Tough times prompts courier to offer advertising on its cars

One of Urgent Courier's cars, ready to take advertising.

A slumping package market has prompted an Auckland courier firm to offer up a quarter of its fleet for use as mobile billboards, with customers able to use its GPS tracking to see exactly which streets their messages are travelling down.

Urgent Couriers says the move has been made in an effort to boost earnings in the tight courier market.

Each of the 20 identically-shaped Honda Jazz cars will be available to be "wrapped" with advertising.

Each of these vehicles would cover between 2,000 and 5,000 kilometres around Auckland streets each month and GPS tracking software would allow advertising customers to see the vehicles in real time and playback the route the vehicle has traveled over a given period.

Company managing director Steve Bonnici said the move to advertising had been launched after courier services steadily tapered off in the last year, with the company's revenue falling 12 per cent in the year to March.

"The outlook for the current financial year is looking to be another reduction in the same vicinity unless there is a sharp upturn in the second half of the year," he said

Premium 'point-to-point' courier market had felt the impact of the downturn worse. Volumes were down 25 to 30 per cent on the same month last year.

Bonnici said there was also the risk that during the downturn, clients would explore more economical ways of sending their goods.

"This could mean that even when the economy picks up this will not be reflected in this segment of the industry. That's why we need to look for different service offerings and alternative revenue streams."

Bonnici said those companies currently using buses or billboards to advertise should consider the courier option.

He said there were two reasons why Urgent was not offering its entire fleet for advertising clients.

The first was the move to maintain its own visibility in the market place and the other was the more practical consideration that it wanted to provide a fleet of identical cars.

Soon the company would be offering the back of its vans for advertising, similar to those seen on buses.

The advertising would be sold either through advertising agencies, or directly through companies that Urgent already had a courier relationship with.

Out of the 2000 companies that Urgent already worked for, maybe 100 or 200 were of a size to do this kind of advertising, said Bonnici, or had a consumer product that suited this kind of advertising.

The couriers, all owner-drivers, were "quite excited at the opportunity", he said, since they would "get a good chunk" of the new advertising revenue.