Hoarding, unipole, gantry: OOH formats and sizes in India

Most people arriving at this question want one number: the standard hoarding size. The honest answer is that there isn’t one, and understanding why is more useful than a number that would be wrong in your city anyway.

Out-of-home sizes are conventions, not standards. They come from the width of flex rolls, the span of the road, the depth of the terrace and what the municipal corporation permitted at that spot in the year it was built. Two boards on the same street are routinely different sizes. So this is a guide to the formats and the sizes they tend to be built at, and to the specifications you should actually be recording.

First, the word itself

Hoarding means different things to different people, which is why searching for it is so confusing.

In Indian and British English, a hoarding in advertising is a large outdoor board carrying a printed advertisement — what American English calls a billboard. The same word also means the temporary plywood barrier around a construction site, and in an entirely unrelated sense it is the psychological condition. If your search results mix advertising with cleanup services, that is why.

Throughout this article, hoarding means the advertising kind.

Out-of-home (OOH) is the industry term covering all advertising a person encounters outside their home — hoardings, transit, street furniture, cinema, in-mall. DOOH is the digital subset: the same idea on an LED screen rather than a printed sheet.

Signage is not the same thing, though the words get used interchangeably. Signage is generally about identifying a place — a shop’s own name board, wayfinding, statutory signs. Out-of-home is about renting attention at a location to somebody else. The distinction matters commercially, because the software, the permissions and the customers are different for each.

The formats

Hoarding or billboard

The classic large printed board, mounted on a building terrace, a compound wall or its own steel frame beside a road. Printed on flex or vinyl, changed per campaign, lit by floodlights or not lit at all.

Commonly built at, in feet: 20×10, 30×10, 40×10, 20×15, 30×15, 40×20, 60×20. The 40×20 and 60×20 sizes belong to arterial roads and highways where the viewing distance is long. Terrace sites in older city areas are often the smaller 20×10 and 30×10, because that is what the building allows.

Unipole

A single steel pole carrying a board high above the road, usually with the advertisement on two faces pointing in opposite directions. Higher and cleaner-looking than a terrace hoarding, more expensive to build, and generally priced higher for the same area.

Commonly 20×10, 30×15, 40×20 per face, with the pole putting the board somewhere around 30 to 60 feet up.

The important commercial point about a unipole is the faces are sold separately. One structure, two pieces of sellable inventory, each with its own direction of traffic and often its own rate — the face pointing towards the city usually beats the one pointing away.

Gantry

A structure spanning across the road, with the advertisement facing oncoming traffic head-on. The most commanding format available, generally on highways and major arterials, and usually the most expensive in any portfolio.

Sizes follow the road’s span rather than a convention, but the display panels are often in the region of 40×15 to 60×20.

Pole kiosk

Small panels fixed to street light poles, sold in runs rather than singly — a client takes thirty of them along a stretch of road. Typically around 3×6 or 4×6 feet per panel.

The thing to understand about kiosks is that the unit of sale is the route, not the pole. Pricing and booking them one at a time is a mistake that makes the inventory unsellable and the paperwork enormous.

Bus shelters and street furniture

Backlit panels on a bus queue shelter, usually around 4×6 feet, often two or three panels per shelter. Almost always municipal contracts, which means you maintain the shelter as part of the deal — a real operating cost that new entrants forget.

Wall wraps and building wraps

The advertisement printed to fit a building’s facade. No standard size at all, priced per square foot, and the permissions are the hardest part.

Digital (DOOH)

An LED screen showing multiple advertisers in rotation. Sold as slots in a loop rather than as a month of display, which changes everything about how you record it: the sellable unit is a number of seconds per loop across a number of hours, not a face for a period.

If you are pricing digital against print, the useful comparison is not rate against rate but cost per thousand impressions, since ten advertisers are sharing one structure.

Why the “standard size” question keeps failing

Four reasons, all of them practical:

1. Flex roll widths. Printed material comes in fixed roll widths, and boards get designed to waste as little as possible. Change the supplier and the convenient sizes shift.
2. The site dictates. A terrace is as wide as the terrace. A gantry is as wide as the road.
3. Municipal limits. Corporations cap display area, and the cap differs by city and by zone. Some of the most common sizes exist because they sit just under a local limit.
4. Legacy. A structure built in 2004 is the size it was built. Nobody rebuilds a working site to match a convention.

So when a client asks for “a standard 40×20”, what they mean is approximately that, and your job is to tell them the actual dimensions of the actual site.

What you should record per site

This is the part that pays for itself. Whether you use paper, a spreadsheet or software built for out-of-home inventory, capture:

• Exact width and height in feet, and the resulting square footage — printing is billed on it
• Number of faces, and whether each is sold separately
• Direction each face points, and the traffic direction it catches
• Lit or unlit, and if lit, whose electricity meter it is on
• Format — hoarding, unipole, gantry, kiosk, shelter, wrap, digital
• GPS position, not a description. “Near the flyover” is not a location a client can verify
• Photographs of the site itself, taken from the viewing angle rather than from underneath
• Licence and lease expiry dates, because these are the dates that can lose you the site

A rate card with sizes on it sells better than one without, and a client who can see the exact square footage stops asking whether printing is included.

The practical consequence

Two sites of the same declared size can be worth very different money, and two sites of different sizes can be worth the same. Size is an input to the rate, not the rate — traffic, viewing distance, lighting and the road itself matter more, which is covered in more detail here.

What size does determine, exactly and unarguably, is the printing bill. So record it precisely once, and stop re-measuring it for every quotation.

In Sazinga AdBoard every site carries its dimensions, faces, lighting and GPS position, and those figures flow into the proposal and the invoice without being typed again. The same discipline runs through the rest of the outdoor media operation — availability, proof of display and billing all read from the same site record rather than from somebody’s memory of it.