Those of us who reside in big cities are exposed to far more advertising than suburban and rural folk. This makes sense; there are more people condensed into smaller spaces, so advertisers get more bang for their buck. I walk down the street, and a trolley goes by advertising a new Nicolas Cage film. I go down into the subway station, and there are ads for McDonald's, Drexel University, and FOX 29 10:00 News. The train pulls up, we go in, and there are ads on every possible square inch on the inside. Hop onto the cruelly-named Schuylkill Expressway headed east, and there are huge billboards every few seconds (or every few minutes if traffic is at its usual volume), with everything from Herr's Potato Chips (former Eagle Mike Quick says: "make Herr's yours!") to strip clubs near the oil refineries. It reminds me of the Simpsons episode when Homer drives down the highway on "new billboard day" and buys all of the food products advertised.
And then there's that weird world of advertisements that a lot of people don't know exist... the urban billboards. Smaller than normal billboards, tacked onto the sides of pizzarias and thrift stores in out of the way thoroughfares, these ads seem to exist in an alternate universe. A universe in which The Transporter 2 is an eagerly awaited late-summer blockbuster instead of a sequel to a film I didn't know existed (seriously... on first glance I thought they made a sequel to Trainspotting), and in which Mountain Dew's "Invasion of the Ballers" advertising campaign is a successful parody of corporations who try to approximate "urban culture" ("You sweat from playing basketball all day and all night! Well MOUNTAIN DEW has got your back! Uh.... G!"), or possibly a laughable attempt to approximate "urban culture," rather than a series of little-seen billboards in West Philadelphia that are incredibly easy to mistake for ads for a movie about alien basketball players. I literally can't find ANYTHING on the web about that one, so you'll have to take my word that they actually exist.
These ads invariably contain things that I never see or hear of again. It really seems like an alternate reality. How do they get there? I have an image in my head of corporations and marketing firms signing misguided contracts and being forced to say, "Well, this ad has to go up somewhere or else we're in breach of the contract. What's the cheapest available space? The side of Ted's Pizza Express in West Philadelphia? Perfect."
I have no idea why I find this topic so fascinating. I'm just really interested in the quirky idiosyncracies of urban life lately. Plus I walk by several of these weird ads every day. Eventually I'll take pictures so you don't think I'm crazy.
2 comments:
haha that "invasion of the ballers" billboard is outstanding. Its jut like three dudes and one of them even looks out of shape.
andrew
And then there is the woman who sold tattoo-advertising space on her own freakin forehead to the highest bidder ... proving that we are, indeed, rats running in an advertising culture's wheel ... d.a.
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