Butt Out!
This Minneapolis billboard for QuitPlan is not subtle, using as it does a 30’ high cigarette getting extinguished in a huge ashtray alongside the freeway. All it needed as text was the company name, QuitPlan, a group that helps smokers kick the habit.
Potential Buyers
The road where it was installed had a variety of traffic, from people heading to fishing destinations and casinos to daily commuters. Any smokers in that broad group would be potential customers.
Getting frustrated by slow traffic makes many people heading home from work, who happen to be smokers, reach
for a cigarette. Casinos, with their ambience of the Rat Pack, are natural habitats for smoke. And perhaps, a fisherman feels he has escaped from domesticity and it is safe to indulge.
Fighting Addiction Creatively
The oversize cigarette is an effective representation of an addition that is hard to kick. For whatever reason, stop smoking campaigns have brought out the creative in many designers.
Some ads since the 1960s have relied on gruesome body parts to show the effects of constant smoking and scare smokers into quitting. But many are pithy and witty, acting as a more cerebral motivating force.
One of the most effective shows a dark skull shaped from the end of a burning cigarette. Another famous photo shows two vertical burning cigarettes, looking like factory smoke stacks. Billowing out of them are dollar bills, a concise depiction of money paid for cigarettes going up in smoke.
Substance Abuse Advertising
Billboards have long been used to market addiction and substance abuse campaigns. Space is often donated by billboard owners as part of a public service effort. Many of these are designed with just text, a simple warning of the dangers and where to get help.
But a number are graphic, vivid and even shocking. Two examples are show on DrugAbuse.net. One was pulled because it was deemed too controversial.
In the Hudson Valley in New York state, new billboards are going up in 2015 equating alcohol and prescription drugs as the gateway to heroin use.
Captive Audience
Clearly, billboards are effective ways to advertise, whether with humor, shock or simple information. Since they are such a public form of marketing, they stand an excellent chance of being seen by their people who need the message.
The estimate is that the majority of Americans spend about 15 hours each week in the car. And outdoor billboards are ready and waiting to educate them on each trip.