Photo: Ocean Outdoor in Washington Post
“A new form of outdoor advertising is slowly taking hold. But experts warn of overload…Anamorphic advertising is coming — usually right out of a building. (
It all began with a floating cat.
Photo: Independent UK (click photo for article
The giant feline suddenly appeared suspended over Tokyo’s Shinjuku train station. Throughout the summer, it stretched awake in the morning, meowed at passersby during rush hour and curled into a sleepy ball after midnight.
The cat, along with a cresting ocean wave above the streets of Seoul, wasn’t a biology experiment gone awry. It was a 3-D anamorphic outdoor ad, a proof-of-concept from several Asian design firms. The pieces would inspire principals at British ad company Ocean Outdoor, owner of many public screens across Europe, to create tools for a 3-D ad platform called DeepScreen. Part art installation, part ‘1984’-esque vision, the results hint at what our commercialized outdoor spaces might soon look like…
In just a few months, Ocean Outdoor’s Piccadilly Circus location and others across Europe have attracted advertisers including Fortnite, Netflix, Vodafone (the ad has 25-foot rugby stars and their ball bursting through a building), Sony, Amazon’s Prime Video (for its new ‘Wheel of Time’ fantasy series) and food-service company Deliveroo. Two weeks ago, the British agency that worked on the ‘Wheel of Time’ spot, Amplify, brought it to Times Square…
‘This is exciting and it’s attention-getting,’ said Arun Lakshmanan, an associate professor of marketing at the University at Buffalo School of Management and an expert in immersive advertising. ‘It also could really start getting intrusive…’
Production is expensive — it can cost upward of $500,000, several times a 30-second TV spot — and labor intensive…
Nir Eyal, an author and expert on the attention economy, called this in an email the ‘shiny pony’ problem. New forms of advertising lose their luster. Customers could lose interest.
But these ads may not be aimed only at them. Teixeira notes that the appearance of innovation could be equally important for what it telegraphs to investors, retailers and competitors.
Even the skeptical would admit there’s something cool about dynamic images occupying the space around us. But is it scary in the hands of corporations? Could advertising get ‘Minority Reported,’ where we are all Tom Cruise, assaulted by airborne ads tailored to us every time we leave our homes?
Could a political demagogue even use the tech to loom large in public?
‘How we want to regulate this is a very good question,’ said Buffalo’s Lakshmanan. ‘Unfortunately, in the history of advertising, it tends to be answered only after something has gotten popular.'”
— Steven Zeitchik, Washington Post