Three billboards, the latest form of self-expression
SOCIAL media might be noisy but if you have an important message to impart, you’d better find a billboard. Martin McDonagh has a lot to answer for — his film Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri has inspired a boom in billboard rental. Simple conversation appears to have failed us, but hiring a billboard for a week starts at £300, so you had better be committed to your message.
At its best, as in McDonagh’s film, this form of self-expression is a way to reach a wide audience, thrusting your message into their personal space so they can’t ignore it.
There are the big-impact political campaigns asking for Justice for Grenfell Tower victims and gun control in Miami. And today Ollie Olanipekun, co-founder of East London creative agency
Superimpose Studio, will unveil antiBrexit billboards in London and across the UK reading “SWINDLED. It’s not too late to fix Brexit”. They’re illustrated with a picture of a juicy burger next to a shrunken one, to show how much worse off he thinks we will be if we leave the EU. In a display of millennial resourcefulness, Olanipekun funded and arranged the campaign himself.
Billboards don’t have to be political. LIFE IN plastic is looking fantastic again. Mattel has made a Barbie doll of boxer Nicola Adams, complete with blinging gold and white gloves.
She’s far more compelling than the dolls I had — I cut their blonde manes and painted them with nail varnish because it was better than playing endless games of Barbie meets Ken, and wondering why you could take off her clothes but not her smooth pink plastic pants.
Adams comes with a ready-made punk hairstyle and a backstory for a new generation to discover; about how this black woman left-hooked her way to two Olympic gold medals through talent, graft and determination. I’m choosing to ignore that boxer Barbie comes from Mattel’s “Shero range”. As Adams herself has shown, women can be heroes too, they don’t need a patronising moniker. Touchingly, McDonagh has been rewarded with his own display in his father’s hometown of Lettermullan, County Galway. They congratulate the “big Hollywood star”.
Of course, the billboard is vulnerable to more embarrassing displays. Step forward Alexis Ohanian. Serena Williams’s husband wished her good luck on returning to work after maternity leave by placing four images of their daughter with the caption “greatest momma of all time” along a road in California.
Olanipekun’s billboards link up to a social media campaign, because Twitter isn’t over yet. The billboard campaign revitalises it — it’s a potent blend of old and new mediums and you’d better get on board.
Barbie Nicola delivers a knockout blow for a new generation of heroes