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On Dec 7, I gave a speech at the MCT Conference titled “Speed” in Istanbul, Turkey.  My first impression of a city always – sadly, but true - starts with airport advertising and the billboards that label the way downtown. The chauffeur that the event organizer sent me chose a pitturesque road along the Bosphorus to take me to my hotel and while we travelled through the night, I stared – not at the beautiful lit up mosques – at the triplets / quadruplets of billboards, all lit up and from what I saw all of them placed on cultivated field. Neat. 

My first thought though when I looked at the campaigns being displayed was the following suggestion to the Outdoor Association: send a letter to all your creatives and beg them to go back to graphic design school. They need to study how to tell a story without words when they design a billboard. Billboards – what a great medium: being outdoors, exposed to many people, they can show a strong visual image and display themselves as in an artful way. Storytelling! These 3 and 4 billboards that are placed right next to each other on the streets of this ancient city perfectly allow to tell a story when you book all 4 of them. Well. Just a thought.

There was a campaign that immediately caught my eye. How could it not have made my head swing around, nearly causing an accident when I asked the driver to stop for a moment to allow me to take a picture. A huge fork stuck onto a bus shelter with spaghetti that curled around it. I saw 5 bus shelters during this weekend in Istanbul and all of them very well placed. A great piece of creative use of Out-of-home advertising.

Then these billboards for OMO.

When I think back to the year of my world trip and the hunt for creative media and advertising ideas, I wish more cities would have presented its openess towards using traditional media in a non-traditional way. That one weekend in Istanbul left me with the impression that this city “rocks” - my AMBIENTOMETER says 7,5 (out of 10).

This department store on the outskirts of Istanbul raises the question: “unique facade design or waste of energy?”. I am torn, I really cannot decide. Embedding billboards in the doubtlessly spectacular construction seems to speak for it.

The rest of the time that I spent in Istanbul, when I wasn’t hunting campaigns and designs and looking at billboards rather than enjoying the busy city life and its fascinating European/Asian influence on lifestyle, food, architecture, mood and style, I strolled through the city and came across some surreal polaroid moments:

A cow on the roof. Dead. No wonder - watch that filthy bathtub that probably killed it. This cow made me breathe a sigh of relief. Every city that I have visited - a cow always crossed my path. Stay tuned.

When it comes to artistic out-of-home expression, New York has a wild card. No other city on our planet hosts such a vast variety of artists, designers and “Gegenwartsarchitekten” (don’t you love these German terms, such as Zeitgeist and now this one?). The city’s urban environment transforms into oversized canvases that portray attitudes and current affairs. City officials and the ‘acknowledged’ art world have realized that street art expresses the mood of the moment in a similar way that well-known artists from the past have captured it. Nowadays artists just use different techniques. New York embraces the dialogue with both the art creator and the mural’s viewer. Get inspired and form your own opinion about art that goes beyond fancy art fairs, museums and galleries.

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More and more ads now tout hip new “green” products and a growing number of ads associate brands with efforts to address climate change. And it’s us, the hypocrites from the advertising industry, appearing as campaigners but more often acting as offenders in our awareness that we are responsible for tons of garbage deriving from our media buys in traditional and non-traditional media.

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