Is sponsorship a good way of advertising Flats for Rent? Barclays have certainly snapped up a bargain, Barclays are only paying £25m towards the £140m cycle scheme which now bears their name, and they get more than just the name ‘Barclays Bikes’ – they also get 100km plus of road painted Barclays blue – and an advert on every bike. Eat your heart out Foxtons Minis, throw away your canvas bags Marsh & Parsons, have your notepad back Douglas & Gordon, Chestertons & Frank Knight!
Of course Barclays are reaping a whirlwind of negative publicity, anti-war activists who have placed large stickers about the conflict in Afghanistan on the back of bikes to highlight Barclays investment in the arms trade. The activists claim 4,000 bikes got stickers & the messages read:
- ‘£20M INVESTMENT IN BIKES. £7300M INVESTMENT IN BOMBS’
- ‘FUNDING DEPLETED URANIUM BIRTH DEFECTS IN IRAQ’.
Other demonstrators left stickers on bikes at Hyde Park Corner in protest at Barclays’ sponsorship of the scheme, unhappy about the bank’s record of investing in defence companies.
“London can now claim the dubious honour of hosting what is surely the largest piece of corporate branding in existence. It’s not just the scale, the mind-blowing square footage, that is shocking about this – it’s the principle. We’re not talking about some supersized billboard here: we’re talking about the mayor selling off the very road beneath our wheels – one of the few parts of a city that counts indisputably as public space. Whether they realise it or not, whether or not they even care, from now on thousands of cyclists are doomed to commute on a giant Barclays ad….There is something, too, in the gibes suggesting this is not just Barclays blue but Tory blue. Neither New Labour nor former mayor Ken Livingstone did anything to prevent the growing privatisation of the city, but it is hard to imagine Livingstone selling off a chunk of the public realm in such brazen fashion.”
The Standard calls for a new name:
London is saddled with the lifeless name for its scheme of “Barclays Cycle Hire”. We badly need a nickname for the scheme. I’ve already suggested the Bozza. All other ideas welcome, the wittier the better
Not good publicity – but then there is no such thing as bad advertising. When Foxton’s illegal and fraudulent business practices became the feature of a BBC TV program their business actually increased.
So Pimlico Flats need to get our company bike covered in slogans, and have George repaint Winchester St. pavement. That will get the tenants renting our flats.























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Great article from Pimlico Flats.
I would like to know your views on why Zoopla have decided to feed only sale properties on to these sites and not lettings. I have my own ideas however will await their response.
There are many letting agents that do advertise on Gumtree – some officially (paid listings) and some unofficially (pretending to be private). What?Estate do list all of our lettings officially on Gumtree.
Gumtree don’t have a facility to feed properties automatically onto their listings in the same way that the Property Portals (such as Zoopla itself) does, this is born from it’s roots as a Classifieds website for the private advertiser. You will be entering your adverts onto Gumtree manually, and whilst you are obviously happy to do this for your clients, my personal guess would be that Zoopla don’t make enough money from lettings listings to warrant the labour cost of entering the data manually, they make more money from Sales and are thus able to employ staff to enter the sales listings. Also lettings turnover much quicker than sales (at a guess a lettings ad. would last 3 weeks, whilst a sales ad. would last 3 months) and there is more reason to make the effort for an ad. for 3 months than for 3 weeks.
Hi Ruth,
It’s only Gumtree where we don’t feed our lettings listings. eBay is sales and lettings. The reality is that the decision is up to Gumtree really. They are already very successful at running their own lettings channel, however it is possible that one day we could power this for them.
Hope that helps.
I think this is a great tie up. Zoopla are showing through their partnerships that they are willing to think laterally and try! (e.g. zoopla auctions).
Thanks for your support Sam.