Children’s entertainment channel Nickelodeon has teamed up with Ubiquitous taxis for the first time to create their very own ‘turtle taxis’, ahead of the relaunch of popular cartoon show Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The show, which was considered one of the most popular children’s shows on TV in the 80’s, is returning to a new generation, with hopes it will once again become a favourite.

The nationwide campaign, planned and booked by UM London, will run across a variety of formats, some not quite as traditional as others! Alongside digital and TV, Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael and Michelangelo, the four ninja turtles, emerged from the sewers onto the streets on London’s Southbank through a specially commissioned 3D art installation at Riverside Walkway by St Gabriel’s Wharf.

In London, liveried taxis featuring the popular characters will be live from 16th October and in Manchester, Birmingham and Edinburgh, SuperSides will feature the turtle heroes. Using taxis across multiple cities has enabled Nickelodeon to reach ‘everybody, everywhere’ across the busiest streets in the country, reaching a variety of audiences with their bright creative.

Alison Bakunowich, VP Director of Marketing and Communications, Nickelodeon UK, “With the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles making a return and creating one of the biggest launches for Nickelodeon to date, we knew it was essential to pull out all the stops. Including taxis in our nationwide campaign will ensure we capture the attention of audiences down the busiest streets and in the most populous cities with our impossible to miss creative. Taxi advertising works perfectly within our integrated campaign, spreading the word that the turtles are back and better than ever!”

“Taxis in key cities offer the perfect way to generate broadcast awareness of a national event, such as the advent of a TV show”, commented Micky Harris, Director at Ubiquitous. “They reach busy, on-the-go audiences with a constant reminder throughout the day, complementing other media running in and around the local area.”

Do you feel like there are precious few moments in the day when you get to do the little things? You know what I’m talking about – those small jobs you’ve got to remember to do, personal or otherwise, that wake you up in the night: arrange travel insurance, book the cinema, check a bank transfer, find an electrician.These are the details of everyday life – the dotting of the i’s and crossing of the t’s, the small ticks and checks that keep all the ducks in a row. If they are so important, why do I find myself cramming them into the parts of my day that used to be the ‘breathing space’? It’s not just me who feels like this. The economic pressure of recent years has taken its toll on people; work and home life interrupt each other more frequently now; lunchtimes are taken up with ‘catching up’; and travel between A and B normally involves checking emails, going online and making calls on that life tool, the smartphone. What would we do without it? If you’re an advertiser, how do you cut through this clutter? How do you keep up with the pace of people’s lives?  How do you get them to stop and look at you? Must you always be hunting for the gaps in the day when there are no interruptions, or must you keep running at the same pace as the people you’re trying to reach?The answer to both is yes, you must; if you want to talk to your audience, you’ve got to do it on their journey through everyday life.Never an industry to get left on the starting block, marketing constantly embraces new technology, and invests a lot of time and energy exploring the most effective moments to utilise it. The most recent manifestation of this is near field communication, or NFC: the close-contact radio communication that enables smartphones to receive and transmit data.Sounds all very complicated, but in fact NFC is the simple (and intelligent) solution for brands that need to have an on-going, relevant, timely and instant communication with a target audience, no matter where they are (check out this great demo video from Posterscope). The trick is to combine the NFC placement with those times and locations in the day when we, the consumers, still have a little bit of breathing space – enough to briefly have our heads turned by an ad that asks us to ‘tap our phones for more info’. Interest in NFC interaction is building quickly and not only amongst industry people; the public are taking an interest too and, as more phones enter the market and more brands take up the opportunity, there’ll soon come a time when tapping an ad or downloading info via your NFC phone is as second nature as swiping your Oyster card. Most people are well practised at using a smartphone when walking (well, they think they are), so will quickly get used to the idea of tap-and-go communication, making Outdoor more ‘in the moment’, relevant and personal than ever before. Many mobile brands and card operators are already talking about fully integrated mobile wallets and it’s my feeling that it’s just this type of service that will help NFC to quickly move from being ‘new’ to ‘mainstream’. This week the European Commission announced the go ahead for the UK’s three largest mobile operators to form a joint venture to introduce NFC mobile payments and promotional services: another big step towards making NFC a part of everyday life. Of course, it will be the early adopters who secure themselves a new NFC phone first – those guys who are the most desirable (and hardest) people to reach. But even in targeting the tech-savvy, brands will need to invest time to educate them about this new touchpoint. So dwell time could be the key here, as well as placing your NFC tags in locations with few distractions – somewhere that easily permits consumer opt-in.  Bus stops, train station platforms and the interiors of black taxis all spring to mind as locations that present adequate dwell time and the opportunity for a deeper, lengthier one-to-one consumer engagement. Already the leading media owners, agencies and advertisers are trialling the technology in these locations, in order to test the reactions of those all-important ‘early adopters’. Looking to the future is really one of the key reasons why Outdoor is a billion-pound industry with a pioneering reputation, and here at Ubiquitous we hope that taxi advertising can play a part in growing that. We’ve done our homework; we know that over 65% of regular taxi passengers access the internet via their smart-phones during their taxi journeys and, with these averaging at 20 minutes, adding NFC into the taxi advertising proposition will enable Ubiquitous clients to capture the attention and imagination of passengers during one of life’s little journeys. If you want to find out more, just call the Ubiquitous team.

So far this year we’ve been fortunate enough to secure a number of campaigns from fashion and cosmetics clients; some have used taxi advertising before, so are familiar with the medium, but others have been harder to win; they’re new to taxis and so had to be persuaded of the brand benefits. Added to this, many prestige clients are based outside the UK and may be unfamiliar with how taxi advertising looks in this country. These are challenges that will ring true with any media sales professional, and overcoming them is part and parcel of the selling process. However, we often find that the challenges don’t stop when the booking sheet is signed; sometimes creative complications arise and these can be deal-breakers or can threaten to undo all that good salesmanship. Sure, many Creatives experience problems adapting their client’s existing campaign to an unfamiliar format, but frequently we find that the issue isn’t because of unfamiliarity so much as nervousness to change a layout that has already been ‘signed off’. I have mentioned fashion and cosmetic clients because ‘brand look’ is of paramount importance to them, but they are by no means unique in this. Many clients create campaigns that are shot seasonally and are precisely formatted according to brand guidelines, achieving maximum emotional or aesthetic impact. Campaigns which, once signed off, are only altered after prolonged consideration by a team of people who often reside in different countries. This isn’t a dig at image conscious clients, it’s simply an acknowledgement that we understand how awkward it can be when we say, ‘your artwork layout doesn’t work for a taxi; we suggest you alter it.’ Many such problematic campaigns have already been specifically created with portrait magazine or poster ads in mind, and once shot can’t be easily revisited; that window of opportunity has closed. And so the creative agency or in-house designer is asked to adapt a very prescriptive layout to a very unusual format: taxis. It’s at this point that we, and the media agencies we work with, should step up and offer constructive and relevant creative guidance; after all, we’ve successfully pitched taxis on the basis that the brand will look great and the campaign will be effective. This is where being an expert in your field and understanding the overall effect that the client wishes to maintain, really matter. It is here, after the deal is done, that media owners and agencies are often asked to earn their dough and quite rightly too, as I believe that we have a responsibility to ourselves and Outdoor as a whole, to deliver the best campaign possible. Every day there are established clients trying new formats, new formats reaching out to established clients; sometimes there are new clients launching on to new formats, which makes everyone nervous. Somewhere along the line, someone is spending brand money on an idea they’ve not tried before, which can be a risk. They’ve probably persuaded internal stakeholders that taxis, for example, are great for the campaign, but what if they have to go back to the board again and tell them that the artwork doesn’t work on the format they’ve championed? Having persuaded them to take this risk, we have a responsibility to provide support from start to finish, ensuring that their risk pays off. The easy route would be to simply take the artwork and run it, regardless of how uninspiring it is, but nobody wins then; the client thinks that the medium isn’t a good place for their brand and we, as media owners, know that our format could have looked better. It’s a delicate line to walk, telling the client that the artwork that they’ve submitted really doesn’t work, but for the sake of campaign effectiveness and brand aesthetics, sometimes you just have to put your art director’s hat on, (even if you’re a media sales guy), and do the right thing: speak your mind. This path might result in pushed deadlines and stress, but at the end of the day, the client got out of their comfort zone and booked a new format, so we should get out of ours and have the conversation about improving the artwork. In our experience providing the best service, rather than the easiest service, is always worth the effort. ANDREW BARNETT

The "Cabmageddon" competition gave shoppers and party goers free rides home on the busiest night of the year! The free rides were also promoted in the press which meant everyone was looking to get a free ride. A Facebook competition also gave lucky winners the chance to get a free ride by dropping a pin on a map to show where they lived and why they were the most deserving of a free ride! To add extra goodwill and Christmas sparkle, a special build taxi had red antlers added to the roof.

In this industry, not a day goes by without someone asking me how business is. The natural response of course is to respond by casting business in a slightly more positive light than might actually be the case; I imagine I’m not alone in doing that. I did it a lot in 2011 though; it was an extremely competitive year for taxi advertising; and that’s really saying something for a category that probably has more wheeler dealers than most of outdoor. Last year we were swimming with a pool of operators who seemed happy to undercut each other to the point where we decided to walk away from business rather than make such big compromises across revenue and quality. In that kind of market those tough decisions feel risky but are vital for long term success, all the time hedging your bets that success will come. But I am glad that we stuck to our principles, as 2012 has been a new dawn for taxi advertising; things really do seem to have changed and when I look closely at why this might be, I can only conclude that this taxi renaissance is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s early doors for 2012, but now when people ask me how business is, I am able to tell them that demand is high and that going into this Olympic year we’re in a stronger position than any of us here predicted. What’s even more surprising is that whilst Outdoor will see some spectacular campaigns and volumes across the Games, the increased interest is not just down to the Olympics; we’re seeing a desire for taxis right across the year. So my gut feeling is that although there are advertisers and sponsors who want to a brand stake in 2012 (and taxis are a very iconic way to do this), the Games are not the driving factor in this taxi renaissance. There are a number of other influencing factors, and although I share my opinion about them here, I am perhaps not the best person to say whether they truly make a difference – the planners and strategists are the folk in the know. But in terms of plans, I can’t underplay the positive impact that the now iconic Vodafone UK deal has had on our business and the taxi sector as a whole. We’ve never taken a campaign of this scale before, no one has, but the incremental effect has been a steady increase in the number of taxis being planned and booked. Vodafone’s ground-breaking strategy has put taxis on the map, has opened eyes to the potential of taxis as a brand icon and cemented faith in them as a broadcast medium. Vodafone broke the mould and made it safe for other brands to up their numbers, or at least that’s my theory. This type of investment hasn’t just come from advertisers though; a significant boost to the public profile of the taxi sector was seen when VeriFone, the payment solutions company from the US, entered the UK market with the acquisition of Taxi Media. Investment and publicity such as this helps to raise awareness of taxi advertising and importantly builds faith that the leading operators are seriously investing in the continued success of this iconic medium. This has to be a positive step for the UK Outdoor market as a whole and may also be another reason why demand for taxis is high. Having run a taxi advertising company for more than 30 years, I thought that nothing could surprise me about it, but so far this year I haven’t had to ‘polish’ my response to people asking me how business is, because our team has it going in the right direction. I can’t exactly put my finger on why though and as I said, it’s early doors for 2012, so let’s not put the Champagne on ice just yet. ANDREW BARNETT * with thanks to Lily Tomlin