advertisements

3 posts

Your Neighborhood Will Soon Be One Giant Billboard

A Southern California company has come up with a new gimmick to get free publicity and expand the areas where they can advertise.  They have offered to paint your home as a billboard for their company, Adzookie, and in exchange they will make your monthly mortgage payment for you.  Once the term of the contract is up in 3 to 12 months they will repaint your home the previous color.  Assuming your neighbors don’t repaint it for you in the darkness of night.

All you have to do is fill out a form and tell them why you should be selected to be a blight on your neighborhood.  They will be looking for homes that get enough eyeballs looking at them to make it worth the mortgage payment.  That means traffic, population density and that their target demographics are likely to pass by.  The demographic would be people who want to use the Adzookie service to push ads onto mobile phones.

Aside from having the word “Adzookie” painted on your house and having to endure constant dookie jokes, there are a few more pressing issues with this. It may be against certain zoning laws that cover where advertisements of a certain size are not allowed.  No homeowners’ association will approve this since it doesn’t conform to the exact shade of beige your neighborhood uses.  Finally, your house will get egged by an angry mob of teenagers on a daily basis because it’s like painting a target on your house.

The company has committed $100,000 to this project so they won’t be able to paint more than a few homes and pay those mortgages which means this is more of a stunt than an actual plan for advertising.

There is a similar, yet successful business model of wrapping cars in an adhesive plastic wrap to advertise many products.  In these cases the drivers are either paid a set amount or given a car pre-wrapped with a contract to drive the car a certain number of miles.

Source SFGate.

LA’s Skyline Doesn’t Need Butterflies or Ads

I’ve seen the LA skyline from just about every possible angle and elevation.  The city core has freeways that run on all sides of it and when driving by at the wrong time of day motorists are often going slow enough to be able to appreciate it for a time.  When landing by plane LAX is far enough from downtown that you can see it as you approach and get a good perspective on it.  It’s not that LA is best known for it’s city skyline, but it’s not known for having an unattractive one.

If a group fronted by Hanjin owned Korean Air gets its way the Los Angeles skyline will begin to resemble Las Vegas with all its glitz and tackiness.  The plan is to build a 45 story hotel and adjacent 65 story office building and festoon each with an array of computer controlled LED lights that could form moving images of stars, butterflies and anything else the building management can think up.  The project is budgeted at $1B.

The bottom 10 floors would show advertisements while the floors above 10 would show images.  To make things worse the top 10% of each building would use the lights to display the major tenants and building owners’ names.  It’s not uncommon for a major tenant to negotiate signage rights but the familiar names on buildings do not often scroll by in a stock ticker fashion.

The new buildings would be built where the Wilshire Grand Hotel now sits.  The ground level advertisements would look like this:

The whole thing will just end up looking like a 13 year old’s MySpace profile if this is the direction things go.

Images: AC Martin and Christopher A. Joseph & Associates

Source LA Times.