The City of Toronto’s eco-friendly living website, Live Green has teamed up with Agency59, a Toronto-based ad agency, to launch a new transit shelter ad campaign. These new ad is interactive, allowing people to flip a large switch that turns the back light of the ad on and off, enticing them with the copy “Switch this poster off” and directing them to the Live Green website for information about saving energy and living green.
There have been some criticism that the adds are not that effective as they are practically invisible during the day and too dark at night. The Torontoist ask Brian Howlett, chief creative officer of Agency 59 about the ad’s issues who stated “It woks well enough to read…That was the first thing we thought of when we came up with it, but lots of great ideas can be killed easily and we’d rather persevere because the reaction we’ve been getting from most people has been really encouraging.”
Currently, the ad can only be found at the Yonge & Empress transit shelter. Live Green plans to install more ads at King & John and Yonge & Eglinton West transit shelters. In conjunction with the transit shelter ads, Live Green is launching an online campaign featuring banner ads. This campaign involves interactive trees, then when selected with a unique visitors cursors, will add a leaf to the tree. Every time a tree gains a thousands leaves, the City of Toronto will plant a real tree.
It is a clever campaign that may be more effective if the ads more visible and had better illumination. The idea could also work at alternative media spaces that would encourage greater reach and interaction such as mall installations or subway cars and buses.
Agency 59 has done some other great environmental-themed ads for the City of Toronto:
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