approach.

Over time, it arrived at a sharper thesis: content drives conversation, and conversation drives outcomes.

Why OOH became the canvas The prominence of out-of-home advertising in magicpin"s marketing mix stems from that thesis.

Billboards, Sharma argues, are not just media assets.

They are statements.

They enforce brevity, reward boldness, and, crucially, are easy to capture and share.

“You have to stand out if you want to be talked about,” he says.

“We found billboards are a great way to stand out.

They are bold, they are in your face.” However, the platform's use of OOH differs from the traditional model of scale and repetition.

The company does not aim to dominate physical space.

Instead, it uses select placements as creative triggers.

A single striking hoarding can spark curiosity, get photographed and make its way onto social media, where the real distribution begins.

In that sense, OOH is less about reach and more about ignition.

“It is not that our media budgets go towards OOH,” Sharma explains.

“Our budgets go towards the right content.

OOH becomes a manifestation of that content.” From billboard to buzz Once a campaign....