In April 2016, HCM City for the first time put 10 buses with ads on the sides into operation after 10 years of delay. The licensing was implemented after an open auction which brought VND14.6 billion to the city’s budget.

In 2015, the city authorities spent VND927 billion to subsidize bus routes. According to the local transport department, if ads can be placed on 2,344 buses in the city, the total sum of money may be up to VND170 billion, which will help ease the city’s budget deficit.

Koa Sha Media Vietnam, a subsidiary of Japan-based Koa Sha Group, has become the exclusive agent to implement the pilot transit advertisement project on 10 bus routes and 171 vehicles.

Vietnam has 6,000 ad firms which use advertisements widely in mass media. However, the open auctioning for transit advertisement has not helped them.

The representative of a firm with 20 years of experience in OOH (out of home) advertisement said transit ads will provide one more ad channel to businesses, but the efficiency will depend on businesses’ capability.

Unlike the billboard ad sector, which has been quiet since the Ad Law took effect in 2013, the number of advertisements on transport vehicles has been increasing.

Koa Sha Media Vietnam is a reasonable choice, because no other Vietnamese OOH ad agent can compete with it in terms of the length of operation. Koa Sha was established in 1938, which has business in Thailand and Vietnam.

Vo Van Hoan, chief secretariat of the committee, said the transport department initially planned to expand the project scale by the second quarter of 2017. However, as the project runs very effectively, this will be done early next year.

Ads have appeared not only on buses in HCM City, but also on taxis. There is no official report about the profit from the ads on taxis, but  Mai Linh, Vina Taxi and Vinasun, and many other taxi firms have applied this model.

Observers believe that transit add will be the choice for many more businesses in the future, because the costs are cheaper than ads on TV, print newspapers and billboards. It costs about tens of million of dong to advertise on one bus for one year.