Terry O'Reilly (8:12)
As an ad writer at advertising agencies. I wrote ads for all mediums. My favorites were radio and billboards, probably because they posed the biggest challenges. With radio, the task was to use audio to make people visualize. With billboards, it was the forced brevity. As a rule, a billboard idea has to be seven words or less. And it has to communicate to people who are quickly passing by, spending only a few precious seconds in front of it. Most billboards are terrible. They're poorly designed, loaded with too many words, and lack an idea. And that's a shame, because billboards offer big opportunities. Speaking of big, the rock and roll industry discovered the power of billboards back in 1967. It first appeared on the most famous street in Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard. It happened on a super sized billboard measuring a whopping 4.2 by 14.6 meters or four 14 by 48ft. It was historic as it was the first billboard to advertise a rock and roll album. The New York based founder of Electra Records had recently moved to Hollywood to open an office there. And he was observing the unique car culture of Los Angeles. Everybody drove. He looked out his window and saw endless billboards all along Sunset Boulevard. But notice, none of them advertised records. So Elektra decided to rent a giant billboard to advertise the Doors debut album. The billboard would put the album in front of thousands of potential buyers. It would demonstrate the label's commitment to its artists. But most of all, Elektra knew many of the top radio stations were close by. And influential DJs drove up and down Sunset Boulevard every day. What made the Doors billboard so spectacular was the fact it was hand painted. Unlike the smaller printed billboards, hand painted boards were unique. Each required a team of illustrators, stylists, typographers, technical advisors, retouchers, wood cutters, quality control inspectors and installation crews. But most of all, the success of the billboards rested completely on the talent of highly skilled artists. Hand painted billboards had a remarkable depth, sheen and texture that a printed billboard could never match. These gigantic signs had to be legible from far away. So the painters used a reducing glass which was the opposite of a magnifying glass. It allowed them to view their work as if from a distance. While the Doors broke the ice for rock and roll, there were many other historic hand painted billboards on the Sunset Strip over the years. One of the most famous was for the Beatles. The giant billboard showed the Fab Four crossing Abbey Road, but their heads protruded above the board, using the real sky to stand in for the blue sky on the album. As we mentioned in a past episode, Paul McCartney's head went missing one night, but Capitol Records chose not to replace it. At that time, the Paul is dead rumor had been flying around. The headless billboard fueled even more record sales for a billboard advertising ELO's out of the Blue album. A huge $50,000 plexiglass spaceship was attached to the board. Another sign that went up just showed a white brick wall. No words, no title, no band. Then over time, bricks were slowly removed, revealing Pink Floyd's the Wall. Dole has been posting interesting outdoor posters in the UK recently. The fruit company is waging a war against malnutrition. Research revealed that 3 million Brits are affected by malnutrition due to unhealthy diets. As the UK consumes more junk food than any other country in Europe, Dole wanted people to pay more attention to what they eat and came up with a dramatic way to make their point. Here's what they did. They put various fruits into a blender and created colored printing inks out of the juice. Then they printed posters using that nutritional ink. Dole positioned the posters near places where people typically buy unhealthy food. For example, one said, every word on this poster contains more vitamin C and A than the chocolate bars in that vending machine. That's because the ink we used here was made with grapefruit and blueberries. Another poster was positioned next to a fast food restaurant and said the words on this poster contain more vitamin A and C than a chicken nugget because the ink they are printed with was made from oranges and red grapes. At the bottom of each poster, Dole invited people to favor more fruit when it comes to snack choices. Dole believes people don't pay enough attention to nutrition labels and most don't realize the long term effects of poor nutrition. Dole's Nutritional Inc. Campaign encouraged people to change their habits. The quality of billboard ideas these days has taken a big creative leap, all due to digital technology. One of the most inventive boards of the last few years was done by British Airways. The digital board showed a young boy sitting on a white floor. But when a British Airways plane flew overhead, the little boy came to life, pointed up at the plane, and literally followed its trajectory across the sky. Then words appeared on the billboard that showed the actual flight number and destination of that plane. Then it showed the lowest fares available at that time for that location, all in real time. The billboard detected every British Airways plane that flew by. It tapped into that longing we all have when we see a plane wondering where it's headed, dreaming that it's probably off to an exotic destination as we all sit stranded in traffic. It was a first, not just for British Airways, but for the advertising industry, as it employed new technology that could actually track planes. Sometimes billboards are huge and sometimes they're tiny. Dude, did you order the new iPhone 17 Pro? Got it from Verizon, the best 5G network in America. I never look so good. You look the same. But with this camera, everything looks better. Especially me. You haven't changed your hair in 15 years.
