7/16/2003: Billboard Liberation Front strikes

[Undertoad]

Via Agenda Bender, this is the latest work of the Billboard Liberation Front, who strategically alter billboards to make a point. In this case the words "The Sappho Collection" were added to the billboard.

More images can be found here, along with a link to a news release that takes a kinda tongue in cheek view of the whole thing but makes a few interesting cases.

My blogger on the spot in this case feels that the modification is subtlely dumb in that they are pointing out what should be obvious to all who see the ad.

My own take is that, if the ad works perfectly, it will appear blindly evident to all those who care to see it -- and not at all evident to those who don't. If you want to see the women as lesbians, they appear to you as lesbians, and the ad works for you in that context. If you don't want to see the women as lesbians, you don't; and the ad works for you in THAT context, too.

TV ads have been playing with this a lot. The first example of it was Volkswagen's Golf ad featuring two young gents who find, and subsequently discard, a smelly old armchair. If you wanted to see those guys as gay, they were. VW took it a step further by sponsoring the Ellen "coming out" episode when other sponsors dropped out -- and that Golf ad was the first ad at the first commercial break. Could they be more clear about it?

But if you didn't watch that Ellen episode because you didn't go for such things, you probably didn't the VW Golf guys <-> Gay connection. (Come on, I know people who didn't, and resisted it when it was pointed out.) And the ad still worked for you; those were just two guys, driving around their semi-urban area together, looking for cheap ways to furnish their new apartment and communicating without words. (Yeah right)

So the BLF billboard addition "breaks" the ad by forcing the sexuality to be the primary aspect about it. It doesn't allow the viewer to interpret the photograph on their own. The problem, as blogger Bender points out, is that the billboard is located in San Francisco. If they really wanted to make the point strongly, they'd alter the same billboard somewhere where most people would interpret it as non-lesbian.