To promote the movie “Contagion,” our goal was to create an outdoor execution on a $15,000 budget that would create impressions on more that just the people passing by. We needed to create an ad that had built-in talk and sharing value.We built giant petri dishes, inoculated them with fungi and bacteria, and mounted them in storefront windows. Over the course of several days, the microbes grew from being nearly invisible to eerily spelling the name of the film. This is the first time an out-of-home execution has been created entirely out of living microbes. In order to accomplish this, we consulted with microbiologists and immunologists from several countries in order to select microbes that could flourish in our environment without posing any health risk whatsoever.

We built giant petri dishes, inoculated them with fungi and bacteria, and mounted them in downtown Toronto storefront windows. Over the course of several days, the microbes grew from being nearly invisible to eerily spelling the name of the film. This is the first time an out-of-home execution has been created entirely out of living microbes. In order to accomplish this, we consulted with microbiologists and immunologists from several countries in order to select microbes that could flourish in our environment without posing any health risk whatsoever.