UrbanStorm News
The Growing Phenomenon of Truck
Advertising
A few minutes spent on any motorway or suburban
road now guarantees that you will see giant
advertisements attached to trucks or trailers.
Not the advertisements you might expect for
cars and petrol, but eye catching raunchy adverts
for underwear. Adverts for radio stations, train
travel, holidays, fashion, health foods, films,
record releases, Video games and new technology.
Just to name a few.
Owing to the latest technology, brands are
routinely specifying truck sides and this new
media has become a real choice for marketers.
Truck sides correspond closely in size to giant
billboards, which are highly visible on the
sides of roads. This appeals to creative agencies
that can use the same adverts for both fixed
roadside sites, and trailers with little alteration
to artwork.
Marks and Spencer are currently trialling advertisements
on their vehicles for their own promotions.
Tesco are selling their truck sides to third
parties for a new revenue stream. The realisation
is that truck sides can produce a revenue stream
and comes under the trendy heading of sweating
assets. The use of truck sides using flamboyant
design is seen as a great brand builder, a process
loved by the city where brand value is a major
factor in determining company’s values.
For truck companies with their wafer thin margins,
this extra revenue is a bonus.
In the UK, truck-advertising companies are battling
it out for a share of the £900,000,000
outdoor advertising market. Market leaders in
the UK are Agrippa, Epic Media, In Your Space,
Mobile Advertising and Urban Storm.
These companies sell a frame system to hold
the advertisements on the trucks. They print
and fit the advertisements. The frame systems
have revolutionised truck advertising. They
make it easy to change the advertisements in
just a few minutes. Unlike the traditional now
outdated method of applying vinyl directly to
truck sides.
Agrippa and Urban Storm have both developed
their own UK patented systems and control the
manufacture of their units.
Urban Storm however are not just content with
the vast UK market, but are venturing into Europe
with great success. The company are also targeting
Africa, the Middle East, China and Australia
with a distributor already signed to distribute
and manage their product in those territories.
Sam Cook, Managing Director of Urban Storm,
said “The UK is the most advanced country
in the world when it comes to truck advertising,
but the rest of the worlds media is waking up
to the considerable advantages that truck advertising
has to offer.
Urban Storm are currently fitting 800 vehicles
with frame systems in Spain and Portugal for
Matutano Lays. The advertisements will be changed
every 2 months. This one job will create 100,000
sq metres of printing each year for UK printers”.
Sam said “he would hope to be exporting
500,000 sq metres of print into Europe for truck
sides from enquiries currently received by Urban
Storm by the middle of 2007.”
This new market is good for Urban Storm but
the print requirement generated is good news
for companies that print for Urban Storm who
need increasing volumes of print for their machinery,
which is becoming faster with each introduction
or refinement of new technology.
Sam estimates the UK trailer advertising media
industry to require a minimum of 2,500,000
sq metres of print in 2007 from a standing start
of a requirement of less than 100,000 sq metres
3 years ago.
For more information contact or call +44 (0)20 7291 8710
