Emirates makes history with Tube sponsorship
Emirates Airlines has become the first corporate sponsor of a London Underground station after the Dubai carrier sponsored a new cable car system connecting Emirates Greenwich Peninsula with Emirates Royal Docks.
The ten year deal is the first privately funded line since Victorian times and symbolises the growing sponsorship and advertising revenues attracted to the famous railway system.
Transport for London earned £107m from such sources over 2010-11 – twice as much as the tube operator raised just five years ago.
This has principally arisen from a partnership with CBS Outdoor which has assembled 1,200 digital panels on escalators and installed 126 projectors to beam adverts across tracks.
TFL aren’t resting on their laurels however; the introduction of Wi-Fi this summer is expected to introduce new digital shopping opportunities and are increasingly embracing so called ‘domination’ advertising in which an entire station is given over to a single sponsor.