Minimum Orders Are Per City, Not Per Campaign: What a 10-City Outdoor Rollout Really Floors At (2026)

A national outdoor brief usually arrives as one number and one list of cities. The number is the budget, the list is ten cities, and the assumption underneath is that a ten-city campaign is a one-city campaign multiplied by ten. It is not, and the reason is printed on every city page we publish: the minimum order is stated per city, not per campaign.

Each of our ten city pages carries the same sentence, that the minimum order for auto branding in that city is 300 autos for hood branding and 500 autos for back panel stickers. No-parking boards publish a 1,000 board minimum per city. Newspaper insertion publishes 50,000 copies per city. Multiply those minimums by ten cities and the floor of a national campaign turns out to be a much larger number than most budgets expect, and it is not negotiable by spending less in each place.

What minimum order does each format publish per city?

Five formats, five different units of measurement. Autos and boards are counted in vehicles and pieces, inserts in copies, vans in days. The column that matters for a national plan is the last one, because that is the number the finance team will see.

The ten cities are the ten we publish rate cards for: Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, Pune, Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Lucknow. The per-city floors are published; the ten-city column is our multiplication of those published figures, and it assumes you take the minimum in every city and nothing more.

The spread in that last column is the whole planning problem. From Rs.4,50,000 to Rs.19,50,000 is a 4.3 times range for the same ten-city footprint, and the difference has nothing to do with quality or reach. It is the size of the smallest unit each format is willing to sell.

It is worth understanding why the floor sits where it does, because that tells you what is not negotiable. Every rate quoted here is published as all-inclusive. The auto cards cover design, printing and installation. The board rate covers the board, printing, transportation and installation at the gate. The insert rate covers printing and guaranteed insertion with a delivery report. A minimum order is what makes sending a print run and an installation crew into a city worth doing at that all-in price. That is our reading of the structure rather than a published explanation, but it predicts the request buyers make most often and almost never get, which is half a city at the full rate.

Does a volume discount apply per city or across the whole order?

Nowhere on any of our pages does it say. This is the most expensive unanswered question in a national outdoor quotation, and it has a strange property at exactly the ten-city minimum: every format crosses its own volume break on the total order while sitting below that break in every individual city.

The insert row deserves a second look. The card says Rs.1.15 applies above 50,000 copies and the per-city minimum is exactly 50,000, so a single-city order sits precisely on the boundary rather than on either side of it. Ask which rate a 50,000 copy order attracts, then ask the same question about 500,000 copies split across ten cities. Those are two different questions and they may have two different answers.

We are not going to tell you the tier aggregates, because our own pages do not say so. What we can say is that the answer is worth between Rs.50,000 and Rs.1,50,000 on a ten-city order depending on format, that it costs nothing to ask, and that a quotation which is silent about it is a quotation you cannot compare with anyone else's.

There is a second-order version of this question that matters just as much on a staged rollout. If you book five cities in October and five more in January, is that one order that crossed the tier or two orders that did not? Nothing we publish addresses it, and the answer decides whether phasing a national campaign to spread the cash flow quietly costs you the discount as well. Ask it at the same time as the first question, and ask for the answer to be written into the quotation rather than confirmed on a call.

What does a Rs.5,00,000 national budget actually buy?

This is where the per-city minimum stops being a technicality. Half a crore is a large local budget and a small national one, and the published minimums decide the shape of what it can buy long before creative or route planning gets involved.

Read down that first column and the real decision appears. It is not which format performs better. It is whether the brief wants presence in ten cities or depth in two, because at this budget the published minimums will not let you have both. A ten-city board campaign and a two-city hood campaign cost roughly the same money and are completely different campaigns.

The leftover column matters just as much. Outdoor budgets tend to strand money, because the next city always costs a full minimum rather than a marginal amount. Rs.1,10,000 left over on a hood plan is not a small third city, it is nothing at all, and the honest options are to raise the budget to Rs.5,85,000 for a third city or to spend the remainder on a different format in the same two cities.

Scaling the same table down is the more common real case. At three cities the hood floor is Rs.5,85,000 and the board floor is Rs.1,35,000. At five cities they are Rs.9,75,000 and Rs.2,25,000. The ratio between the two formats never changes, because it is set by the size of each minimum unit rather than by the number of cities. What changes is whether the figure at the bottom of the plan is one the budget can actually carry, which is the argument for deciding the city list and the format in the same meeting rather than in that order.

Why is mobile van branding the exception?

Because the van is the only format we sell by time rather than by quantity. The published minimum booking is one van for one day, so there is no quantity floor to multiply by ten cities. A T-Shape van day is published at Rs.2,200 in Kolkata, Rs.2,500 in Chennai and Rs.3,000 in Bangalore and Delhi, which puts one day in each of those four cities at Rs.10,700.

Scaled across ten cities at that same range, one van day each is roughly Rs.22,000 to Rs.30,000. That is our arithmetic on the four cards that publish an all-in day rate, and the remaining six city cards should be read before anyone budgets from it. It is also the cheapest way to be visibly present in ten cities on one date, which is a genuinely useful thing for a launch day or a results day, and completely useless the morning after, because nothing remains on the street.

We wrote about that trade in more detail when we looked at what a single day of outdoor advertising can be booked for. The short version for a national plan is that the van solves the minimum-order problem and creates a duration problem instead.

What we do not publish, and should be asked for in writing

Three gaps matter on a multi-city order, and naming them is more useful than papering over them. First, whether a volume tier is read per city or across the whole order, which is worth Rs.50,000 to Rs.1,50,000 as shown above. Second, whether a 300-auto hood minimum can be pooled across two adjacent cities, which would change the shape of any two-city plan. Third, whether a 50,000 copy insert order takes the Rs.1.25 rate or the Rs.1.15 rate when it sits exactly on the published boundary.

None of the three is published on any page of this site, and we would rather say so than invent a rule. Put all three in the same email before you compare quotations, ours included, because an agency that answers them in writing is quoting a different thing from one that does not.

One more line belongs on any national plan, and it is the one most often dropped from the comparison. Every card quoted here is before 18 percent GST, so the ten-city board floor of Rs.4,50,000 lands at Rs.5,31,000 and the ten-city hood floor of Rs.19,50,000 lands at Rs.23,01,000. We have worked the landed totals for every format through GST in a separate post. For a multi-city plan the short version is that the tax does not change which format is cheapest, only how far the budget actually reaches.

Our recommendation

Pick the footprint first and the format second, because at any realistic national budget the published minimums make that decision for you anyway. If the brief genuinely needs all ten cities, no-parking boards are the only format whose floor fits inside Rs.5,00,000, and 10,000 boards at Rs.45 is the campaign to price first. If the brief needs the autos, accept that hood branding is a two-city format at that budget and choose the two cities on merit rather than spreading thin and failing every minimum.

For a launch date rather than a campaign, the van is the honest answer, because it is the only format with no quantity floor to multiply. And whichever way the brief goes, settle the tier question in writing first. It is the cheapest Rs.60,000 to Rs.1,50,000 anyone will save on the whole plan. Send us the city list and the budget and we will price both shapes side by side.

Eight questions to ask before signing a multi-city order

1. Is the minimum order counted per city or across my whole order? 2. Is the volume tier counted the same way? 3. If ten cities together cross a tier that no single city crosses, which rate applies? 4. For a 50,000 copy insert order sitting exactly on the boundary, is it Rs.1.25 or Rs.1.15? 5. Can the auto minimum be pooled across two neighbouring cities? 6. Is GST quoted on each city order or on the total? 7. Which city cards carry a seasonal premium during my campaign window? 8. If one city cannot be serviced, does the quantity move to another city or come off the invoice?