A Case Of Poor Outdoor Ad Targeting

Brooklyn’s Gowanus Lounge has posted an interesting series of blog entries about an outoor apartment rental ad placement gone horribly wrong.

In placing an ad for apartment brokers above a community garden, the agency clearly thought they had made a perfect match: They were targeting neighborhood-conscious people with an ad aimed at neighborhood-conscious people. What could be simpler?

And yet, the agency didn’t consider that the ad itself would be exactly the type of eyesore that neighborhood-conscious people can’t stand to have in their neighborhood.

Physicists and anthropologists like to say that it’s not possible to observe a situation without changing it. If, for example, you go to live with indigenous people in the rainforest to study their culture, you will become a part of that culture. So what you’re observing, as an anthropologist, is what that culture is like with a person from a developed nation living in it.

It’s the same for advertising. You can’t just consider the target demographic in terms of who they are. You also have to consider them in terms of how they’ll react to your ad. Not the product you’re selling, not the ad’s “call to action,” background color, etc., but to the presence of the ad itself. To the fact that it exists, taking up a certain specific space in the consumer’s line of sight. Is that okay with them?

What are some ways this agency might have presented an ad for the same service, in the same location, while avoiding the hostile reaction?

garden spider (get it?) photo  by General Wesc