JEAN-FRANCOIS DECAUX has come up with the ideal campaign strategy to get Ken Livingstone reelected as London mayor. Bicycles. Thousands of them, in racks all over the capital.

Spreading his slice of toast with a heart attack-threatening layer of butter, the Frenchman said he believed there was nothing like bikes to create an urban feelgood factor.

Livingstone clearly agrees. He has visited Paris twice to assess Decaux’s low-cost bicycle scheme with a view to importing it.

It cannot have escaped his notice that in a city full of striking public-sector workers, mayor Bertrand Delanoë is riding a wave of popularity since Decaux’s vélos were wheeled out for pedestrians four months ago.

“The Parisian voters think he has changed their lives,” said Decaux. The 21,000 bikes, free to use for the first half hour, can be returned to a rack anywhere in the city.

Free or cheap bikes for all is not a new idea. But Decaux appears to have got over the old problem of theft with the introduction of credit-card deposits after a pilot scheme in Vienna had 2,000 bicycles disappear within 48 hours.

Of course, Decaux, as the name suggests, has something of a vested interest in getting urbanites to leave the car at home. With his brother Jean-Charles he jointly runs JC Decaux, responsible for supplying “street furniture” – bus shelters, rubbish bins, news kiosks and now bicycles to cities all over the world – as long as they can invariably paper them with advertising at the same time.

His bikes are already trundling around Lyons, Brussels and Seville while Chicago and Van-couver are interested. Usually, the company secures a contract to sell space on billboards in exchange, but in Toulouse it slapped ads on the back of the bikes themselves. HSBC is a blanket advertiser in the city.

Decaux said: “From the beginning, the company’s culture was built on the advertising piece providing some kind of service to people who live in the city.”

He spends almost half his time talking to local politicians and mayors. Having the same name as the €6 billion (£4.3 billion) company opens doors. So, too, does the promise of offering to invest in infrastructure on behalf of cash-strapped authorities.

Sometimes his overtures have a mixed response. A bike scheme in Dublin faces opposition. And the city’s Transportation Office recently added to the criticism of a plan to allow JC Decaux to erect 120 advertising panels for the next 15 years in exchange for supplying 500 bikes and four public toilets.

Decaux’s father, Jean-Claude, set up the company in 1964 by building bus shelters with advertising panels in France. Billboards followed, and then superloos, spearheading a US breakthrough in 1992 when San Francisco placed an order.

Decaux’s cause was helped by film director Francis Ford Coppola, who appeared at a public hearing on the matter to sing their praises after seeing the loos while filming in Europe.

The company is bucking the trend of sickly media performances. Underlying sales, excluding currency swings, rose by 8.6% in the first nine months of 2007, led by a 16.3% increase in transport income, which makes up 27% of the group.

Decaux said that signing contracts with 30% of the world’s airports – including Heathrow, New York’s JFK and Los Angeles – opened it up to business advertising in a way that billboards and bus shelters did not. “When you cover six out of the top ten airports, you are the must-buy.”

The company’s shares, floated in Paris at €16.50 in 2001, stand at a healthy €26 – although they got there via a slump to €7 when air travel was hit in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks six years ago.

However, with such high fixed costs, Decaux looks vulnerable in a spending downturn. Not so much, the boss insists, partly because street-furniture contracts show resilience as they are usually exclusive in any one city, holding up pricing power. On top of that, there is the reassurance of predictability with contracts taken out for an average of 15 to 20 years.

Decaux joined the firm in 1982 at the age of 23. “My father said if you want to join the family business, you start a market from scratch. I picked Germany because I could speak German.” His brother headed to Spain.

“I had a gut feeling that this business model, which hadn’t been developed outside France, was a huge opportunity to prove myself and take advantage of the fact that none of our competitors had developed the same system.”

The third generation, his two daughters, will also have to prove themselves, he said. At least by learning Chinese, they can help take the business further afield, although the Asian behemoth already accounts for 11% of revenues thanks, in part, to a Shanghai subway contract.

Decaux’s weak link is America, where billboards grew up as a duopoly, controlled by Clear Channel and CBS. However, with Clear in private-equity hands, parts of it could shake free. Although City analysts are working up their models for a deal, he is not too hopeful.

“There will be a window at some point, but it is unlikely in the short term because I don’t think they are going to sell their best-performing asset.”

It is no wonder, then, that Livingstone is sniffing round ahead of elections planned for next May. Decaux said: “He was very impressed. Obviously, London is a much bigger city than Paris and you would have to take into account all of the boroughs.

“But it’s not a question of whether or not. I think the bike scheme will be happening in London. It is a question of when.”

Decaux envisages a 5,000-strong bike scheme for central London, perhaps rising to 80,000 to cover outlying boroughs as far as Croydon.

For an idea more readily associated with his Tory rival Boris Johnson, a keen cyclist, it could be too much for Livingstone to resist.

SIGNAGE OF THE TIMES

FOR so long a Cinderella media, associated with old-tech paint brushes and paste, outdoor advertising has come into its own in the past few years.

Advertisers like billboards, bus shelters and airport signage because consumers are spending more time outside the home. Road congestion means that motorists are a more captive audience.

Outdoor is the only ‘old’ media segment showing growth in both mature and emerging markets.

Technological advances mean that billboard ads can rotate, and LED displays can change the advertising message during the day.

In Britain, outdoor advertising grew by 8.1% in the first half of 2007, compared with 0.5% for total display advertising, including the internet, according to Advertising Association statistics.

Even though 2008 doesn’t look quite as promising, outdoor firms are comfortable with forecasts of 4%-5% growth.

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