In your face..!

After a fairly tumultuous 2014 for cabbies with the now ubiquitous Uber coming to town and shaking up a hornet’s nest of competition, they could be forgiven for quietly hoping that 2015 might offer a bit of a new start and perhaps a return to ‘normalcy’.

Far from this being the case, Goldline Cars, title sponsor and official partner of Leyton Orient FC (of course) is running a fairly punchy and combative advertising campaign – which might not be seen as ‘fair play’.

The self-proclaimed ‘premier Private Hire service in London’ has shoved some bus mega-rears in the faces of the black cab drivers, cleverly using the public transport vehicles to advertise their private transport business where their competitors – and their competitors’ passengers – are very much aware of it..!

Cabbies lose their way

If you were in and around London yesterday, you probably noticed a heavy increase in road traffic as almost 12,000 cabbies took part in a ‘go-slow’ protest. The cause of their action was Uber, an app-based taxi-service, which traditional London black cabs claim is operating on their exclusive turf.

While one could wonder about the effectiveness of a transport group protesting against a taxi-service in this way, Uber capitalized on the situation beautifully with full-page ads in yesterday’s Metro and Evening Standard.

As commuters flocked to the trains and tubes due to the action, it seemed inevitable that thousands of new (and frustrated) eyes would feast upon Uber’s sleek creative...

...and so it proved. 

With the ad in question sporting a £20 discount code, it proved highly effective. Uber had its most successful day of downloads since they launched two years ago: up by an incredible 850% in comparison to the previous Wednesday.

This represents a supremely timed media buy by the challenger brand; the cabbies may well need a sat-nav to find their way back from this one!

#PurePoint