Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Just a pretty face..

This billboard is on the corner of William Nicol and Sandton drive. I was alerted to this beauty by a fellow Designer Twitterer last week. Thank you @anjavanstaden. It seems that who ever did this job decided to just: 'find a nice effect on the web - do the tutorial-and slap it on the billboard' - let the client pay.
This billboard is in one of the prime positions in the Sandton/ Johannesburg area. I shudder to think what the monthly media rate is here. (more than my yearly income perhaps?!) My personal feeling of this board is that it is pretty yes, and maybe the brief was: " Ok design/creative team, we're gonna throw some money at making a pretty billboard so that the people who see it will like us for bringing them something nice to look at and so will have good will toward us and will therefore support our product..." yeah right! Come on guys if we're branding a product, cool, that gives us a lot of opportunity to make it special to make it fun, interesting, dramatic and yes even magical but this is just a purdie pictcha on a big board. It has no viral effect, other than the three of us who write and read this blog.. ;-)
Of all the marketing media, I feel that the billboard or Out-of-home medium is one of the old school mediums that will be here to stay. at least until we've discover tele-porting, because we'll all need to travel from A to B in some way. Hmm.. maybe if we get personal flying machines we'll even have floating billboards on the roads in the air... who knows? Other Media types will come and go and gain / loose some piece of the advertising spend pie.
Now just because I have DSTV / MNet here it doesn't mean that all the other billboards arround Jo'burg are just hunky dorey on the contrary, 95% are much worse than this one... But I don't want to give every blerrie billboard an audience (of three) no no no, I want the good stuff. So if you find something really good, let me know!

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

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.