Photo: theinspirationroom.com
Hands up whoever hates outdoor signs and billboards. Alright, no surprises there, it makes perfect sense to dislike this antique form of advertising a product or a service.
Not only do these billboards make a mess out of any attempt of urban planning, something that architects actually go to school to study, but they have also been recognized as a source of distraction for drivers.
Think about how much better our cities would look if it weren’t for the chaotic ads you inevitably bump into at every step. What’s more, most people have also become quite immune to them, successfully ignoring their messages and flashy visuals, so from a real nuisance, they’ve now turned into a really useless nuisance. And yet, they don’t seem to be going anywhere.
And that’s probably because every once in a while, an advertising agency comes up with a great idea that makes everybody think “maybe they’re not so bad after all,” giving the old billboard another few months to live. Until another agency does something clever, and so on.
This MINI ad from Demner, Merlicek & Bergmann, an advertising agency from Vienna, isn’t the least clever in itself. It’s actually quite dumb. The visual consists of a MINI Cooper of a certain color on a black background, while the text does little more than to highlight the obvious: “It is green” for the green car, followed by the actual name of the color in MINI’s palette - British Racing Green, in this case. The same with red and yellow.
As somebody used to say, it’s all about location, location, location. These scrolling billboards have been placed in several important intersections around the Austrian capital city of Vienna. And while that’s all fine, the real trick is that they’re synched with the traffic lights, so that the colors shown match those of the real stoplight. So British Racing Green actually means it’s time to get a move on.
The campaign was surprising enough to catch the eye of theinspirationroom.com website, but also the Epica Award judges, who though it deserved to win the prize in the outdoor-advertising category. As for us, we think all outdoor advertising is obsolete, but if they have to exist, then at least make them useful.
Think about how much better our cities would look if it weren’t for the chaotic ads you inevitably bump into at every step. What’s more, most people have also become quite immune to them, successfully ignoring their messages and flashy visuals, so from a real nuisance, they’ve now turned into a really useless nuisance. And yet, they don’t seem to be going anywhere.
And that’s probably because every once in a while, an advertising agency comes up with a great idea that makes everybody think “maybe they’re not so bad after all,” giving the old billboard another few months to live. Until another agency does something clever, and so on.
This MINI ad from Demner, Merlicek & Bergmann, an advertising agency from Vienna, isn’t the least clever in itself. It’s actually quite dumb. The visual consists of a MINI Cooper of a certain color on a black background, while the text does little more than to highlight the obvious: “It is green” for the green car, followed by the actual name of the color in MINI’s palette - British Racing Green, in this case. The same with red and yellow.
As somebody used to say, it’s all about location, location, location. These scrolling billboards have been placed in several important intersections around the Austrian capital city of Vienna. And while that’s all fine, the real trick is that they’re synched with the traffic lights, so that the colors shown match those of the real stoplight. So British Racing Green actually means it’s time to get a move on.
The campaign was surprising enough to catch the eye of theinspirationroom.com website, but also the Epica Award judges, who though it deserved to win the prize in the outdoor-advertising category. As for us, we think all outdoor advertising is obsolete, but if they have to exist, then at least make them useful.
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