Made In The Dark (But Best Enjoyed Outdoor)

With London broiling under an unseasonably hot sun, and yours truly suffering from an embarrassingly prominent bout of April sunburn (I blame the Scottish ancestry for my pasty pale skin) Magners are targeting thirsty commuters with a campaign on the capital’s underground network.

The centrepiece is an 180 degree wrap, designed to deliver maximum impact at Oxford Circus station, and underlining Magners claim to be ‘made in the dark.’

Planning on going to the Topshop spring sale? You'll want at least six of these first.

Setting aside the fact that I presumed all cider is made in the dark (or to give it its technical term, a ‘barrel’) it’s quite a cool creative concept, that’s explained in more detail in the accompanying TV spot:

The brand – working in partnership with CBS Outdoor – will have a consistent presence on the London Underground throughout the summer, using creative specially tailored to stations at Angel, Clapham Common, Camden Town and Leicester Square.

Let’s hope it’s a hot one.

PB

PS Got something interesting to share from the world of outdoor? Get in touch with me directly on iamposterboy27@gmail.com …

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Will Ocean Keep The Trafalgar Ship Afloat?

Details of some serious OOH philanthropy sailed my way this week, with the news that Ocean Outdoor are backing a major campaign to save a piece of (nearly) priceless art from an overseas pirate private collector.

Yinka Shonibare MBE’s sculpture, "Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle ". Worth more than my East End flat, incidentally. And about the same size.

£362,500 of  must be raised by mid-April or “Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle”, which is inspired by Vice Admiral Nelson’s flagship Victory and appeared (as above) on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square in May 2009, is in danger of setting sail for foreign waters.

So far the public campaign has raised in excess of £150,000 – so Ocean Outdoor boss Tim Bleakley has pledged £362,500 worth of outdoor ad space to help secure a permanent new berth for the sculpture, hopefully in time for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations.

Texting £5 to save this ship will make you feel better about all the bad things you're going to do at the weekend. Hopefully.

Ocean’s campaign invites supporters and the public to text SHIP to 70555 to donate £5 towards the campaign and is running across sites including the Two Towers East, Eat Street at London’s Westfield Centre and Hammersmith Broadway P10.

Poster Boy is proud to have been brought up in the gently undulating fields of Nelson’s County (that’s Norfolk, for the uninitiated) and will be texting in a fiver post haste…

PB

PS Got something interesting to share from the world of outdoor? Get in touch with me directly on iamposterboy27@gmail.com …

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Big Up The up!

Word reached Poster Boy this week of a neat new campaign for the up! – an irritatingly punctuated but really rather lovely little streetcar, from your favourite German automobile company, Volkswagen.

Using Ocean Outdoor’s suite of digital screens – plus some natty social media work from DDB and Boxlight Media – the campaign mixes that Facebook thing your kids keep telling you about, with some deliciously imposing outdoor advertising.

The concept is simple. Log on to the Volkswagen Facebook page (it’s here), write something nice about the new up! (whilst trying to ignore that erroneous exclamation mark) and in return the nice folks at Volkswagen will flash up a compliment – to you – on an Ocean digital screen.

I logged on for a look and got this screengrab:

And yes, before you look I did remember to crop out my Facebook identity..

“Kate Elizabeth’s silly grin makes our tummy go all butterfly-ee” reads the caption. It’s the probably the first time a car company has ever given Kate a compliment – but there’s no shame in that. In Poster Boy’s experience you have to take the plaudits from wherever you can find them…

PB

PS Got something interesting to share from the world of outdoor? Get in touch with me directly on iamposterboy27@gmail.com …

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Outdoor Ads? They’re Alright By Us

Credos (the think tank for advertising) unveiled an interesting piece of research last week, investigating public views on the use of sexualised imagery (think girls in bikinis and boys wearing briefs) in outdoor advertising.

As some of you will already know, the OMC and the Advertising Association have both spent the last 18 months working with the government and the ASA to figure out exactly how much bare leg it takes to corrupt a nation’s youth (if any) and asking whether advertisers, agencies and media owners need to tone down our saucier billboards.

The report sheds a little new light on what real people (hint: not politicians) actually think about this stuff. All of the data can be viewed here, but to save you the bother of all of that boring number crunching, yours truly has summarised the views of the hundreds of people Credos spoke to and boiled it down to three easily digestible sentences, for the lazy busy readers of this blog:

• The people (over 1000) Credos spoke to just aren’t that worried or offended by the examples of outdoor advertising they were shown. And just 11% said (when prompted) that they were likely to be offended by ads they’ve seen outdoors.
• Credos showed a range of different outdoor ads to people and asked them which ones they found offensive. The ones the majority picked were ones already banned by the ASA. Which is handy – as that’s exactly the point of having an advertising regulator.
• Outdoor advertising came 5th – yes, 5th – in its capacity to offend, behind those bad ‘uns in TV, internet, mobile and, er, direct mail.

All of that should make encouraging reading for an industry that has perhaps (whisper it) copped rather more of the blame for our sexualised society than the evidence suggests it deserves. Time will tell if this report from Credos will start to redress a bit of that balance…

Poster Boy

PS for those of you who only read down this far in the desperate hope you might get to look at someone attractive wearing very little, here’s a reward for your persistence:

18% of people Credos spoke to found this ad offensive. Nobody knows how many just found it a bit rubbish. Either way, it had already been banned by the ASA

And for those of you who like tennis, here’s another:

Nadal, on a bus. What's not to like?

PB

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This Season’s Look? Outdoor

As anyone who’s tried to neogitate the hordes of beautiful people currently packing out every bar in our nation’s capital will know, we are currently neck-deep in London Fashion Week.

And as such, outdoor media owners all across town are bringing a bit of catwalk glamour to out-of-home consumers.

In the West End, Vogue and Ocean Outdoor are teaming up to bring London Fashion Week to the style-conscious shoppers of Westfield W12.

The magzine is using Ocean’s Eat Street digital billboard as a live canvas to reach shoppers at the iconic London mall, bringing them exclusive video of Stella McCartney’s Olympic Adidas collection.

That green jacket is only marginally less valuable than this board

When Stella’s tracksuits aren’t dominating proceedings, the screen is featuring daily highlights of impossibly thin and attractive people walking around in a range of unusual outfits, punctuated by a never ending stream of commentary on Twitter. Sounds to me like the perfect fit for a fashionista audience…

And there’s no escaping LFW – even Underground. As part of an ongoing partnership with the British Fashion Council, CBS Outdoor UK is bringing a live feed from London Fashion Week to over 60 Cross-track projection screens in tube stations across central London, with images being projected alongside highlights from the @LondonFashionWk Twitter feed.

It just goes to show what we already knew – if you want to reach the cool kids, you have to go outdoor.

Poster Boy

PS Got something interesting to share from the world of outdoor? Get in touch with me directly on iamposterboy27@gmail.com …

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I Dove You Too, Tweetheart

Valentine’s Day for Poster Boy is a busy affair. There are always stacks of correspondence to respond to, the customary romantic breakfast, lunch and dinner (almost never with the same person) as well as the usual marriage proposals from glamorous strangers, desperate friends and lonely colleagues alike.

But somehow I managed to fight through the massed hordes of amorous humans threatening to batter down the door of my secret London office and sneak (heavily disguised) into Victoria Station, where I knew the only lasting object of my affections would be waiting for me. Namely, some interesting out-of-home advertising.

It must be Dove (Dove, Dove)

I’d heard that the Unilever-owned beauty brand, Dove, were doing something special on the Victoria  concourse – with its daily footfall of 350,000 people. And almost as soon as I arrived I was handed one of the paper birds pictured above – encouraging me to Tweet a soppy message to my many, many loved ones.

Reluctant to choose, I instead snapped another handsome couple who were being asked to share their loving thoughts via text or Twitter onto the big screen behind them.

Nothing says 'romance' like a loitering man in a high-vis jacket

I hung around for a while, reading the messages and silently correcting the spellings – as Dove’s brand ambassadors fanned out across the station, handing out tulips and paper birds to people waiting for the 12.45 to Gatwick.

He's not a keeper, Katie - he forgot the possessive apostrophe

If you want to be part of the campaign (created by Billington Cartmell and booked by Kinetic and Mindshare on JCDecaux sites) there’s still time – it runs until 19th February. And if you manage to get the words ‘Poster Boy’ onto that Victoria screen, then I might even break my anonymity to buy you a drink…. provided, of course, that you’re extremely beautiful.

Poster Boy

PS Got something interesting to share from the world of outdoor? Get in touch with me directly on iamposterboy27@gmail.com …

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Poster Girl

Last week we welcomed back the Queen of Pop – for a music video debut with a difference.

Now on her twelfth studio album, Madonna (an artist not adverse to the odd publicity stunt) found an interesting way of promoting her latest smash, ‘Give Me All Your Luvin’.

The single – the first to be taken from Madge’s new album, MDNA – debuted on Clear Channel billboards across the US, France, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Singapore, Belgium and Finland on the 3rd of February, in promotional push with outdoor at its heart. The media giant expects the campaign to reach 150 million people worldwide.

And in Britain the video appeared at Piccadilly Circus, while also streaming on hundreds of Clear Channel owned radio stations across the globe. For those of you who weren’t able to get away from the office/a pressing three hour lunch to watch the premiere, the song is here:

Madonna looks as good on a billboard as she does at the Super Bowl , taking over MTV or snogging Britney on You Tube, so much so that I still can’t believe she’s 53 years old.

Incidentally, that makes her old enough to be my mother – who, thank heavens, is yet to appear in anything like this.

Poster Boy

PS Got something interesting to share from the world of outdoor? Get in touch with me directly on iamposterboy27@gmail.com …

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