19/02/07
FourQuads: Brand Damage?
Before we moved into our new house, we stayed in Chiswick, for about the last week. I’d end up going up to the High Road to get a coffee, whilst taking the boy out of the house for a stroll at the same time at around 10.30 am. And every day, there would be the same annoying, green, quad bikes driving around offering to advertise your brand on the back of them. Some days it was only four of them driving in convoy, advertising only themselves, but then last Wednesday I think I saw 8 or 12 of the blighters. Is it just me or would anyone considering advertising on things that get in the way, burn energy and irritate the hell out of road users, need their heads examining?
4Quads seems to be operating in a vacuum. In the week when West Londoners have the congestion charge bestowed upon them, driving in West London (including Chiswick) has got a little bit more stressful. [I tried it once last week, in a moment of I'm-still-living-in-Edinburgh thinking that I could just pop out to the shops in a brief 15minute outing. I won't be driving in London again.] The roads are pretty clogged up (OK, mainly by SUVs in W4) but at a time when climate change, pollution and congestion are way up the agenda is blocking the road with purely wasteful things really the way forwards?
I’m intrigued to see which brands do want to associate themselves with this…
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# Comment by Zsolt Porkolab @ 6:38 pm, March 9, 2007:
First of all you have not examined the matter carefully enough. Our Quads are being equipped with LPG kits which makes them as environment friendly as possible. You might not like the idea that advertising is an important industry of our world and you might not like the idea that London is one of the major commercial cities of the world, but metropolises are not designed to be turned into garden cities. I find your article discriminative as there are huge vans running around the city carrying advertisments, which look ugly, huge and generate a huge amount of pollution.
Also, you seem to forget about the Buses and Cabs which do the same thing. Apart from advertising, we deliver mail to people, also we deliver documents, flyers etc for charity organizations in the city.
I might agree that roads are congested in London, also I find the traffic quite huge and sometimes disturbing, but this is what comes with living in one of the most important financial and commercial hearts of the planet.
We try to achieve the best possible option to reduce environmental damage and we pay the congestion charge as well. Despite the fact that LPG is usually makes one’s vehicle exempt, our bikes cannot get that benefit.
But, if we follow your way of thinking then we should turn Central London into a ‘Garden City full with walkways’ and no traffic at all. What do you think, what would happen to this City? Companies would leave, revenue would decrease, people would loose their job. Then you have a Museum City with nice walkways and parks, but after a while without proper revenue it would not be maintained and it would go back to the ‘jungle-stage’. Obviously the choice is in the hands of the electorate and what I believe is that we need to find proper balance between the needs of a commercial city and its residents. You can have the life you suggest in Edinburgh or somewhere in the farmland. Your choice is London, so accept the rules of London. You like it or not, I believe that this advertising method is less destructive than the billboards and static advertising all around the city not to mention all the rubbish the flyers cause.
What we can promise sir, as soon as electric engine is available for these vehicles, we will be the first to use them.
There are riksahs, promobikes, cabs, vans, lorries etc in this city, not to mention the low quality public transport compared to the price the public pays for it which needs real attention, and that would really help to achieve a less congested London.
Your opinion is one, and there are many others who think different.
# Comment by Peter Collingridge @ 7:28 pm, March 9, 2007:
Thanks for commenting Zsolt. I’m going to respond to your points in order.
First of all, I totally and happily accept advertising as a part of our world. In fact, what we do as a company is promote our client’s work and products through ‘apt’ channels with ‘apt’ creative and stategic input - we’re not an advertising agency, but we work with them. So I don’t have any problem with that.
We’ve also just moved to London *precisely* because it is one of the major metropoli of the world.
I don’t know where you get the idea of trying to turn London into a “garden citiy” - but that’s not my problem with FourQuads.
When you say I discriminate in favour of buses, vans etc - this is because buses (and in the main part vans, and rickshaws, and cabs, lorries etc) are also fulfiling a primary role of delivering / transporting either people or goods to destinations. FourQauds - as I saw them - are just self-serving. The problem I had with the ones I saw was that they were just sitting in traffic, in convoy, and were clearly not distributing, or delivering, anything. They were just using up space, time, energy, and - as you’ve now made clear - fossil fuels.
To be honest I think that the best way to reduce environmental damage you cause would be to re-think your strategy. There is nothing wrong with advertising in places where you have a captive audience, but the medium should not be the message. (Maybe you should, I don’t know, make available free bikes with adverts on them?). But, I stand by my thought that any advertiser would need to consider exactly what they are being associated with by advertising on your buggies, as well as the context those ads appear in. (In my case, sitting in bulk in traffic putting out exhaust.) This is also the case with flyers and so on, but the pollution created by vehicles is much more explicit - and higher up the agenda at the moment.
Finally - leaving aside your extrapolation of my post into reducing London back to a jungle - as you indeed say the choice for the future of our cities is (almost) in the hands of the electorate. All I can say to that is that the future of your business is in the hands of your clients who will prove me wrong and vote themselves on whether they agree with you or not, by giving you their business. But at the time I saw the quads in Chiswick, not one of them carried an ad.