Taxi advertising is an avenue that has seen enormous growth in our inner cities. In areas where the council doesn’t tightly control the appearance of taxi cabs, advertising is slowly taking over. Much like advertising on buses, the benefits of having a moving advert, travelling around urban areas, potentially being viewed by thousands of people, is too good to ignore.
Advertisers are having to work extremely hard to find new ways of advertising to an increasingly ad-blind and ad-weary public. The average person is bombarded with marketing messages, brand images and advertisements wherever they go. Some have become blind to them, others have become so tired of them that they deliberately ignore them.
Overcoming these barriers is the biggest challenge facing companies and advertising agencies. One way round it is to make adverts clever and engaging. Another is to find new mediums with which to communicate the message.
Moving Target
Taxi advertising is essentially a mobile billboard travelling round a city. With the inevitable traffic problems that plague our urban areas, these adverts are static for long enough to be noticed, but not long enough to become predictable.
The human eye is attracted to moving objects. It’s a legacy of our hunting ancestry. We are naturally attracted to things that move, including advertising messages. Having a simple advert moving around town on the side of a vehicle is a great way to appeal to that instinctive side of an audience.
This is why static billboards are gradually evolving into ones that move, shuffle or slide a series of adverts. To attract the eye during the movement of the change and so we don’t get blind to them. The advances in LCD technology now allow advertisers to have moving images as well as static ones, again attracting the eye.
Hitting the Mark
Taxi advertising takes these principles and merges them with a static image. The advert itself may not move or be interactive but the medium itself, the taxi, does. That means those around the taxi advert won’t get blind to it, or begin to ignore it.
While this won’t cure ad-blindness or tiredness, it will keep it at bay for a time. It is just one trick that advertisers use to keep people aware, and interested in their messages.
For the advertising pound, taxi advertising is value for money. Compared to billboard, magazine or TV advertising, it is possible to reach more people for less investment using taxi ads. While that remains so, the market will continue to grow.