The future is clear

Clear Channel Outdoor is one of the world’s largest outdoor advertising companies with over 881,000 displays in more than 60 countries across six continents. Clear Channel Adshel is the company’s international street furniture division, which is currently active in 45 countries and operates over 6,000 municipal and transit contracts worldwide. Clear Channel Outdoor UK’s Adshel division now has agreements with more than 350 municipalities in the UK and has been enjoying a string of street furniture contract wins recently. Christian Shelton spoke to the company to find out more.

Clear Channel Adshel was founded in the UK in 1969. This is also the year when it installed its first bus shelter in Leeds. Bus shelters remain at the core of the company’s product offerings, although in the early 1990’s the company branched out to offer a wide range of additional street furniture. This now includes seats, benches, bins, automatic public toilets, public bicycle schemes and information signage right through to state-of-the art electronic information kiosks offering internet access.

One reason why the company has been so successful is due to its innovative business model. Clear Channel Adshel offers local authorities or passenger transport executives the opportunity to install high quality street furniture product solutions that are suited to individual city’s needs, at no cost to themselves or the local taxpayer.

Dave Huckerby, Development Director of Clear Channel Adshel, explained: “We provide a variety of street furniture and bus shelter options that can be, if desired, funded entirely by advertising. For example, Clear Channel Adshel will pay for a bus shelter to be installed and maintained and in return we then sell advertising attached to the shelter. It is the revenue from this that funds the provision and maintenance of the shelter.”

All of Clear Channel Adshel’s advertising funded contracts will have cleaning and maintenance agreements attached to them. “All cleaning and maintenance is undertaken by our in-house team and runs for the life of the contract. Our standard street furniture contracts run for 15 years, reflecting the high level of initial capital investment,” Huckerby said.

This means that if the bus shelter is damaged in anyway Clear Channel Adshel will promptly fix it. According to Huckerby, Clear Channel Adshel is able to respond to any damage promptly as it receives damage information from either the police, local authority or transport authority and from its own cleaning and maintenance teams: “We inspect our own products on a very frequent basis. Most bus shelters will be visited by a Clear Channel employee at least once a week. On one week we post the poster and then the next week we clean the shelter.”

It is this care and attention that has helped Clear Channel Adshel win so many prestigious contracts. For example, the company has recently been awarded a 24-year contract to supply and maintain street furniture in the city of Portsmouth, on the south coast of the UK. The contract covers more than 650 ad panels on bus shelters across the city.

In 2005, Clear Channel Adshel won a ten year contract with Transport for London (TfL) following a highly competitive tender. This is the UK’s largest street furniture contract which covers the sale of media space and the cleaning and maintenance of 5,000 shelters across London.

Clear Channel Adshel is also working in partnership with TfL to develop and improve London’s bus shelters. Huckerby commented: “The result of this is very exciting. We will be working closely with TfL to design the new generation of bus shelters for London.”

Good design is key to Clear Channel Adshel’s work. Huckerby explained how the design process works: “While we have a portfolio of off-the-shelf products, we also produce bespoke designs according to the needs of different municipalities. For both portfolios we employ well-known international designers who work closely with internal and external teams of engineers to ensure the final designs are suited to the practicalities of life on the street.”

And the future for Clear Channel Adshel is looking exciting. According to Huckerby: “We will continue to maintain our core offerings to clients, namely superb designs supported by rigorous cleaning and maintenance programmes. The exciting challenge for the future is how we will integrate new technologies with our existing product portfolio to improve the impact of our advertising and the waiting experience at bus shelters – to make it as comfortable, secure and informative as we can.”