Oct 2007 Meeting Recap
A Survivor’s Guide to Outdoor Production
All great billboards have one thing in common: they all begin with eye-grabbing, impactful creative.
The best way to learn what makes great outdoor creative is to see it first-hand. That’s exactly what we did, as we began our meeting by cruising Sunset Strip and Hollywood in a double decker bus. Second only to NYC’s Times Square, the Strip is home to the most expensive outdoor space (averages $30-50,000 per month) and most creatively challenging executions.
In this one-mile-plus stretch, we saw a working cat clock complete with a swinging pendulum tail for Yellow Tail wine, a retro-style neon sign for Yahoo!, the country’s first video LED display, as well as “traditional” boards with extensions, pop-ups, backlight and even a vertical orientation (for iPod, at the spot that was forever home to the Marlboro Man).
In addition to billboards, we gazed at wallscapes the wrapped high-rise buildings, where the material and creative carefully weaved around windows and curves.
This is one meeting where it suffices to say, “You had to be there.” Words cannot do justice to the bewilderment behind some of these outdoor executions, leaving us to wonder, “How did they do that?”
When the bus dropped us off at the doorstep of the Renaissance Hotel, we resumed with our meeting to learn the answers to that question. Stan Nygard, longtime outdoor advertising veteran, began with a history of the outdoor medium, dating back to circus posters and horse and buggy signage in the 1800s, the first wall mural in 1891, to Foster & Kleiser’s low-sitting 30-sheet boards shortly after cars were invented.
Fast forward to today. Kevin Holden of Vision International presented a visual collection of the world’s most unique outdoor executions, from heated transit shelters to vinyl-covered bridges and 3-D optical illusions. Some boards contained live embellishments, from humans to plants, and actual inanimate objects.
The best creative can only work if executed properly. Keep the text brief. When it comes to fonts, size does matter (so does the readability of the font). Avoid all caps. Make effective use of color combinations.
When creating embellishments, extensions or cutouts, review your ideas with the outdoor board company beforehand for legal, engineering and cost implications. Consider an extension below the bulletin. Be aware of the other board’s extension showing through yours – ask for a wall divider.
Some executions require proper zoning approvals. Transit shelters and bus advertising are governed by the city. Special effects, such as ground-sitting palm trees swaying below a Mini Cooper bulletin, require leasing the space on the ground (which may not be owned by the same party as the bulletin itself). Bulletins and building wallscapes along freeways may require preapproval by the state highway department.
For green-minded advertisers, recyclable vinyls and non-vinyl substrates are now available and BIOflex vinyl is 100% biodegradable. Eco-solvent inks can now hold color better than before.
What’s next? How about sheep wearing blankets with your company’s logo? Be on the lookout for vinyl-covered stair steps, bus rooftops (that are visible when looking down high-rise office windows), “floor graphics” on crosswalks, pole-wrapped banners, and ATM wraps.
APALA would like to thank its Program Committee members Kevin Holden, Gloria Olegario and Eva Quan for organizing this month’s meeting.
