Message Trumps Medium: Five Sort Of Green Billboards
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 06.13.08
David Ogilvy, the founder of Ogilvy and Mather, wrote: "I have a passion for landscape, and I have never seen one improved by a billboard. Where every prospect pleases, man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard." To an earlier post on billboards, commenter Todaystoptrend wrote: "There are no acceptable billboards! Please rethink your position!" There is a survey in this for another day, but one must admit that some of them are clever. As McLuhan might have said: Hate the medium, love the message.
Billboards with a Green Message
Solar Powered Billboard Wins Prize feeding power to its neighbours.
It's Not A Billboard, It's a Power Plant although many of our readers think its neither, but a photoshop job.
Pedal Power Lights LED Billboard -a campaign to show how energy-efficient LED lights are.
Billboard Made of Lettuce Grows On You but it is still McDonalds.
Hacked Billboards
The Billboard Liberation Front smelled opportunity here. Quote of the Day: David Ogilvy on Billboards
Imagined Billboards
Brendan O'Grady imagined inhabiting the structure of a billboard. Urban Intensification: Inhabiting Billboards
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I so agree with Mr. Ogilvy...no amount of clever, with regard to billboards, can make them better to have around than not.
Hi,
Thanks for digging up that Oglivy quote: it is perfect!
The PG&E board is in fact real.
It was built by Atomic Props & Effects in St. Paul MN
We used LED flood lights to light the board at night.
There is a real image http://www.highpointcreative.com/_atomic/pge.htm"> at this site
Billboard = slum signifier. Unbelievable waste of energy and blight on urban landscape. Can't make them go away forever soon enough.
The ones that I really think the promoters ought to be put in jail for life are those billboards on trailers that they haul around in heavy traffic just so other motorists can see them. Fuel wasting, time wasting, air poisoning, global warming obscenity on wheels. Should be criminal.
Why would you use LED flood lights on that billboard? They are LESS efficient than conventional sodium vapor flood lights.
Ogilvy was such a genius.
This series does much to prove the validity of that quote. Though I'll have to say some are rather funny.
> Unbelievable waste of energy
Until billboards start generating energy.
once upon a time there was a story about a magical hill, when the time was right,flowers came up overnight. not a word was said,not a person seen.but when they read the flowers it said spring landscape billboards are very beautiful and are carbon free use flowers on the hill not signs in the sky
billboards are a good place for graffiti