#310 Wowboards

You’ve seen em, corrugated plastic, about the size and shape of political signs. Fastened to wooden or wire stakes and driven into the ground at intersections or along roadways. Except instead of political candidates they’re for furniture stores or mortgage places or lose-30-pounds-in-30-days-guaranteed. They’re that latest scourge on the advertising landscape, wowboards. I call em that because whenever I see em I go, “Wow, what the heck?” I suppose I could call them what-the-heck boards. But the point is they’re proliferating like bunnies on Viagra. It used to be you could actually see an individual wowboard tree but now, with a whole forest of them out there it’s like bank on a bus syndrome déjà vu all over again. When everybody’s doing it no one sticks out. The appeal of these signs seems to be that they are both effective and cheap—the two key words of guerilla marketing. Get your name and a message out there in way you can to slip under people’s ad-defensive perimeter. Once you’ve planted your message inside their subconscious, next time they need the product, bingo, they’re yours. Top of Mind recognition they call it. It’s all the rage. Used to be branding, before that it was positioning, before that it was name familiarity. Basically it’s all the same. Place your name in the prospect’s mind in such a way that the next time he’s thinking about your product he’ll think of you. The trick is, you want him to think of you in a positive light. So maybe you don’t want to advertise next to a documentary on the destruction of the big tsunami. Or as I’ve pointed out before, on the back of a diesel exhaust-belching bus.
So it may be that wowboards are heading in the same negative direction. We put up with political signs every couple of years because we have to. And candidates have strict rules about taking the darn things down once the election’s over. Real estate signs generally are on the property for sale. So how long is it before the cities and counties, finding every roadside and corner festooned with 2 by 3 advertising signs in prodigious quantities, start citing the responsible businesses for littering? I mean, if I throw a piece of cardboard on the ground, even if it has a “Will Work for Beer” sign scrawled on it, it’s still litter. What distinguishes these signs from the same designation? That they have a wire stake? Look honey, it’s litter on a stick! Is vertical litter any less litterry than horizontal litter? If I suspended a plastic bag full of cigarette butts and beer cans from a foil helium balloon at about two feet off the ground, would it be any less of an eyesore and an assault on the environment? The great thing is when the city decides to cite someone, the company name and phone number is right there on the sign. Um, yeah, that’s my sign officer, but, um, a vandal must have put it there...
America, ya gotta love it.