Billboards still matter

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17 Aug

Image Credit: Angelyne Productions, YouTube

Michelle Santiago Cortés on “out of home” advertising meant to circulate the internet.

In the early eighties, Angelyne was known as the “LA Billboard Diva.” She was famous for her pink Corvette, for her Barbie-ed up looks, her Valley Girl ways and above all else, she was famous for being famous. Key to her fame–beyond a commitment to the color pink and mythologized story–were the hundreds of billboards she took out. Throughout the eighties, LA drivers were alerted to the existence of Angelyne–her busty contours, her love of pink and big blonde hair. The billboards created the legend by advertising nothing but a name. She earned her living (and paid for her Pepto-pink Corvette) by making appearances and selling merch. She even had a cameo in 1988’s Earth Girls Are Easy alongside Geena Davis, Jeff Goldblum, Damon Wayans, and Jim Carrey.

A billboard can be transformative. A person or product can become greater than itself by virtue of being on a billboard. Angelyne is the girl from the billboards. I was recently helping a friend move in Ridgewood, Queens and she pointed out a highway-sized billboard overlooking Fresh Pond Road. The billboard advertised a local bar–it included a map and a picture of the facade even though the spot was less than ten minutes away. I feel the billboard might be bigger than the actual bar, nonetheless, now it’s the bar from the billboard.

A person or product can become greater than itself by virtue of being on a billboard.

This summer feels marked by a turn towards billboard-esque advertising. In a time when product promotion is woven into everyday online activity and the space between an ad and a sale is as narrow as ever, brands are turning to heavier and louder promotional mediums, namely, out of home advertising.

In April, Jacquemus launched car-sized versions of its Le Bambino bag onto the streets of Paris–one was even stretched out to the length of a bus and included windows. In July, tube trains and double-decker buses in London were adorned with a strap of giant rubber lashes that ran through giant Maybelline Lash Sensational Sky High mascara wands that protruded from building facades and tube station interiors. Crucially, nobody on the streets of London or Paris were able to witness these ads because they were entirely digital–3D renderings and AR imagery that went straight to social media.

You can’t escape the billboard, whether you drive to work or work from home. Recent trends in marketing blur the line between digital-first or in situ activations–where digital assets garner attention for seeming to be on-site and site-specific ad space becomes popular through mimetic distribution.

You can’t escape the billboard, whether you drive to work or work from home.

Undoubtedly, the most popular example of the latter is the new Sphere at the Venetian in Las Vegas. The world’s largest spherical building is covered by a 54,000 square-meter LED screen. Inside, it will soon be a concert arena. Outside, The Exosphere is a “360-degree canvas for brand storytelling that will be seen around the world,” according to MSG Sports COO David Hopkins. But a senior VP noted that, “The Exosphere is more than a screen or a billboard.” He’s right, because it’s also a meme.

Rare is the meme that hasn’t been doctored into images or videos of the Sphere. According to Know Your Meme, it started as jokes about the Sphere itself–about what would happen if it encountered a technical error or if it got hacked. Before long, creative entrepreneurs started editing their own ads onto the Sphere–thus turning the meme of the billboard into a billboard. That is exactly what Adam Faze did to promote Clockwork Dynasty, a show from his company, Fazeworld.

“I think the best ads are memes and the best memes are ads!” he tells me over text. Perhaps meme ads are the jingles of the digital age–obnoxious, catchy, amusing. But even if he could display his own ad on the Vegas Sphere, in situ, Faze says the point would be to bring it into social media: “For the biggest of the big activations, [it] feels like the only purpose at this point is for bragging rights on social media.” He says it’s all about the post. “How do you not do it for the post, it’s the most ridiculous screen in the history of screens.” And ridiculous seems to be the point of it, it’s easy to picture the phone screen, the billboard and the Las Vegas Sphere on a spectrum of ridiculous screens–prime real estate for viral advertisement.

A little over two years ago, artist Maya Man was commissioned by the artist collective For Freedoms to make a billboard. Forbes called it “ugly” and by many a snobbish design standard, Man’s billboard is ugly: Bold red letters and a poorly cropped picture of her adolescent face, this is not the kind of billboard that projects onlookers into a desirable future only a product can deliver. “Billboards are made to stand out,” Maya tells me over email. “An extra ugly billboard on the side of the road will probably catch your eye more than an aesthetically pleasing one.” The minds behind Maybelline’s larger-than-life mascara renderings professed a similar intention, they told Metro.co.uk they “wanted to create a disruptive marketing campaign.” It didn’t disrupt any physical space, but it disrupted the eye with over-the-top digital assets. “That’s why I especially love the design language of billboards, they’re shameless!” Maya adds.

Shameless and ridiculous–that’s the power of the billboard. “I think of social media as a continuation of billboard culture!” Maya tells me, adding that “the analogy that feels most relevant to me now is influencers as billboards.” For brands today, it’s about turning social media space into billboards and IRL ad space into memes, that in turn, become digital billboards. For proto-influencer Angelyne, the key to good marketing was simple: become the billboard.

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PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

  • Sky Ferreira fans buy her a billboard in Times Square to free her from her record label. (Fader)

  • Amid all the platform chaos TikTok decides to get rid of the algorithmic feed, offering in its place a “chronological Following and Friends” feed…for European users only. (Wired)

  • “Reality TV’s reckoning is coming” per a new lawsuit presented to NBC Universal (Bravo’s parent company) on behalf of “former cast and crew of ‘NBC’s most lucrative reality shows’.” The strike is prompting the industry to lean on reality programming where it can, only now it seems to be on the verge of imploding. (Vulture)

  • The state of entertainment is so bad, a star columnist for The Hollywood Reporter sent a very embarrassing email. (Variety)

  • It’s hard to take headlines like Who is Bobbi Althoff? seriously when the lead-up to such stories is Althoff’s inescapable ubiquity. Still, it marks a curious trajectory of the influencer-cum-podcaster figure and hers is certainly a unique path.

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MIXTAPE

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