Billboards force you to be simple.
In all of advertising, billboards are the best place to practice the art of simplicity. In fact, my first mentor, Tom McElligott, told me if you have outdoor in the media mix for the campaign you’re about to do, start there first. Nothing focuses you on a problem like this medium.
Figure 3.24 Neil’s cool idea: reductionism. Ad number five is almost always going to be better than ad number one.
It’s been said that a board should have no more than seven words. Any more and a passing driver can’t read it. But then you add the client’s logo. One or two words. Now you’re up to nine. And if your visual is something that takes one or two beats to under- stand, well, in my opinion, you’ve already got too much on your plate.
I suggest draconian measures. Shoot for three words, tops. It doesn’t mean you’ll be able to keep it to three. But start with three as your goal. The board from the 1960s pictured here (Figure 3.26) works with just one word.
Here’s a great way to test whether your outdoor ad is simple enough and works fast. It’s also a great way to present it to the client. Walk up to your client, holding the layout of the idea with its back to your audience. Say, “Okay, here’s a billboard we were think- ing about” and then flip it around and show them the idea for two seconds.
Figure 3.25 It’s hard to read as it’s reprinted here, but the little warning sign says: “This changing booth is monitored by store personnel to prevent
theft, particularly theft of Lee jeans, the #1 brand of women, something that would really cheese off our store buyers, especially now that
Lee has lowered their wholesale prices and the store stands to rake in some serious profit.”
Just two seconds—one Mississippi, two Mississippi—then flip it back around again.
Check out this wonderful billboard for a new flavor of Altoid’s Curiously Strong Mints (Figure 3.27). It’s marvelous. And it’s fast.
Two words and a product shot. You hardly have to count past “one Mississippi” to get it. Same thing for the great board for the JFK museum (Figure 3.28). One visual, three words. Elegant and very fast.
Your outdoor ideas will have to work just as quickly. Visualize precisely how your idea is going to be viewed by the customer. Car approaches, billboard whizzes by, and it’s gone. If the idea you’re showing is as fast as these, I’ve found this presentation technique can be persuasive. Remember, the rule is your board has to go at least 65 miles an hour.
Figure 3.27 An example of a billboard so simple you could actually present it to a client in two seconds.
(Reprinted with permission of Callard & Bowser-Suchard, Inc.) Figure 3.26 This old 1960s billboard for Pan Am Airlines
does its job with one word.
Outdoor is a great place to get outrageous.
Big as they are on the landscape, outdoor boards are an event, not just an ad. In fact, what makes for a good print advertisement doesn’t necessarily make for a good billboard. Whatever you do, don’t create something just okay. The final size of a billboard out there in the world only magnifies how an idea is just
OK AY.
You don’t wanna be just okay.
Check this board out; it’s way better than okay. Adidas brought to life its “Impossible is nothing” tagline with a live-action board in New Zealand. To launch the Fifa World Cup games there, the agency (TBWA/Whybin) created a reverse bungee “Sky Screamer” ride that looked like a giant soccerball, setting it up in front of a large image of a popular player, Steven Gerrard. Fans who purchased a ball were given the chance to “Be the Ball” and were strapped in on seats inside. A sportscaster gave commentary on a match and at the exact second they described Gerrard kicking the ball, the Sky Screamer launched, reaching 105 mph in two seconds (Figure 3.29).
Outdoor begs for the ostentatious. Go for broke. Remember, you’re in “made-you-look, made-you-look” territory here. Outdoor companies, prop makers, and tech firms can help bring just about any wild idea to life. And now with the confluence of the Web and mobile phones, people on the street can interact with boards, send- ing either video or text for all the world to see.
Figure 3.28 Three beautifully chosen words that make the reader reinterpret the visual.
Your outdoor must delight people.
Except for the handful of great ideas in the One Show every year, most of the outdoor I see really sucks. When an ad in a magazine isn’t good, I can turn the page. But if I live across the street from a bad billboard, there’s nothing I can do about it except close my curtains.
Copywriter Howard Gossage didn’t believe outdoor boards were a true advertising medium: “An advertising medium is a medium that incidentally carries advertising but whose primary function is to provide something else: entertainment, news, etc. . . . Your exposure to television commercials is conditional on their being accompanied by entertainment that is not otherwise available. No such parity or tit-for-tat or fair exchange exists in outdoor advertising. . . . I’m afraid the poor old billboard doesn’t qualify as a medium at all; its medium, if any, is the scenery around it and that is not its to give away.”16
The city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, has already outlawed billboards, and here in America several states are weighing similar bans. Well, until the day billboards are outlawed altogether (either as “corpo- rate littering” or perhaps “retinal trespassing”), you owe the citi- zens of the town where your outdoor appears—you owe them your very best work. You must delight them.
Figure 3.29 An example of “outdoor as event.”