Steve’s breakdown: “Gumtree.com, the classifieds website, is looking for an agency to handle its £3 million advertising account.” For those who don’t know: Gumtree.com is the UK’s number one classifieds site, spanning 48 cities across the UK and Ireland with some 34,000 new adverts each day and an impressive 13.7 million visitors every month.

LONDON, UK: The company has been in touch directly with agencies to invite them to pitch for the business.

Gumtree has most recently worked with Beta, which it appointed to handle its TV work in July 2010.

Beta created the brand’s first TV ad, which launched in August 2010. It showed animated characters climbing a tree to reach items such as a washing machine and a pram.

A follow-up TV campaign, which broke in March 2011, comprised three ten-second ads. The spots showed a couch fired from a catapult, a pram bouncing from a trampoline and a car being lassoed by a speeding plane. They used the strapline: “It’s local, it’s quick and it’s free.”

Before Beta, Gumtree worked with Albion, which won a branding brief in 2008 off the back of an existing relationship with the website’s parent company, eBay.

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