Bet your bottom dollar on this billboard!

Last week I was driving through town when I came upon this billboard.

At first it was not very clear what it was saying, but boy I soon realised it was a beauty. A billboard covered in 'Money' , infact it was so well done that at first, I thought, they had used real money and stuck it to the substrate, closer inspection however revealed that the money was in fact printed on the board but the production co had also randomly stuck on some 'bills' which were flapping in the wind. Genius, it was so realistic I had to walk up to the board to find out how they had done it. The advertiser is thezimbabwean.co.uk which is the web page for the similarly named news paper. Now, I don't know much about the actual newspaper and weather or not they have a printed version, but I now know about the web page.
For those who are not familiar with the shenanigans of our friends across our northern border, they have had to contend with an inflation rate higher than the number of hours in the month! I mean we are talking 100.000.000 % in 5 years or something equally ridiculous. And yes their local currency is now worth less than wallpaper and probably less than toilet paper too (there's a great billboard idea in there as well ;-)















This, in my mind, is good creative, it's the sort of thing I would look at and it will give me a smile and it's something I will talk about around the proverbial water cooler. Since I don't have a water cooler and I work alone, my next best option is to blog about it.
We can go into the effectiveness of this type of creative. I believe that the target market, at whom this billboard would have been aimed, would very definitely have seen it and made an instant connection with it. Of 'course without the proper market research we can't know for sure. But after over a decade of working for an out of home media owner, my money is on this board... and the Zim dollar, quite literally.