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Most companies wouldn’t care for an ad that only makes sense during a certain time of day, but this one is so cool that people are clamoring to see it. Using about 3,000 Newcastle bottle caps, artists Pablo Power and Ellis Gallagher created a San Diego billboard that makes its point by using shadows.
Link via Laughing Squid
There’s a lot of green activity happening in this Coca-Cola billboard in the Philippines. The cola giant partnered with the World Wide Fund for Nature to create a 60×60 ft. billboard made of 3,600 Fukien tea plants, a breed excellent at absorbing air pollutants. The pots the tea plants sit in are made of recycled Coca-Cola bottles, the potting mix within is made of industrial by-products and organic fertilizers, and a drip irrigation system was installed to properly hydrate the plants.
I guess I can feel a little bit better about my caffeine habit now.
This has got to be recycling at its best. Why throwout perfectly good billboards when you can reuse them as a living space? I don’t know about you, but how many billboards have you seen that would make a good one bedroom apartment? This may be the idea, but we shall see if it comes into practical use. Check out the images of billboard residences in different settings.
Someone wasn’t using his braaaaaiiiinss here: a billboard advertising the zombie series Walking Dead was put right beside a funeral parlor in Consett, County Durham, England. The ad has since been removed, but the infamy will be undead forever on the Net.
Link (Photo: North News) – via The Mary Sue
If corporate sponsorship can save beleaguered sports teams, arenas, and schools, why not houses? Adzookie is offering to sponsor your mortgage in return for turning your house into a colorful billboard! You get an extra bonus if your home already needs a new coat of paint.
Adzookie launched the offer on its website Tuesday — and by late afternoon, the company had already received more than 1,000 applications, according to Adzookie CEO Romeo Mendoza. One even came from a church.
“It really blew my mind,” Mendoza said. “I knew the economy was tough, but it’s sad to see how many homeowners are really struggling.”
Adzookie intends to paint its logo and social media icons onto participating homes. Houses must remain painted for at least three months, and the agreement may be extended up to one year.
Link to story. Link to website. -via Consumerist
A Church in Florida is on a mission to bring scumbags closer to God. Pastor Moses Robbins of the Saturday Night Live Church in Florida feels so strongly about his calling that he commissioned a billboard. It simply states, “Scumbags Welcome!”
What’s on the agenda for his next billboard?
Robbins said he is planning to post another controversial message about sex within the next few months.
I guess we will have to wait and see if the next billboard lives up to the hype.
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts rented a billboard sign for their exhibition “Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting.” It featured a portion of the nude painting Venus Rising from the Sea. It didn’t stay nude.
Apparently, someone thought it was just a little too nipple-y outside. Even if this is some kind of Midwestern modesty thing, at least the vandal did grant Venus a saucy red strapless deal–hardly sensible blizzard-people attire.
The MIA’s PR staff held a little pow-wow with Clear Channel, who offered to take the billboard down immediately. But head of PR Anne-Marie Wagener was tickled.
“Without those words it did look as though someone’s trying to censor it,” she says. “But with ‘Brrrr!’ it has that whole sort of funny element. Because it is cold!”
They’ve decided to leave Venus and her new wardrobe up.
Link (contains art nude) -via reddit
A billboard bragging about the schools in South Bend, Indiana was erected without anyone noticing a certain misspelled word, until Lee MacMillan took a picture and posted it on Facebook.
Responsibility for the spelling error has been claimed by the Blue Waters Group. The company does work for the city of South Bend’s redevelopment commission to promote the city.
“I feel terrible. It’s a mistake we made and we’re guilty of it, and responsible for it. and we take full responsibility for the error,” said Patrick Strickler, president of the Blue Waters Group.
“Four people looked at it, eyeballed it and didn’t see the mistake, and those people all work for me,” Strickler explained. “We take responsibility for it. We simply blew it. We did not see the missing “L.”
The billboard has since been taken down. Link -via The Daily What
(Image credit: Lee MacMillan)
Plan BEE used 100,000 bees to create this SOS (Save Our Swarm) "bee"-llboard drawing attention to the worldwide problem of honey bee population decline. For some unknown reason, honey bees have been disappearing at an alarming rate in the past few decades. Beekeepers have noticed that more than half of their colonies have died. Honey bees aren’t even found in the wild any longer.
Dude Craft has got the 30-sec video clip: Link
Remember the scene from Minority Report where billboards recognize an individual and display ads tailored to his or her preference?
Well, it’s inching nearer to reality in Tokyo, Japan:
Digital advertising billboards being trialled in Japan are fitted with cameras that read the gender and age group of people looking at them to tailor their commercial messages.
A consortium of 11 railway companies launched the one-year pilot project last month, and has set up 27 of the high-tech advertising displays in subway commuter stations around Tokyo.
"The camera can distinguish a person’s sex and approximate age, even if the person only walks by in front of the display, at least if he or she looks at the screen for a second," said a spokesman for the project.
If data for different locations is analysed, companies can provide interactive advertisements "which meet the interest of people who use the station at a certain time," the project said in a statement.
Link – via Singularity Hub
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We’re coming one step closer to smell-o-vision, and it’s great news for meat-eaters. Actually, the more I think about it, I’m not sure it’s great news for anybody.
A new Billboard on River Highway in North Carolina not only shows a gigantic piece of steak on an even more giant fork, but it actually pumps out the smell of steak for passing drivers to suffer through.
Let’s hope the cabbage farmers don’t get the same idea…
Image and Story via Gizmodo
Good news: Tiger Woods return to advertising. Bad news: Involuntarily and for PETA.
Moments after his sex scandal was revealed, companies pulled their Tiger Woods ads and the golfer went from ubiquitous to pretty much invisible. Is Tiger’s days as product endorsement champ over? Not to PETA!
The animal-rights group came up with the "cheeky spay-and-neuter" billboard above (without the golfer’s approval) that will surely bring a resurgence to all those bad Tiger Woods jokes:
It will be a challenge to find an advertiser to put up the sign, acknowledged Virginia Fort, a campaigner with PETA who is working on the project.
"It’s a fun, tongue-in-cheek approach. We hope these billboard companies will understand," Fort said.
She said the billboard isn’t meant to offend the golfer, his family or fans, but to prevent millions of cats and dogs from being euthanized at shelters each year. [...]
"We’re sure Tiger will appreciate our attempt — from a story that’s distracted the world and followed Tiger — to turn it into something positive for little tigers," she said.
A billboard in Chattanooga has people doing double takes. You have to look twice before you see which finger the woman is giving you -her ring finger. The caption reads, “She’s tired of waiting.” The ad is for a local jeweler.
“If you look at it twice you ought to get a chuckle,” said Barry Schenck of M.M. Schenck Jeweler, “that’s what we are hoping for.”
Schenck says it’s not the first time he’s paid to post more than a dozen billboards before Christmas, but this latest stunt is getting feedback.
“It’s sort of putting a lot of pressure on young men to ask their girlfriends to marry them,” said Carolyn Miller of Chattanooga.
Critics say Schenck’s ploy is in bad taste, but Schenck stands behind the scheme. He says the woman in the picture is no actress.
“She is single, she does have a boyfriend, and she is waiting,” said Schenck.
Link (with video) -via Simply Left Behind
Our web BFF BuzzFeed has a hilarious post about 15 billboards that really don’t belong next to each other. We’re kind of late of posting this one, but it’s too precious too miss: Link – Thanks Eric!
To remind drivers to drive carefully during the rain in Papakura, New Zealand, the local government put out a rather disturbing billboard that bleeds when it rains. The billboard may be terrifying, but apparently it’s effective: there hasn’t been a fatality since.
BuzzFeed has the video clip: Link [embedded YouTube]
Toronto’s street artist Dan Bergeron (aka fauxreel) created this billboard advertising cheap lobotomy with a local phone number where people could call and leave messages. Surprisingly, a lot of people actually called to request lobotomies!
Link (embedded YouTube video, warning: coarse language) – Thanks Photosapience!
