Showing posts with label billboards. Show all posts
Showing posts with label billboards. Show all posts

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Apparently, edginess has its limits


When it's something you want to hear, it's "edgy."

When it's something you don't, it's offensive and violates some flavor or another of unspecified "values."

In New York, this pro-life billboard highlighting the inconvenient statistic that 59.8 percent of pregnancies among non-Hispanic black women there end in abortion is offensive.

“The ad violates the values of New Yorkers and is grossly offensive to women and minorities,”the city's public advocate, Bill de Blasio, tells The New York Times. That's because, in the big city, telling minorities that we're eradicating most of them before they can emerge from the womb to become a "social problem" for white people is much more "offensive" than the actual eradication of most minorities before they can pop out of Mama's belly and start troubling Caucasian advocates of tolerance and open-mindedness.


FOR INSTANCE, take Times judicial reporter Linda Greenhouse (please), who's so tolerant of pro-lifers -- particularly Puerto Rican, Democratic pro-life officeholders -- that she lets no stereotype go unmolested in the push for better demonization.

You want to know the one instance when it's permissible to call a Latino Democratic pol "nutty" in New York City? This is it. And a state senator, no less.

If you ask me, the first sign a nation's on the road to oblivion is when it's more offensive to bemoan the extermination of 59.8 percent of a city's African-American children than it is to exterminate them in the first place. Think of it this way . . . we fought a bloody civil war a century and a half ago for this?

At least Jefferson Davis would have had enough sense to look at the LifeAlways billboard, sadly shake his head, then bemoan the senseless loss of perfectly good free labor. Which says a lot about us today, doesn't it?

Monday, July 14, 2008

What if advertising were fun again?


The NE Creative advertising blog wonders why some of Omaha's abandoned grain silos, for example, haven't been put to good use as outdoor advertising. That's a good question.

I'M NOT AN AD MAN, and I don't play one on television . . . but my late father-in-law was. And in looking at what's left of the massive old silos adjacent to I-80 near the middle of town (Hello? Interstate 80 . . . major cross-country route . . . heavily used by weary truckers, travelers and drug runners), I see gigantic cans of energy drinks.

Like Red Bull.


PODNA, that's an outdoor ad you absolutely, positively can't ignore.


In fact, it's not just an ad, it's a tourist attraction. An honest-to-God tourist attraction.

And what if -- for 100 miles east and west of the giant Red Bull cans -- the maker of the energy drink bought billboard space and used it for oversized Burma Shave signs . . . only for Red Bull. Halfway across a transcontinental expressway. Full of people who absolutely, positively don't want to get drowsy and fall asleep at the wheel on a long, long drive.

Heck, for that matter, why not have an interactive campaign where you get Red Bull drinkers to write the Burma Shavesque rhymes for the billboards. Make it a contest. Best 100 go onto the billboards.

It's not brain surgery, but it sure would be fun.

NOW, IF SOMEONE takes this idea and runs with it, remember that I am not a greedy man. But papa sure could use an iMac and a MacBook Pro.