Billboard and Outdoor Advertising

Fisch Franke, a seafood restaurant in Frankfurt, wanted to prove to its customers that its fish were the freshest to be found. So it stuck them inside a bus shelter billboard.

It’s a great publicity stunt, and from the accompanying video, visible here, it looks like a lot of people got their pictures taken with the fish, so it succeeded on that level, but I’d hate to walk by a week later only to see a bunch of dead fish floating in the ad and suspect they were hours or even days away from becoming someone’s dinner at Fisch Franke.

Braunwald, Switzerland, is a car-free mountain resort, as far removed as can be from the country’s polluted, crowded cities. People instinctively enjoy popping the bubbles on bubble wrap. Braunwald’s tourism bureau managed to combine these totally unrelated facts, posting bubble-wrap-covered billboards all over the big cities of Switzerland.

The bubbles were ostensibly filled with crisp Braunwald mountain air, and the ads were situated where clean air was most desperately needed – along the walls of bus stops, at major pedestrian-traffic intersections, along the sidewalks paralleling busy autoroutes. Needless to say, people couldn’t resist popping the bubbles, and regardless of whether or not there was any real mountain air inside them, Braunwald got a lot of exposure.

[via Ads of the World]

In a citywide campaign to raise awareness about the homeless population in Barcelona, the Arrels Foundation painted architectural floorplans on places where homeless people could commonly be found sleeping, emphasizing that for many of the city’s residents, “home” was whatever bench, corner, or bank lobby they could use as temporary shelter.

The nonprofit‘s nontraditional approach to outdoor advertising seems like it would be a lot more attractive than more billboards about the homeless, which a lot of people tune out because they’re already so ubiquitous.

[via IBelieveinAdvertising]

Martor Solingen‘s unconventional billboard display, shaped like one of their “extremely sharp” hobby razor blades, was surrounded with fake chopped-up pigeons in this gruesome but amusing promotion. Passersby couldn’t resist getting a closer look at the “dead” birds, though I imagine the company had to replenish the supply pretty frequently when people ended up taking pieces as souvenirs.

This is a lot more effective than a normal promotional poster – it’s hard to make razor blades look interesting without demonstrating them in action, and this goes way beyond the typical beauty salon and shaving applications…

[via InvisibleRed]