June 5th, 2011
On a bright summer day in 1996, Kate McDonnell was wandering through an alley in the eastern Plateau when she spotted the remnants of a hand-painted tobacco ad on the wall of an old triplex.
Fifteen years later, Kate ventured down the same alley and, sure enough, the ad was still there, a bit more faded than before but otherwise intact. Unfortunately, the bottom of the ad is now blocked by the tall wood fence of a terrace built on an adjacent garage.
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February 13th, 2011
“Chrysler: Born of Fire”, presented during the last Super Bowl
Am I the only one that feels the spirit of a city in this advertisement? I believe Chrysler and Eminem were able to capture the true identity of this American city. I could say that I enjoy the way they first present Detroit as an historic industrial hub while they present themselves as hard workers and creative citizens.
Are we watching a city that tries to wake up and scream to the world, telling us they want to survive, asking for help?
I am not American, neither am I a fan of cars, Eminem or Detroit itself, but I must say that I felt almost proud after watching this advertisement. I wish Montreal could at least try to do something as emotional as this.
November 20th, 2010
Bill Brand’s “Masstransiscipe” installation in New York’s subway
I first noticed subway tunnel wall animations in Boston, where the long gaps between stations on the MBTA Red Line provides a captive audience. The animation, composed of dozens of stills that simulated movement as the train zoomed by, was an ad. The message: visit Vermont and its great outdoors, which certainly must have resonated with more than a few claustrophobes riding the crowded rush hour rails.
Animated ads in subway tunnels are expensive, both to design and install, which helps explain why the Vermont ad’s successor, a campaign for a movie “coming to theatres” last February, was only removed recently — with no ready replacement. But the medium is a popular one, if only because it’s relatively novel and rare. Examples from Budapest, Hong Kong, Kiev, L.A., Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. have been enthusiastically documented for upload to YouTube. And given that cash-strapped transit agencies have allowed almost every other subway surface to be colonized by ad space, including seats and whole exteriors of rolling stock, it was almost a logical next step.
Much of the credit for introducing these flipbook or zoetrope-like ads goes to two independent innovators: New York astrophysics student Joshua Spodek and Winnipeg animator Bradley Caruk. Spodek’s ads debuted in Atlanta in 2001; his company, Sub Media, continues to produce similar ads today. In 2006, Caruk won a Manning Innovation Award for his concept, which his partner, Rob Walker, first thought up while staring at the blank walls of Paris’ Metro. The company they co-founded, SideTrack Technologies, set up its first system in Kuala Lumpur and has since opened others across the United States — and beyond, to London, Rio de Janeiro, and cities in Mexico.
Caruk’s system, which relies on motion-sensitive LEDs, made subway advertising widespread and profitable. The MBTA raked in $1.5 million in SideTrack’s first two years of operation in Boston, and one ad alone brought the L.A. Metro the equivalent of 192,000 new riders in revenue. But he was hardly the first person to experiment with subway animation.
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July 29th, 2010
C’est l’été et les responsables de bike sharing ne lésinent pas sur les arguments de choc pour encourager l’usage du vélo !
“Avec moi, tu consommes au minimum 300 calories par heure.” / “With me, you burn at least 300 calories an hour.”
July 24th, 2010
Posters along the former green line calling for “real change.”
After years of foreign/militia rule, the Lebanese navy reasserts itself through this poster featuring a group of scowling teenage boys. “We’re back!” reads the caption in the lower left. Should we feel threatened or reassured?
September 25th, 2009
This new ad for the recent extension of the Hong Kong MTR’s West Rail Line, which now runs from Tsim Sha Tsui all the way out to Tuen Mun, via the farm fields, housing estates and wife cakes of Yuen Long, straddles a line between parallel traditions of public transit advertising: the earnest and the bizarre.
While it does a pretty straightforward job of depicting all of the places linked by the West Rail Line, the ad uses multi-coloured rings as a visual and narrative device to link everything together. I’m not really sure what the rings are meant to represent (stations? transfer points?) but it’s a cute concept.
August 6th, 2009
It’s got nothing on Il fait beau dans l’métro, but this 1985 TV spot certainly ranks up there in the pantheon of kitschy transit ads. What kind of bugs me about it is that the metro is taking this very fashionable couple from their living room to a restaurant and a swimming pool, yet they choose to get off and hop on a bus driven by some creepy moustachioed uncle with a twangy accent. What gives?
May 17th, 2009
This is what makes ghost ads in Montreal more interesting than in most places: more than just a window into the past, they reveal the city’s linguistic geography, past and present. Here we have two examples of early-twentieth-century tobacco ads revealed by recent building demolitions. One, on east-end Masson Street in Rosemont, is in French. The other, on west-end Sherbrooke Street in NDG, is in English. It’s a pretty straightforward illustration of Montreal’s linguistic divisions, which exist to this day — you’re far more likely to hear English spoken in western NDG than French, and the opposite holds true in Rosemont.
Of course, there’s more than just linguistic history that can be gleaned from these old ads. Turret Cigarettes were produced by Imperial Tobacco in St. Henri, about four or five kilometres from the ad in NDG, and they were marketed as the poker-player’s cigarettes of choice. Enough boxes of Turret made you eligible to redeem a deck of playing cards from Imperial Tobacco’s warehouse in the present-day Gay Village — hence the seemingly cryptic slogan, “Save the Poker Hands.”
Old Chum, meanwhile, was a brand of pipe tobacco, also produced by Imperial, that was popular with the tobacco charities run by La Presse and The Gazette. The tobacco charities raised money to provide tobacco to Canadian soldiers fighting in the first world war. After troops complained of being given inferior tobacco, The Gazette commissioned Imperial to produce packages of Old Chum specifically for the troops. Smoking became a patriotic activity promoted by both the French and English press.
Top photo by xbourque; bottom photo by Guillaume St-Jean
May 8th, 2008
For some reason, I’d never really considered how and where Hong Kong’s taxicabs are plastered with advertising, so I was somewhat amused to wander into a group of guys doing just that in an out-of-the-way part of the North Point waterfront.
May 4th, 2008
Earlier this week, while walking to a friend’s place on Coloniale Street on the Plateau, I came across an unusual piece of street art. Pasted on an abandoned mattress that was leaning against the side of a building, it depicted the body of a skinny-jeaned, cardiganed hipster topped by the head of a motorized scooter. Its position on the mattress created an interesting optical illusion that gave the scooter-man an extra sense of depth; looking at it head-on, it seemed to be standing up straight in front of me. Later that day, heading home on the 80 bus, I saw a few slightly different versions of the same paste-up on the papered-over windows of a vacant storefront on Park Avenue.
It turns out that the scooter-men, dubbed Antlerheads, are a guerilla marketing campaign for Vespa, which commissioned a well-known street artist, Fauxreel, to promote its new Vespa S scooter in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary. His work has already made a big splash in Toronto, where they appeared last month. “Guerilla marketing gone horribly right?” asked blogTO, which admired the fact that they are at once an advertisement and a parody of consumer culture — “the idea that we can exchange our faces and minds with a product.” Strategy Magazine reports that the posters are part of a much larger campaign that will include print advertisements, street teams distributing scooter-head buttons and a giant 40-foot projection.
As advertising in conventional media becomes less and less effective, marketers are turning to guerilla advertising to get the word out about new products. At its worst, guerilla marketing cynically co-opts street art and public space to sell us more crap we don’t really need. But, somehow, the Antlerheads seem different. They are a very oblique form of promotion, since they contain no obvious signs of being sponsored by Vespa. No logos, no web addresses; only someone who is already familiar with the company’s scooters would recognize them as advertising. Artistically speaking, they certainly hold their own against most of the graffiti, stencils and paste-ups found in our streets, and their cultural commentary gives them an added dimension.
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April 13th, 2008
Just off Stone Nullah Lane, in an old and quiet part of Wan Chai above the Queen’s Road, I came across this old advertisement on the side of an apartment building. Duk hau wai cheung tong yue, it reads — “Special Stomach Pills.”
January 30th, 2008
I’ve already written about transit ads in Montreal, Paris and Milwaukee. Now it’s time for Hong Kong.
With several competing bus companies and a metro system that is constantly being expanded, Hong Kong is in many ways a public transit user’s paradise. That can be seen in the regularity with which the company that runs its metro system, the MTR, advertises its services. Unlike many North American transit agencies, the MTR doesn’t take its riders for granted: every year sees new advertising campaigns geared at reminding Hong Kongers that taking transit is the right way to go.
Those ads are, in many ways, a reflection of Hong Kong. Take the one above for example. Set on an apartment building roof, it portrays the classic child’s game of “traffic lights,” which involves a cast of people who try to sneak up on a man who isn’t looking. When he turns around, they must freeze or else they’re out of the game. Before yelling “stop,” the man gives them a warning sound — “Doot doot doot! Doot doot doot!” — which is, of course, the sound the MTR’s doors make before closing. The message of the advertisement? Stand clear of the train’s doors when they close.
It’s an odd mix of passive promotion (the MTR doesn’t even sell us on its services, it just reminds us that they exist), local culture (all of the people in the ad are Hong Kong stereotypes, from the old man holding bird cages to the see lai housewife) and public service announcement (a love of which Hong Kong seems to have inherited from the British). I don’t think you would ever see an ad like this anywhere else.
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January 25th, 2008
These two videos show a guerilla ad campaign for Delay No Mall, a trendy lifestyle store that opened in Hong Kong last month. It’s an offshoot of G.O.D., a fashion company with products inspired by Hong Kong’s local culture, including some that have gotten it into trouble with the local authorities. (“Delay No Mall” is a reference to G.O.D.’s slogan, Delay No More, which is a homynym of something far more impolite.)
Check out the guy in the black helmet at the end of the second video. I went to high school with him in Vancouver!
December 20th, 2007
Montreal has eight American Apparel locations, more than any other city but New York and LA, but our streets are devoid of the company’s notorious advertisements, except for those on the stores’ façades themselves. (The back pages of our weekly newspapers, however, are another story.)
In New York, though, American Apparel has made a mark with frequently-changing billboards that feature the kinds of ads that have made it so infamous: young-looking hipsters, clad to various degrees in the company’s clothes, shot in unflattering light and in a variety of pseudo-pornographic poses. (If you still haven’t seen any of the ads, American Apparel has some of the tamer ones on its website, along with photo galleries of its models.)
Lately, there has been a sort of backlash against American Apparel. Earlier this year, a series of ads at the corner of Allen and Houston, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, raised the ire of some nearby residents. The first, described by one blog as a “leotard-and-knee high socks beaver shot,” came in the early spring. Then, over the summer, it was replaced by a new billboard advertising tights, its topless model visible only from behind, bum thrust outwards. By the end of October, it had been defaced with neon green paint and the inscription: “Gee, I wonder why women get raped?” Shortly thereafter, in early November, a paste-up appeared on a SoHo street lampooning a 2005 American Apparel tube sock ad.
I can’t help but find myself amused by the consternation over American Apparel’s advertising. For the most part, it is no more revealing or exploitative than most other fashion ads; the difference is that American Apparel’s provocation is cheeky and only half-serious. It takes typical fashion advertising and strips it of all pretence and glamour, reducing it to its bare sex-driven essence. American Apparel’s ads are vulgar, and they’re certainly brash, but at least they’re honest in their intentions. They don’t dance around the fact that they are using tits and ass (and other things, too) to sell fabric. At least its models are human-looking, unlike the hairless androids often featured by other companies.
American Apparel’s other, non-sexploitative marketing efforts suggests that the company has a pretty good sense of humour, too. In May, at the corner of Houston and Allen, it took a break from crotch shot billboards to run an ad featuring Woody Allen, from a scene in his 1977 film Annie Hall, dressed as a Hasid. It was accompanied by the Yiddish phrase der heyliker rebe, “the holy rabbi.” When asked about the ad, which only lasted for a few days, American Apparel’s representatives would only say that they view Woody Allen as their “spiritual leader.”
On American Apparel’s website, the company declares its devotion to “people, places and things that surround us” with photos of everyday streetlife in Hong Kong, signs in Montreal and mid-century architecture like Habitat ’67. (Sound familiar?) This is a company with a heightened awareness of kitsch, and a passion for kitsch is what is driving a large part of our current urban culture. That might explain why, even though many people seem repulsed by American Apparel, even more are attracted to it.
