Hyd uses GIS for ad-tracking

HYDERABAD: Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad (MCH) is expecting a rise in revenues in days to come from leasing of advertising space. With Advertisement Information Management Systems (AIMS) -- a GIS application -- tracking the hoardings or even advertisements on trees within city limits not only the transparency will increase but identifying the revenue collection patterns will also be possible at just a mouse-click.

“This will be the first time that technology is being used to track outdoor media. This product will facilitate management of all outdoor advertising be it in terms of additions, deletions or changes,” said Pradeep one of the seven developers of the software which is right now being fine tuned at Hyderabad-based MapWorld Technologies Ltd.

In fact, this pilot project made MCH aware that it has 1,672 hoardings, 2,160 electric poles, 594 bus stops, 59 central media, 59 arches, nine foot path railings, seven digital, 35 neon, 29 trees and 174 road dividers currently being used for advertising. “We will be including glow signs also as soon as the data is in,” added Pradeep.

This six-month project AIMS under Asst Prof. B Sridhar of Vasavi College of Engineering is part of the industry-institute interface and equips the MCH not only with just the number of advertisements but also with minute details such as size, dimensions, location and the agency they belong to -- and all of it with a high degree of accuracy.

“It will primarily help MCH in tax collections,” said Sridhar along with of course the ease of management of the whole system, which right now is lost and consequently mismanaged in the tomes of files.

(CNS)