Turning everyday street objects into ads can be a clever vehicle to leverage a campaign. As we all know, the coffee wars between McDonalds, Tim Hortons and Starbucks have heated up significantly. It’s no accident that McDonalds executes a major push, with a weeklong free coffee giveaway, during Tim Horton’s Roll up the Rim to win campaign. Here a cheeky street ad they did recently. Now that’s pretty hard to ignore!
Here’s another interesting one, courtesy of an effort to clean up the Milwaukee River, by driving people to a website to donate. Again, the juxtaposition of objects being used out of context pushes the creative to be noticed.
And here’s one from downtown Vancouver. Art Stafford is in the tax preparation business, and he borrowed this idea from an application his son saw in Britain.
He’s found a clever way to get around street sign bi-laws that would normally prohibit such signs being attached to poles. Mounted to the back of a bike, which is then chained to the pole, it becomes a free ad complete with take away business cards. Art has been putting the bike ad out for the last 5 years, during 3 months leading up to tax time. He claims to get about 100 clients/year from the stunt.
Bottom line? Creativity = business! Let us know if you have seen street based creative advertising that should be shared. I’d be happy to post the links.
