Ambient Overload

Look around and you might think there’s no space money can’t buy. Spending on ambient advertising, which includes often mundane, sometimes odd out-of-home media like pizza boxes and movie tickets, grew an estimated 6 percent in 2011 to $630 million, per PQ Media. Creatives scrambling to cut through the clutter have gotten increasingly inventive. “Forms of media [that physically make people stop and look up] are more powerful than ever because everything else has been diluted,” said Roald van Wyk, group creative director at Draftfcb New York.