Why so few anamorphic ads?
I noticed this “ad” while coming up the escalator at Jing’an Temple station on the Shanghai metro the other day. See it there? On the ceiling. That’s the logo for Shanghai’s 2010 Expo. If you visit Shanghai these days you can’t miss this logo or the ubiquitous Expo mascot, Haibao. Both of them are everywhere—in parks, lining the streets, hotel lobbies, restaurants, taxicabs. You’d think it would be easy to find places to put your ads when you essentially have free reign to put them anywhere in the city, which is why I was surprised to see this placement. A bit hard to notice, much less read.
It also reminded me of something I’ve thought about before: the potential for anamorphic ads. Anamorphosis is “a distorted projection or perspective requiring the viewer to…occupy a specific vantage point to reconstitute the image,” and the technique has been used to create anamorphic art since the Renaissance. It’s still used today, in some pretty fascinating ways:
Julian Beever’s sidewalk drawings:
No, there's not really a giant Coke bottle there
The work of Felice Varini:
Nope, no circles floating in the room. Click "hors point de vue" to understand the illusion.
You do not have x-ray vision
The utility of this technique for advertising is that space that previously didn’t seem so appealing for ad placement—like a ceiling—could be used more effectively. Of course, I’m no fan of plastering ads in more places…
…but if we’re gonna put it on the ceiling anyway let’s at least do something interesting. The advantage of the technique for this particular ad is that it’s intended to be visible from the top of the escalator, so you know where people are standing when they see it. This is important since anamorphic ads would require the viewer to “occupy a specific vantage point,” one reason they probably haven’t caught on. But I think the novelty of the idea would mitigate the fact that the ad would look strange from most viewpoints. Another issue is that it actually takes a lot more physical space to create an image that occupies the same retinal space (i.e., looks the same size), which could be expensive…but here we’re talking about the ceiling, and I don’t think price is an object.
Further along in Jing’an Temple station there’s a hallway lined with ads for Midea. Just the same ad, over and over again. I suppose that’s one way of getting people’s attention.
But what if they’d used a technique like Julian Beever’s sidewalk drawings (above)? Sure, it would look really weird from most points of view, but I bet once people figured it out (and you could position it strategically to increase the odds that they would), you’d have people really noticing the ads for the first time.
And of course flat surfaces wouldn’t be the only option anymore. Look at Felice Varini’s work (above) a little more, and you’ll see that he’s found ways to make “two-dimensional” images appear on pretty amazingly disjointed and oddly shaped services. The best part is that they’re actually less intrusive than most ads in a lot of ways. Can you believe someone like Nike hasn’t used this process to plaster their logo on an Olympic Village yet? All you need is a vantage point that you can be reasonably sure a lot of people will arrive at.
Open invitation to any of my old vision science buddies to go in on this idea with me…
Gotta share one more example…click here to see Shigeo Fukuda’s sculpture that looks like a pile of junk but casts a shadow of a motorcycle. Amazing…
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Finally, an anamorphic ad! From Deloitte at this year’s Davos meeting: http://www.businessinsider.com/davos-awards-2011-1#most-um-innovative-sponsorship-deloitte-18
Another great example (but not an ad): http://www.petapixel.com/2011/09/19/giant-words-added-to-photos-without-photoshop/
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