Why do billboards in Manila look like they’re crafted by salesmen?
In this guest post, Roger Pe wonders why outdoor advertising in Manila looks more like giant leaflets than billboards these days.
While doing my usual morning rounds to check on emails and messages on social media, I saw a post on Facebook that read: “One step behind, that’s Philippine advertising. Billboards look like print ads, print ads look like leaflets, radio commercials are spoken print ads and TV ads are radio scripts with pictures.”
While some people might think that it’s a sweeping generalisation, truth is, I have long wanted to make the comment that the heyday for billboards has passed, but held back for as long as I could, so as not to annoy friends in the industry.
But a former chief creative officer and CEO of a multinational ad agency beat me to it and validated my fears: billboards in Manila, indeed, are increasingly resembling leaflets or fliers, he says.
I would have to agree. While Manila has won Cannes Lions, Clios, One Show Pencils and Spikes, is home to many talented people, has a vibrant local creative awards show, and is one of Asia’s most prolific entrants to the world’s biggest advertising festivals, the city is flooded with billboards that look as if they were created by salesmen.
Choke me to death seems to be the covenant when local Gods of outdoor media descended into this tropical eden. Words are aplenty. Layout chaos is the order of the day. Forget about the awards book.
Suffocate every available white space seems to be the standard rule.
Mix and match (or ‘halo-halo’ as we’d say in the Philippines) the fonts. The more, the merrier, it seems. Could it be because halo-halo is also a favourite Pinoy dessert?
The city has seen many great, globally applauded campaigns like Coca-Cola’s 60 X 60 foot ‘Living billboard’, a sign made up largely of living plants, which absorb carbon dioxide (made by McCann WorldGroup Philippines).
Ogilvy Manila’s Ponds billboard
Ogilvy Manila produced a number of category-breaking outdoor ads for Pond’s way back in 2007, including a red light on the cheek of a woman’s face that lit up like a pimple. Sad to say, bad billboards dominate the good on Manila’s cluttered skyline now.
And as skyscrapers boom and mushroom in the city, the bad ones grow in number. One only needs to cruise along a stretch of Edsa (Manila’s busiest highway), from Monumento to SM North to Cubao, Shaw, Boni and Guadalupe to see the spectacle of screaming billboards.
Many marketers, even some advertising practitioners, today seem to think that a billboard peppered with lots of hard-sell messages will be more effective. Not so. They just cause more accidents and traffic chaos on the road.
Roger Pe is ECD at the 24-Hour Creative Store. He was formerly the ECD at DDB International Malaysia, DDB Philippines and River Orchid in Cambodia.
It is hardly surprising to hear Roger Pe comment about outdoor advertising in Manila looking more like giant leaflets nowadays. This creative ‘phenomena’ is really not exclusive to Manila alone. It is also quite rampant in Jakarta, Indonesia as well as in most part of Asia.
One should try to understand why billboards are becoming more and more like giant leaflets and why they are are no longer functioning as outdoor mediums with a clear communication objective and purpose today.
Instead these outdoor mediums are exploited to ‘death’ beyond its original media objective and function by many incapable and incompetent ‘communication practitioners’, clients included. Like the famous quote says, “it always takes two to tango”.
Below are some examples of the broad reasons for the bad outdoor advertising:
1. There is a poor understanding on the function of a billboard medium against all other mediums (like TV, Print, Radio, Web, POP) amongst advertising practitioners and their clients. Each medium has its own idiosyncrasies, strengths, weaknesses and limitations. If we understood the medium well enough and who it is targeting at, we won’t have to make this silly mistake of creating ads for the wrong medium. However, most of us don’t understand the outdoor medium or think we do, or worst pretend we do.
2. A billboard on a highway is meant to be look at from a certain distance, depending on its true size or dimensions. A 4×8 horizontal billboard from a distance of 100 metres will resemble the size of an A4 paper. Now imagine the creative with lots of text with fine print. If you can read, you belong to the league of superheroes with a 40:40 vision.
3. Unobstructed billboard viewing time on high speed highways can sometimes only be read around 6 – 8 secs if you are travelling with a driver at approximately 60 – 100 km/hr in a car, and around 15 secs – 1 minute eye focus if you are travelling only 10 – 25 km/hr in the city centre with heavy traffic crawling.
Bearing this in mind, maybe because of this assumed longer billboard time of viewing in the city centre, the idea to create a giant leaflet was mooted by these people through their own daily commuting experience. They now think you may have more time in your hands to read lots of text and fine copy because you are not going anywhere any time soon.
4. Like I said earlier, by the sheer size and nature of the billboard medium it is meant to be seen from a distance, not from a foot or yardstick distance. Whoever first created the medium designed for it to be looked that way.
I cite you another good example, most of us had been inside a cinema hall or theatre. Now try buying a ticket for the very first row nearest to the large screen and view the movie from that ‘up close and personal’ distance. Drop me a line and tell me if that is your best movie experience. I like to hear it.
The cinema hall is also designed with a perfect viewing distance and acoustic sound system from a certain earmarked row seats, normally found at the centre or middle rows’ seats in an upright position on an inclination floor. However, because of the law of economics at play you can’t just design only the middle row seats to be the only perfect viewing movie seats. You need to optimize space in the hall to get your monetary returns.
5. But in reality, we don’t always get what we want, like that middle row seats in the cinema hall. Likewise, billboards are the same. They are not always found in highways, toll roads and expressways. You find them in the city centre, next to intersections, busy traffic lights, on the side of corner buildings, on tall buildings, on the roadsides where pedestrians walk, on the road dividers, and so on.
Commercial reasons are driving these billboard placements into these areas and spots. As you know, all city centres in the world are traffic-jam prone areas. With these billboard placements in the city centre up close on viewing distance, this changes all the billboard principles and understanding that we have come to know. This becomes like our cinema hall experience. We are now forced to look up rather than to look straight ahead from a distance.
I hope this long explanation will help Roger Pe and many others (including clients and agencies) understand where we had gone wrong with outdoor advertising all this while. We had applied the wrong principle on billboard advertising!
ReplyThank you for pointing out the basics, Billboard 101 (items 1, 2, 3 and 4) on how to make Billboards become more effective. They are most of the time abused and overused by reckless billboard creators and wanabes lacking in taste and moderation, who think that just because motorists are close by, or within striking distance, they can seize the moment – suffocate them with information overload. But, personally, in my case, I don’t read cluttered messages and my initial instinct is, look at the next and veer away from them. Most especially, I do not patronize them – they unmask themselves as bad advertisers of bad products. Do people do the same? Studies show. Similarly, the worst thing that could could happen to anyone is to be so close to a movie screen, so close, they can’t get the messages put across.
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