To some, especially musicians, the overhead wires strung from telephone pole to telephone pole in bustling cities conjure up visions of sheet music, the wires the staves on which notes might hang.
It was just such a vision that came to the Calcutta School of Music in India as an imaginative way to generate awareness about its classes.
So this month the school, working through its agency, Ogilvy & Mather, set about stretching wires between light poles at four locations around the city, then hung musical notes from works by classical artists Bach, Haydn and Mozart.
At the base of the poles, at eye level, were attached signs reading “Learn to appreciate Bach,” or whichever artist's work was represented hanging from the makeshift staves above. Passersby could hear the artist's music being piped from kiosks nearby.
“Overhead wires against the sky immediately gave us the cue of the stave notation lines,” says Sujoy Roy, a creative writer at O&M's Calcutta office. The ads were up for two weeks.
The campaign did the job. Roy says it immediately translated into more than 700 phone calls and 260 requests for enrollment forms for Calcutta School of Music classes.
An ad campaign for PBS plays off a similar idea, a musician at the piano, struggling to come up with a melody. He's staring out the window when he notices birds perched on telephone wires, looking like musical notes. He begins to play the notes, and there's his melody.
