At first glance it looks like someone forgot to close the clear covering on this painfully plain Mercedes billboard. But…upon further inspection we find an eye-catching and creative billboard that mimics the main selling point of the vehicle being advertised! The 2011 Mercedes-Benz SLS Gullwing is a remake of a popular classic car that featured gull-wing doors, which are a special type of door hinged at the roof rather than the side. The billboard does a great job of illustrating this popular and classic look and getting people excited about the release of the new car. Automotive promotion at it’s finest!

A high incidence of driving accidents in Kuwait were attributed to drivers’ having been distracted by their cell phones. Wataniya Telecom, the second-largest mobile operator in the country, wanted to do their part to instill safe behaviors in mobile customers - using a hands-free headset, while still potentially distracting, is nowhere near as dangerous as actually holding or dialing a cellphone while in motion.

To communicate this message, Wataniya placed giant smashed mobile phone replicas near its billboards, where it would look at first like yet another car had gone off the road and only at second glance reveal itself to be a huge phone. The visual meaning was clear, even before drivers read the text on the billboard, and a law soon passed that made it mandatory to wear a headset while operating a motor vehicle.

[via DirectDaily]

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of ads like this one placed on revolving doors. It’s a good way to get the attention of commuters who are so set in their routines that changing billboards or other advertising surfaces like subway posters don’t reach them - someone walking through a revolving door has to look at it, or risk being mowed down by people on the other side!

This ad for Meiji milk suggests that with the help of the seemingly innocuous beverage, pushing a Sumo wrestler out of your way is as easy as pushing a revolving door. Meiji also used stickers featuring wrestlers, rugby players, and judo masters to represent those who could be conquered with a nice cold glass of milk. You have to give them credit for trying - no one’s really come up with a good advertising campaign for milk since the iconic “got milk?” ads of the ’90s.

[via IBelieveinAdvertising]

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]

Most people spend the coldest months of the year trying to forget the temperature, bundling up in layers of winter apparel or just staying inside with the heat turned up and a warm mug of coffee close at hand. Norwegian Air Shuttle wanted to catch people’s attention during the rare times they might actually be feeling the cold - waiting for a (heated) bus, on a walk from (heated) home to (heated) office - in order to remind them that they need not be cold at all. Warm weather, after all, is only a short flight away. The massive temperature readout was supplied by an internal electronic thermometer, while the airplane fare below reminded passersby that traveling somewhere warm was not expensive, and that it was certainly worth it to escape the freezing weather.

This billboard for Morgan Crossing, a residential-commercial condominium development, attracts attention with its beige couple and their equally dull minivan clambering towards a life outside of “Boringville.” Morgan Crossing wanted to position itself as a vibrant alternative to the monotony of suburban living, since the condos the real estate company was trying to sell were within walking distance of retail shops, restaurants, and a sense of village life. The life-size beige people make this promotion more than a simple billboard or outdoor poster - it’s impossible not to notice them - and their abandoned automobile represents freedom from the need for a full tank of gas to have a good time.