Yes, you can read that headline both ways: Brooklyn’s Colossal Media, or “the largest hand paint mural and out-of-home advertising company in the US”, earned a mention from our fellow trade blog AdFreak yesterday for a new campaign created to promote…the agency itself!
The murals, which have appeared recently in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Bushwick (but not near Roberta’s, since no one with an MFA can afford to eat there), serve a dual purpose: they allow the agency to both support the neighborhood and attract local artists to work on apprentice programs for their traditional outdoor campaigns.
A Colossal spokesperson tells us that the agency currently receives 25 to 30 calls per day responding directly to ads like the one below:
The applicant pool is surprisingly varied: some interested parties have fine arts backgrounds while others work in construction.
The practice and those who learn it (colloquially known by the storied “wall dogs” moniker) belong to a dwindling breed–but the agency remains dedicated to teaching these budding artisans how to hand-paint wall murals using Colossal’s own scaffolding, etc.
Colossal explains that, because the ads are unique in being hand-painted, viewers are more likely to “stop on the street and share on social; they’re experiential in that respect.”
Here’s “The World’s Largest Shave”, created in 2011 for Gillette in partnership with BBDO (pic via The AdBuzz).
…and one more in the series that recently appeared in our home borough:
Coincidentally, it’s not just painters and construction workers who frequent the area: plenty of out of home media buyers happen to live there too.
Win win, then.
(And no, we did not miss the painfully obvious fact that the top mural resembles certain anatomical elements, because duh.)