Photographer Ansel Adams once said, “A photograph is usually looked at, seldom looked into."
The photography of Adams, of course, was the exception. Another exception is the creative execution for an alternative campaign in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
The aim of the campaign was to get across the superior reproduction available from using HP Advanced Photo Paper.
HP’s agency Publicis Malaysia did so through a dramatic visual sleight of hand.
At first glace what people see looks like a giant picture with a hole torn out of it, as if someone had ripped the paper on which the picture had been printed and walked through it.
But that was the illusion.
The agency creatives had come up with what they called standees. The standees are human-size graphics with black at the center and the outside rimmed with strips of torn paper, as if someone had ripped the paper apart to go through it.
The standees were then placed around the city in picturesque locations.
Looked at from a distance, the effect is striking, looking as if this huge scene had been printed in all of its brilliance, then ripped through at the bottom edge.
As passersby get closer, they see the standee, entirely reversing the initial impression. On one of the torn pieces of paper, at eye level, are the words: “Reality reproduced.”
“The idea was to mimic reality and to show how true-to-life the photo paper was,” says Andy Soong, executive creative director at Publicis Malaysia.
He says HP wanted to target the younger tech-savvy crowd, so it placed the standees near office buildings, shopping complexes and holiday resorts that many 20- to 35-year-olds frequent.
The month-long campaign showed up in a number of consumer-generated blogs, according to Soong, and the agency is now considering where to roll out the campaign next.
