Big billboards and big SUV’s — they both pollute the environment. In keeping with smart car’s low impact on the environment, we created low impact billboards. Miniature sized street advertising that celebrates the beauty of being small.
Advertising Agency: BBDO, Toronto, Canada
Tags: Advertising, BBDO, Billboards, Environmental, Out of Home, Toronto
From Media in Canada: Spotted! Simply Orange gets fresh by Val Maloney
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Thanks to marketer Rob Linden for spotting this fresh new campaign from Coca-Cola’s Simply Orange, aimed at getting consumers back to the brand’s tagline, “100% pure. Never concentrated. Never frozen.”
With media by UM Canada and creative by Zulu Alpha Kilo, the campaign includes OOH, print and in-store activities, Shannon C. Denny, marketing communications, Coca-Cola refreshments, tells MiC.
“In addition to the transit shelter ads, there is an oversized billboard with a large orange cut in half that sits above the physical board,” she says. “The orange, sitting atop a juicer, is filling the Simply Orange carafe below.”
Tags: Advertising, Astral, Billboards, Out of Home, Toronto, Transit Advertising, UM Canada
In an effort to prevent impaired driving, fake, double-sided funeral cards are place on vehicles parked in major bar districts. Inexpensive and easy to execute, the cards target drivers just as they’re getting back to their cars. The campaign was launched successfully by Cossette Toronto on St. Patrick’s Day and continues to be executed on nights with increased alcohol consumption.
Watch the case video here
Tags: Advertising, Cossette, Out of Home, Toronto
Alex Prager is a self-taught artist whose intriguing photographs feature women dressed as starlets and femme fatales, embroiled in cinematic melodramas. Growing up in LA, the artist was immersed in an environment that embraced ideas of glamour and celebrity culture. While each photograph in the series Week-End (2010) tells its own story, together these images come across as film stills from tantalizingly incomplete narratives. Her enigmatic tableaus are reminiscent of a classic Hollywood era, with their supersaturated and enhanced colours, dramatic lighting, unexpected camera angles, and archetypal representations of beauty.
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Prager’s signature style is influenced by fashion photography inasmuch as it draws upon films by Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, and Douglas Sirk. For the artist, “a picture is a picture,” and it is irrelevant whether these images were produced for a gallery wall or for a fashion magazine. If anything, editorial shoots enable her to realize more ambitious projects that would otherwise be difficult to realize.
Surrounding a car dealership and autobody shop, this site-specific installation also evokes nostalgia for a time when film screenings could be enjoyed at the drive-in theatre. Presented as billboards, these seven images reveal the artist’s interest in advertising tropes, in the way they lure the viewer into make believe-worlds. Much like a fashion advertising campaign, her seductive photography heavily relies upon artifice and fabricated promises of happiness. By working with makeup, costumes, and poses–caked lipstick, fake eyelashes, wigs, and demure blank stares–Prager celebrates the trappings of femininity, to the extent that she makes it uneasy for the viewer to see beyond these constructed facades. Within each of these scenes there is an air of mystery present, as if the answer lurks just outside of the picture frame.
This was presented in partnership with Pattison Outdoor Advertising and Nikon Canada
Tags: Advertising, Art, Billboards, Out of Home, Pattison Outdoor, Toronto
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South African photographer Pieter Hugo documents an expansive wasteland in Ghana and the inhabitants who live there. Rife with outdated technologies, this destitute slum known as “Sodom and Gomorrah” is also home to a marginalized community. Despite the devastatingly harsh realities depicted in Permanent Error (2010), many of these images are also aesthetically breathtaking classical portraits. Amidst the ravages of an industrialized world–mountains of discarded hard drives, keyboards, and monitors–locals confront the camera, revealing an inner strength and dignity.
The United Nations has stated that Western countries produce around 50 million tons of digital waste annually, and here the shocking consequences are exposed. As an installation situated within the urban surroundings of a parking lot, there is a heightened awareness of consumer culture and how the West has normalized its wasteful behaviours. Much of this debris is shipped over to developing countries, with the false promise that it will improve their economy. Many of the inhabitants in this wasteland survive by burning electronic components to extract copper and other precious metals, left with little choice but to create toxic firepits of melting plastic and black smoke. As a result, the surrounding landscape and rivers are contaminated with lead, cyanide, and mercury.
Marshall McLuhan theorized about the effects of technology and how its pervasiveness leads to new cycles of obsolescence and retrieval. He questioned what happens when a medium is pushed to its extreme. Hugo’s work reveals the dark underside of a culture that values “progress” above all else. This bleak graveyard of outdated electronic artifacts foreshadows an apocalyptic era, while harkening back to romanticized pastoral landscapes. These photographs are a stark reminder of the fragility of existence, not only of people and place, but of information and technology.
This was presented in partnership with Pattison Outdoor Advertising and Nikon Canada
Curated By Bonnie Rubenstein
Tags: Advertising, Art, Billboards, Contact Photography Festival, Out of Home, Pattison Outdoor, Toronto
A Sign in the Northwest Passage – Kevin Schmidt
Presented as a billboard on The Power Plant’s south facade, Kevin Schmidt’s A Sign in the Northwest Passage (2010) documents the artist’s recent project made near Tuktoyaktuk, in the Inuvik region of the Northwest Territories. Aided by local guides and workers, the artist erected a large handcrafted cedar sign displaying an ominous text drawn from the Book of Revelations. Describing the decimation of the earth and humankind in vivid detail, it relays a warning that no one seems present to receive. This solitary sign–carrying an urgent message for the masses–references advertising culture and the city, yet is silenced by its surrounding barren landscape. Schmidt deliberately located this project on the ice above major oil reserves, where the potential for devastating exploitation is clearly implied. When the seasonal ice melted, this sign floated away to parts unknown, taking its cataclysmic message with it.
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Schmidt is a Vancouver-based artist exploring the highly constructed cultural codings of the Canadian landscape. In his work, the wilderness becomes a site for staging elaborate scenarios and conversely, elements drawn from the natural environment are represented in contemporary art spaces, taking on a decidedly unnatural air. Positioned outside The Power Plant as a billboard facing Lake Ontario, this work is imbued with a self-referential quality, invoking this displaced sign within the wild.
Schmidt’s work is included in The Power Plant exhibition To What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong? until May 29. He will also be the focus of a solo exhibition at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, U of T, from June 8 to August 20.
Presented in partnership with The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. Curated By Gregory Burke & Jon Davies
Running until August 21
The Power Plant
231 Queens Quay W
Toronto, M5J 2G8
(416) 973 4949
Tags: Advertising, Art, Contact Photography Festival, Out of Home, Toronto
From the Torontoist: SUBWAYTM Map Not a Joke After All? by Hamutal Dotan
Back in March, the TTC indicated that it would entertain proposals to sell naming rights to subway stations and subway lines. It was a small clause buried in a long document outlining the requirements for those seeking to bid on the TTC’s advertising contract, and we decided to have a bit of fun with it. On April 1, we published a map of what the TTC might look like with the stations renamed after potential corporate sponsors.
We had a great time putting the map (and corresponding platform mock-ups) together, and you, dear readers, seemed to enjoy discovering what your new transit system might look like.
Regrettably, it might turn out to be less of a joke than we intended. This week the City of Toronto also released a proposal that will be examined by the Executive Committee later this month; it calls for a new policy on naming rights for public spaces in Toronto, and would make it easier for a company to, say, purchase the naming rights for a playground. The Toronto Star asked mayoral brother and advisor Doug Ford (Ward 2, Etobicoke North) about this new approach to naming. Would he, for instance, be comfortable taking a subway to Spadina-McDonalds station?
His reply: “Whatever. If it brings in revenue, I honestly don’t believe anyone cares.”
The Torontoist put together some great mock ups of what stations might be called in the future….
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Tags: Controversy, Toronto, Transit Advertising, TTC
