Pakistan's hologram industry is eight months of demos and no takers

Two paths into the same gap

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing his guests as co-founders of Oztech — one the CEO with a business background, the other the CTO with a software engineering pedigree. Their routes to building a holographic marketing company in Pakistan are different, but they converge on the same diagnosis: the country’s marketing industry is stuck.

The CEO traces his career from a Karachi software house in the early 2000s — where teams were building Facebook pages for US clients at five thousand dollars a page — through a drop-shipping venture, and eventually to Red Tape, a digital out-of-home company that grew from 17 screens to around 500 during his tenure as general manager. Each stop gave him more exposure to what technology could do and more frustration with how slowly Pakistani brands were moving to use it.

The CTO’s path ran through game development and enterprise software at the same firm, Cellsoft, where the two first crossed paths. “I was into programming and developing softwares and game development — that was something that really caught my attention,” he explains. A master’s in software project management and years as a data analyst gave him the analytical foundation that now underpins how Oztech thinks about measuring campaign performance.

By May 2019, both had enough experience — and enough impatience — to start something of their own.

Why out-of-home, activations, and retail

Oztech did not try to disrupt everything at once. The co-founders identified three domains where they believed technology was most obviously absent: out-of-home advertising, brand activations, and retail.

The out-of-home choice is partly structural. In Karachi, a Supreme Court order following a fatal billboard collapse banned traditional billboard structures outright. What remains is largely wall pasting — a regression, not a status quo. “Out-of-home is one of the major communication channels — as soon as a consumer steps out of their home, brands are trying to speak to their consumers,” the CEO says. “That communication needs to be uplifted.”

Activations — the one-on-one brand experiences at stalls, events, and pop-ups — are the second domain. The co-founders draw a clear line between passive digital signage (which they classify as out-of-home) and genuine interaction. Activation, in their definition, requires a human response: a touchscreen, a gesture, an AR experience. The third domain, retail, covers everything from hypermarkets to corner stores — the moment of truth when a consumer is standing in front of a product and deciding whether to buy.

Muzamil pushes on whether Oztech is also providing the human layer of activations — the brand ambassadors, the event staff. The answer is categorical: no. “We on the back end would strategise for the brand, design the whole campaign, develop the technology, deploy the technical part — and we let the expert activation agencies manage the whole campaign.”

The eight-month icebreaker

The most revealing section of the conversation is the account of what it actually took to land the first hologram campaign. Oztech pitched for eight months. They built demos. They gave presentations. Clients were interested but unwilling to be first.

“They were not convinced — they sort of wanted to not be the first ones, they didn’t want to take the risk,” the CEO recalls. “For eight months we were completely investing, continuously investing, giving demos and whatnot.”

This is a pattern Muzamil and the co-founders return to repeatedly: Pakistani brands are not opposed to new technology in principle, but they will not move until someone else has already moved. The icebreaker problem is real, and it is expensive. Oztech absorbed that cost themselves, bootstrapping through the demo period with no external funding.

Once the first successful campaigns were delivered, the dynamic shifted. The co-founders describe a curve — heavy upfront investment to convince the industry, followed by the ability to scale and reinvest. They are still on the early part of that curve, but the trajectory has changed.

The economics of bespoke technology

Muzamil raises the central commercial tension directly: holographic and projection-based campaigns are bespoke by nature. A hologram built for one product launch cannot simply be reused for another. That makes the model look more like consulting than product sales — and consulting, globally, is expensive.

“Budget is always going to remain a constraint,” the CEO acknowledges. “Even if we tell them that projection and holograms is something groundbreaking, they would much rather spend on a billboard.”

Oztech’s response to this is twofold. First, they own some of their equipment — certain projectors and hardware — and rent the rest, which reduces per-campaign costs. Second, they evaluate every technology investment against a scaling question: what is the eventual business case, and can this grow? The goal is not to win one expensive campaign but to build toward a point where the technology is familiar enough that clients budget for it routinely.

The capital intensity of the business is not hidden. Importing equipment was unavoidable — the co-founders are direct that the kind of projection hardware Oztech needs simply does not exist in Pakistan at the required scale. “In a developed country, one city would have that equipment in total,” the CEO notes. Pakistan, as a whole, had less.

The drone QR code moment — and what it reveals

Later in the discussion, a specific viral moment surfaces: a drone light show in China that formed a QR code in the sky. Oztech received fifteen or sixteen calls about it within days of the video going viral. Every caller wanted the same thing — 1,500 drones, immediately, at a landmark location.

The co-founders had suggested starting with 200 drones, proving the concept, becoming the first in Pakistan to do it at that scale, and growing from there. Nobody was interested in that version.

“Everybody who’s calling is like — we want 1,500 drones and we want it like tomorrow,” the CEO says. The gap between what brands want to announce and what they are willing to build toward is, in his view, the defining problem of the industry.

Muzamil asks why this pattern persists — why Pakistan has not been able to develop a more experimental marketing culture. The answer the co-founders give is not about capability. It is about incentive structures inside agencies and brand teams. “The brands and agencies need to understand that we need to build technologies, we need to look ahead — we don’t need to wait for what goes viral.” The viral moment creates a spike of interest that fades within a month, leaving no lasting infrastructure behind.

What the cheapest digital experience actually looks like

The conversation does not stay at the level of drones and holograms. Muzamil asks what the most accessible entry point is — the cheapest digital experience a brand could create today.

The answer is disarmingly simple: connect an existing digital screen to social media. Let a consumer post with a hashtag and see their content appear on the billboard in real time. Or put a QR code on the billboard and give people something worth scanning — a game, a competition, a personalised offer.

“We missed that board,” the CEO says, referring to the years when big companies avoided building campaign apps because they were afraid of the promotion cost. “A lot of boards that we’re missing — just because we’re not experimenting, just because we’re trying to play safe.”

The point is not that holograms are the wrong ambition. It is that the industry has skipped several intermediate steps, and those steps matter. Brands that have never run a QR code campaign are not ready to commission a drone light show.

The world Oztech is building toward

By the end of the conversation, the co-founders sketch the longer-term vision. It is a connected consumer journey that begins the moment someone leaves their home. Smart outdoor projections that pull live data — sports scores, social feeds, personalised messages. Interactive projections that respond to movement. In-store screens where a customer picks up any product, places it in front of a sensor, and the screen populates with ingredients, pricing, and competitor comparisons. Eventually, virtual try-on and avatar-based retail experiences.

“Imagine a world where you come out of your home and you see digital assets that are smart, that are connected — and they can maybe recognise who you are and play a message that is social-media connected, showing live data,” the CEO says.

Muzamil notes that this vision is not purely advertising — it is about making consumers more informed and more capable of making good decisions. The co-founders agree. Product image recognition, gesture-based interaction, and personalised retail suggestions are all things they describe as already in development or clearly on the roadmap.

The caveat is honest: mass-market consumers in Pakistan are not ready for fully virtual retail yet. Brick-and-mortar stores are not going away. But the fundamentals Oztech is building now — the data infrastructure, the projection technology, the interactive display systems — are the foundation for a market that will eventually arrive. “We’ve got complete faith in our technology and our vision,” the CEO says. “The challenge we face is to have the icebreaker.”