Admen love nothing more than the comfort of a cliché. The tried and tested, the familiar and time-honoured bring reassurance to the exhausted imagination. The more inventive may attempt a little subversion to enhance or even undermine the original intentions but for the most part what we get is recycling pure and simple. Chris Mullen has curated more than 10,000 platitudinous examples to delight the eye and intellect at the Visual Primer of Advertising Clichés. Today we look at the billboard cliché – imagine the conversation. We take the product off the shelf and on to the great American Highway. We pass a billboard that displays an oversize ad for our product and we get two ads for the price of one and an amplified message even more difficult to ignore. Whether any research has been done to prove this, I’ve no idea. There is something in the idea of an ad embedded in another – an act of quotation. But it’s very hard to see how that would translate into additional sales.
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