Ordinary car owners are being paid to use their vehicles to advertise online agent eMoov.
They belong to the Car Quids scheme, which launched a year ago. People offer their cars to the scheme, and Car Quids then finds advertisers – in this case eMoov. The car owners are paid between £50 and £100 a month.
Advertising messages are attached using vinyl stickers rather than paint, being easier to remove without damaging the car.
Car owners do have the right to reject any particular advert which their vehicle might carry for periods of up to a year.
The car owners driving home the eMoov message are all in Nottingham.
Ed Winters Ronaldson, one of the founders of Car Quids, told Eye that it is a very cheap way of having a Foxtons-style branded fleet.
He said: “eMoov are pushing into cities outside London, and without a physical presence a branded fleet is a great way to build brand awareness.
“The drivers we used for this campaign are all home owners themselves and selected to reflect the brand they are representing. It’s a powerful way of tapping into their social network, including friends and colleagues.
“eMoov don’t have physical offices or company cars. Instead they have used the sharing economy to deploy their own fleet without the high costs associated with it.
“We have had interest from estate agents, but eMoov is the first company in the sector that we are actually working with.”
Comments (25)
Yes, we can many times see the brand name on the car, but it is very common these days. Companies do this to promote the brand. My friend bought a new car and transported to his brother who is staying in another country with the help of We Will Transport It ( https://www.wewilltransportit.com/ ) shipping company. The agent was very happy to know this and gave my friend gifts as his brand name was going to be promoted to the other country too.
No great surprise there then. They are/were after all, Essex car dealers!
Gor blimey, Guv – time for the “weekly ridiculous emoov story” already?
Next up – ‘Hatched’ advertising on the side of eggs, maybe…
Who knows. Watch this space.
As ever, they’ll fling their ******** anywhere they think it will stick…
It does make me laugh all these t’internet firms trying every opportunity to jump on the back of advertising.
For example this story from emoove ….. Eye did not stumble across it, somebody at emoove towers thought it would be a ‘Neat’ idea for publicity
Yes they managed to get a story published but they have close on 20 comments knocking them! – If the public do see this story all they get is the negative remarks made about the company.
Phrase ‘Shooting themselves in the foot’ springs to mind!
The brilliant bit about this Smile is that it really does go back to the Onliners Autumn on EAT, it proves the point that the cost of replacement presence equals and exceeds the cost of an office that sits there quietly, 24 hours a day reinforcing the Sold or Let boards, reinforcing that nice parent who meets their kids after school or at church or at…….
This is the admission that the fixed costs of online agency have to be the same if not more than an officed Agency. This is the big clanging penny that says the digital marketers have got it wrong and the embarrassing realisation they are all stood there in the altogether , naked as the day that they were born.
Typically cars will commute, going from home to work, work to home; £1200 buys presence in a single street at night (a £1200 car will be in the garage out of site) a single car park during the day hitting a limited audience repeatedly and a transient immeasurable audience for the time of an average commute.
Emoov need at least 3500 cars to have a single car presence in every activity centre, £2.1- £4.2 million to attempt this nationally. Trouble is one car / centre isn’t enough!
Two firms linked by a single Dragon’s network is what I reckon is going on here!
A driving advertisement for the flouting of the ASA rules regarding the inclusion of VAT in prices advertised…..gosh what a good idea.
I’ve just booked my wifes car in to be e moov branded. I’ve also ordered my own magnetic “don’t use” signs to stick on (before the e moov logo) when she goes out. Who is going to check her car on every journey? £100 a month for me to show what I think of e moov’s poor service seems like a no brainer to me.
How about hiring out a range of bespoke signs to the other local agents. £25 a month to agents. £100 one off for disgruntled vendors who paid up but didn’t sell then offer a £100 discount on your fee
I could imagine some real rust buckets ending up being held together with plastic Stickers… Still if they get dumped just add an R and call the Police!!!!
I will add that i think the concept from ‘car quids’ is good i can see for some businesses its a great idea.
However for an agent it looks cheap, tacky, unprofessional and budget – Kinda like Emoove!
It’s true about branded cars and can invalidate insurance. As an example, imagine having a Foxtons branded car when you live in Brixton…
Interesting. I had to change my car insurance recently because my existing insurance company would not re-insure my car when I told them that it had my company logo on it! They said that I had modified the car!!
I suggest all agents with branded company cars check this out with their insurance firm
So most of the replies here assume the founder of Car Quids hasn’t thought about these issues already? Perhaps he has a criteria for the age/appearance of car, preferred driver, area they usually drive in, miles covered week, estimated number of eyeballs etc etc. Perhaps – brace yourself loom burners – other businesses actually think about what they do! with research and strategies and stuff! Imagine that! I wonder what independent driving schools would say about small volumes of branded cars not working?
You may have a point but if somebody has a nice car less than 4/5 years old they will not want it plastered with advertising, defeats the purpose of having a nice new car!
Which in turn means only bangers left to be advertised on.
You can’t keep that rogue woodpecker from tapping out insults from your keyboard can you? Pomposity, Luddites, any more?
Not to worry, let’s have a look at the research and strategy bit of your post. Why do you think an online agency has to shell out on multiples of £600-£1200 on this form of advertising?
They are buying awareness in areas where they are invisible, making up for the anonymity of presence in the vastness of the internet. With just 2% penetration achieved in 19 years, the general public simply aren’t aware of firms that have no physical presence in the form of reputation, local contact, an office or with a board coverage that matches a Henry’s Maple. In practical public terms they simply do not exists in any meaningful way.
Long before you were involved in this particular digital sector we were discussing how the fixed cost savings from not having an office eating 10% of turnover had to be replaced by other subliminal messages such as this. The upshot of that discussion was that the central office online might save 10% but end up spending more just to get noticed.
As you mentioned driving instruction, how is ‘digital’ impacting that particular service industry?
Shall I tell you the real irony of all the digital smugness and superiority Agency has to put up with? It is the digital industry itself which is at most risk from digital competition; I can quite easily threaten a digital business in London, the Midlands, the North, all over the world from my office in Devon simply by being better and having more respect for a shared customer base than my digital competition.
That makes Digital executives reliant on performance and seriously exposed to under performance.
Awww… let him/her vent their frustrations on us Estate Agents, Robert – we’re well used to dealing with the neurots of this world.
It’s water off a duck’s back to us lot and this one’s a rank amateur in terms of insult slinging so best let alone to spout off harmlessly or he/she will no doubt kick a poor defenceless Digital Rep next week in order to get that warm fuzzy feeling.
But while you’re there – please help me understand this comment from the poster: “Perhaps he has a criteria for the age/appearance of car, preferred driver, area they usually drive in, miles covered week, estimated number of eyeballs etc etc.”
This seems to me a little like a set of the ridiculous stats RM furnish inept Agents with to baffle their clients into thinking they are ‘doing’ something –
“age/appearance” = Premium Listing Upgrade
“miles covered week” = Summary Views
“estimated number of eyeballs”… REALLY? A car drives past you at 20… 30… 60 miles per hour (DOUBLE that figure if you’re driving in the opposite direction at the same speed…) – at WHAT POINT does an “advert” become a blur?
A competitor’s vendor asked me last week what the RM stats meant. I said that “Summary Views” were like people who drove past the Agent’s office at 60mph – neither use nor ornament. A stat not fit for purpose.
But then… NONE of them are…
Oh – on the subject of “advertising” – well done on the Barclays plugs.
How did you manage THAT result?
Marketing genius! ;o)
😆 Didya like that? as one very respected, humble, chap used to say!
Prime time, all commercial channel subliminal advertising to the very people who own properties and linked to a respected bank! If I wasn’t so honest I would take full credit for what is a massive and well timed coincidence, linked to a gift handed to me by dyslexia & my near constant use of dictionaries and thesauruses plus an oversight by everyone who didn’t spot the power reach and versatility of the URL.
I am not a genius on any level, but I did manage to make luck feel so guilty at the way I have been treated in recent years I was sent three quite big lumps in quick succession ( the URL- Tristan and the Barclays Bank advert) The rest is enjoyable hard work, experience and a commitment to an industry the has looked after me so well for so long.
Pay per click must be getting too expensive already…..
Branded cars work well within a tight geographical area, driven around your patch all day by smart business like people, who keep their cars clean, don’t smoke, and don’t have kids sloshing about in the back seats.
The odd car here and there spread across the country isn’t going to work.
Back to google methinks.
found it now. Just type in shysters
Wow there a thought. How much will they pay me to have a sold board. That’s got to be worth £500 surely.
whats their email address address. Wait a minute. I can’t find it on google
If they had some sold boards out they wouldn’t need this type of advertising.
Well done those car owners taking cash from of emoov in cold blood.
at least dick Turpin had the curiosity of wearing a mask when he robbed people. At £1200 per year for a small car advert, these boys have two six shooters fully aimed at emooovs pocket.
ILMAO
hope there’s no road race.
A bit like newspaper ads perhaps? I mean who’d be stupid enough to spend thousands and thousands each year on adverts that no one sees and that are already out of date as soon as they’re published? A proper mugging. Oh….
Mr Quirk – may I draw your attention to an error in the above post. The final two sentences should read as follows:
“A proper mugging. Oh….sorry – I have mis-spelt my signature here – please ignore the letters ‘g’, ‘i’, ‘n’ and ‘g’ at the end.”
No doubt a simple slip of the wrist… I’m delighted to help correct it for you. Where is your Marketing Minion when you need him?
Not much control over brand image, I doubt many of these cars are new minis, most likely a 1998 Nissan Micra or Dawoo with a beaten in passage door. Not the branding I would want for my business.