Hotcards, Full Color Printing In The Nation

We’ve got 2000 billboards and banner ads to put up!

Okay, you got me. Maybe I have been looking for an excuse to use that quote in a blog post about banner printing. But to be fair, what blogger hasn’t?

Opening night for the new Indy movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, is a week away, and just in case you weren’t sure if it’s the movie event of the summer, take a look at the print collateral.

Paramount has launched a massive outdoor advertising campaign to hype its big summer blockbuster. Usually, giant billboards and print ads go up in Los Angeles, but this time, they decided to take the billboard domination tactic nationwide.

Paramount ad guy Steve Siskind attributes the strategy to Steven Spielberg, whom he quotes as saying, “I know they always do big billboards in L.A., but let’s do them all over.”

And he’s not talking a billboard here, a bit of banner printing there. He’s talking location domination, which means the indy brand takes over the ad space in a given area. Drive up Ventura Boulevard or La Brea Avenue in L.A., and you’ll see series of SIX consecutive, unique billboards that take you on a journey through, if not the film itself, than at least its advertising strategy.

Madison Square Garden in New York is similarly festooned on all sides with truly epic full color banner printing. The designs rely heavily on classic Indy-running-for-his-life images, as well as the franchise’s signature font.

However, sometimes the sheer size of the signage seems to render the recognizable lettering almost obscure, like the image of a face close-up, where a pore might be a crater on the moon. This begs the question – in the world of outdoor advertising, is there such a thing as too much of a good thing?

Bloggers and critics covering the banner printing story describe the campaign much like the film itself, with a mixture of awe and cynicism. The marketing scheme’s ultimate value will only be determined once the movie reviews begin to come in.

If it’s a hit, the massive ads will be remembered as fabulously prolific.

If it’s a dud, we’ll surely remember the jumbo full color banner printing as having been horrifically overdone.

That’s showbiz!

Images taken from AtomicShakespeares Flickr photostream