Why yes, I do work in an augmented building

Don't you?

Tokyo is saturated with billboards and electronic outdoor advertising, but the N Building has taken the concept, married it to augmented reality and upped the bar for out-of-home display.

In essence, the entire facade of the building is a QR code. Users with a custom iPhone app will be able to scan the building's front and interact with the merchants, extract relevant data and generally know everything they need to know. Augmented reality and architecture, it's cool.

N Building from Alexander Reeder on Vimeo.

What makes a billboard perfect.

Just let a TV station in New Zealand tell you...

Tax this to pretty up that.

Toronto city council is debating a new tax on billboards this week. Links are here and here. The idea is to implement a tax on billboards in the city and use the revenue to facilitate a cleanup and beautification of the city. And anyone who's been outside lately knows we need a cleanup here.

One side of the fence sees billboards as urban blight and visual pollution. The other sees them as a sign of business-friendly city government.

Billboards should be taxed, but so should all the other pseudo-advertising that clutters up the great outdoors. From those plastic signs for roofers to the posters that seem to overlap one another in a space of minutes. If a budget can afford a billboard, a poster or the printing of thousands of plastic signs, it can afford to pay a tax to use public space. If it doesn't pay a tax to use public space, then why should it be allowed to remain? This isn't a freedom of speech issue, it's not an example of government being unfriendly to business. It's about public space and who gets to use it.

New breakthrough in outdoor promotion

This just in from the Institute For The Blindingly Obvious:

Hotels on the east coast of Canada are learning something about promotion.

It's called lit signage.

Apparently it's a big deal there. Or it was an astonishingly, appalling slow news day.

Coca Cola's new touchy campaign

Coca Cola wanted to promote their new bottle design, meant to improve the consumer's grip. Apparently this is a big problem in Europe, after several highly publicized incidents of grip-failure related injuries swamped hospitals and emergency services...

Anyway, to get the attention of the grip-challenged public, they decided to promote them using some transit ads. Transit ads that reached out and touched the public.

It's an interesting idea but really only practical when there's little chance of bare skin coming into contact with it...

Gorgeous outdoor projection

It's got artistic merit and heavy outdoor promotion potential.

It's 3D projection and it's gorgeous.

Projection on Buildings from NuFormer Digital Media on Vimeo.

This is how the future looks

At least for outdoor, interactive digital advertising.

Waterloo Station in London is the site of a very cutting edge piece of outdoor media. When the landscape is saturated with media, only the best media will stand out. This is one of them.

Interesting infomercials in India

Inhabitants in India, initially interested in identical items inhabit interstitial innerspace.

Or, to put it simply, many people living in India don't have televisions. And if they don't have televisions, they can't watch infomercials. So, someone came up with the novel idea of doing it live in front of an audience.

The Wall Street Journal profiles one such person, who works for a division of a division of Lowe Worldwide.

Small world innit?

And you live where exactly?

Does your neighbour jerk your chicken? In Toronto they just might.

some you've seen, some you'll like

Billboard Tuesday.

Enjoy

It's the outdoor equivalent of telemarketing.

Need your roof done? How about a mover, or a divorce, or both? Maybe you need some posters put up everywhere, and I do mean everywhere. Stop signs, mailboxes, parking meters, hoarding, light poles, newspaper boxes, sidewalks, phone booths, walls, doors, cats, cars, those weird boxes that control stoplights, pretty much anything that stays still long enough to get something slapped on it.

Toronto is part of a democracy, and democracies have things like freedom of speech, and in a democracy people, and corporate entities have rights. But don't you think that postering and stickering have gotten a tad out of hand? It's not guerilla, it's not unique, it's not new. It's ugly, it's a waste of resources and it's as visually irritating as a mistimed strobe light.

Everyone has a right to advertise. They don't have a right to blight the landscape just to make a buck. This isn't keeping thousands employed, it's not serving the public good and it makes the city look like it doesn't really care who does what on public property.

Here's an interesting article about the law in Toronto and how it's not enforced. And here is The Advertising Hall of Shame.

I'm not invisible

Every city has a homeless population, and every city tends to ignore it.

Raising awareness of the homeless is never a simple task, but a German group has devised a more direct approach that highlights a basic fact - homeless people become almost invisible in a city.

Here's how they did it.

Wait and see how they advertise mushrooms

Great outdoor/transit piece - very novel idea. But the whole 'simple, local, down-home' feeling is getting out of hand.

Let's just all admit that potatoes are grown on industrial farms, there is no such thing as a free range potato, they ain't organic and if you're elbow deep in a bag of chips, you probably don't care where they're from...

No, it's not a joke

40 years ago humanity walked on a surface other than earth for the first time. 40 years later humanity has evolved to such a point of sophistication that we can now advertise on a surface other than earth for the first time.

Yes, it's true. Advertising on the moon.

I recently bought some property on the moon and am accepting offers to erect one huge billboard...

Rememberance and design go hand in hand

July 7 is a very emotional day for many people in London. Now, two years after indiscriminate bombings of innocent civilians, a memorial has been designed.

Here is a link to an interview with the typographer who helped on the design and construction of the memorial.

Design isn't all packaging and marketing, wayfinding and entertainment.

this will NEVER fly here

Imagine the outcry? The frothing letters to the editor? The demonstrations.

Thing is, it works.

one hell of an insight

An outdoor poster educating people about domestic violence. Pretty damn powerful.

random acts of art

Berlin has long been an artistic haven, but a few years ago artists caught postering were treated the same as graffiti taggers. In order to avoid legal tangles and to make public art even more engaging and random, they came up with the Papergirl Street Art Project.

Brilliant and wonderful idea.

Lion Nathan "Carb Relief"

They were asked to launch a new low carbohydrate beer into a market already flooded with low carb brands. Our beer has only 1/3 carbs, so they decided to operate like a charity, giving away the other 2/3 to people who love carbs the most. Americans. The more beer Australians drank, the more carbs they could donate to hungry Americans. The 6-month sales target was achieved in the first 3 weeks, selling over one million Litres of white stag. It was so popular that trade demanded it be made available on tap some 21 months earlier than originally planned. They thought that was pretty good. White Stag beer had 2/3 carbs to spare. Since Americans seem to love oversized meals and high carbohydrates, they were the perfect recipients. Australians have also had a longstanding love/hate relationship with America, which made them the perfect recipients of our excess carbs. Bronze Cannes Lions Promo Winner.

The guerrillas are on the move

Toronto has become a haven for guerrillas. From guerrilla gardeners to honest-to-god guerrillas seeking asylum, we've got'em all. And now we have guerrilla advertisers. Once content to glue, staple and nail thousands upon thousands of posters to any flat surface, now they're embracing technology and projecting their ads on the sides of poor innocent defenseless buildings in the Annex.