I really like the new ad campaign by Equinox fitness centers. It's called "My Body. My Biography." and carries the tag line "It's not fitness. It's life."
Of course, it's accompanied by lots of pictures of "real" (and pretty) people and their stories. The headline, though, I think is really compelling and poignant.
Unfortunately, if one accepts the premise that one's body is one's biography, then my own biography reads like a really trashy novel. Really trashy.
Riding the Red Line T inbound from Harvard Square, I was glancing out the windows of the train, looking at the nothingness of the black walls of the subway tunnel. Then all of a sudden I saw an ad. It lasted long enough for me to understand the ad (but not long enough for me to remember, more than a week later, what product the ad was promoting.)
I thought to myself, this is cool, but enough is enough. Do we have to have advertising EVERYWHERE?
Nonetheless, it was still pretty cool.
Thinking about this on Sunday (the day I am actually writing this post), I Googled "advertising in subway tunnels." I found a blog on advertising technology, that had a post about this very spot on the T. It included this quote Forbes about the technology used.
Submedia, cofounded by Spodek and Matthew Gross in 1999, produces 15- to 20-second animated ads that appear on subway tunnel walls. This is accomplished through a series of backlit pictures which Spodek compares to "the frames in a film reel." The pictures, printed by the U.K.'s Photobition Group on Kodak transparencies, spring to life as the train speeds by, creating a fluid film and giving passengers the effect of being inside a giant flip book."
My friend Bernardo passed this along. Who knows if any of this stuff is really real, but it was funny nonetheless. (Hint: look at the small print.)
