Repulse to Attract

How do you expose an invisible threat? On World Handwashing Day, soap brand Lifebuoy extracted germs from everyday items and showcased them on poster-sized Petri dishes. Deviating from typical cartoon representations of bacteria, it shows how a more candid approach can be effective in driving reach: one third of Uruguay’s population saw the billboards.

Australian mattress start-up 10:PM hijacked illegally dumped mattresses and turned them into bacteria-ridden billboards. Each reject was scientifically analysed and emblazoned with the story of its grotty past, directing people towards a more sanitary alternative from 10:PM. With the low-budget ads delivering an equivalent of $1.6m out-of-home media, this campaign shows how to turn waste products into a cheap and attention-grabbing media channel.

Amazon Prime immersed fans in the gore of its online series, The Boys, through a grisly real-world experience. A handful of viewers won tickets, and influencers distributed the content across social media. It demonstrates how to target a specific fandom: while gruesome content might not appeal to the masses, it captivated the audience that Amazon Prime was looking to engage.

In another piece of gross outdoor, HBO’s The Last of Us brought its fungal Cordyceps character to life as a billboard in Mexico City. People queued for more than 60 minutes to snap a selfie with the art, which generated more than 3m pieces of user-generated content. Like Amazon Prime, it demonstrates the shareable potential of head-turning content among a specific group.

People had started to ignore the images of diseased body parts on cigarette packets. So the Thai Health Promotion Authority combined these images to show the cumulative effect of smoking on the body. The approach proves that you don’t always have to add something new – combining existing content can be shocking enough.