Nov 24 2008
Out of the Box
A few years ago I recall riding on the subway in New York or Atlanta and seeing a sporty new Lexus speed past the train. As much as I had liked for it to have been a real-life version of James Bond chasing down bad guys in the same tunnel I was commuting in…it wasn’t. The speedy new Lexus turned out to be nothing more than a speedy new Lexus in a advertisement being illuminated off the subway tunnel wall…basically a far superior childrens flip book. The proof of the genuis in this at the time new form of advertising is probably tied to fact that I still remember this Lexus ad 3 years later. And it wasn’t even the Super Bowl.
Being someone that is obsessed with marketing, advertsing, and old propaganda posters I
a) am truly a good hearted person
b) decided to look further into this commuter advertising idea
Turns out the the idea was more innovative than inventive. Many something years ago an American shaving cream brand called Burma Shave would place a series of witty billboard ads with sequeled messages along popular highways.
Jump many something years later and Burma Shave is now defunct but their advertising ingenuity lives on. So the moral of the story is as follows: In a world buzzing with marketing noise, winning advertising is often innovative advertsing.
When I first came across LTLprints I saw a really cool product that could beautify living spaces but when I thought about businesses and their needs, I started to think along lines like this.