Walking home today, I walked past a bus stopped at a red light. It was one of those buses with an ad completely covering the side of the bus, with even the windows covered with that perforated one-way poster material so people inside can still see out.
Sometimes those whole-bus ads are well done - the most memorable being a bread ad where the bus was made to look like a giant loaf of bread. More often though, it's a real estate agent with their picture blown up to humongous proportions. I don't really get those ads: how is seeing a big picture of the agent going to make us want to use their services? They're reasonably good-looking people, but not exactly supermodels. It would be like a restaurant ad that doesn't show you what the food looks like, but does include a photo of the chef.
And if I was going to have my picture blown up so my face is the size of an SUV, I'd want it to be a really nice picture. I'd find a photographer with the 20 gigapixel camera, and personally Photoshop the result to remove any blemish that would end up being an inch or more across. But somehow real estate agents are okay with fuzzy, washed-out photos that look like they were taken with the first generation of camera-phones.
This ad, however, was a much nicer ad for a new condo development. As a downtown resident, I have an interest in new urban development in the city, so I was interested in where this new building would be going. The ad didn't say where it would be, so I had a good look at the artist's rendition of the structure to see if I could recognise the location. As I'm staring at the picture, it occurs to me that it's directly over one of the bus windows, so there's probably someone inside wondering why some weirdo suddenly stopped walking down the street and started staring intently at him.
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