These days ads are on everything, but the one place you'd never expect to see one is on those blue street corner postal boxes where folks mail letters.
But in fact those blue boxes have been the venue for two recent campaigns, and both were quite imaginative in how the creative incorporated the shape of the boxes.
One, for Niagara Falls, was of water flowing down the box as if it were flowing from the falls. For the other, a campaign celebrating the 30th anniversary of “Star Wars,” the boxes were made up to look like the robot R2D2.
Indeed, mail boxes would seem the ideal ad venue, located as they are on street corners all across America, some 280,000 of them. The challenge is in getting the U.S. Postal Service to greenlight a campaign, and it rarely does so. It prefers its boxes to stand out for people looking to mail a letter.
The Niagara Falls campaign got the go-ahead, thinks Frank Anselmo, because it was the creation of his class at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Anselmo, creative director at New York's KNARF, also teaches a course at the school titled "Unconventional Advertising" in which students are challenged to come up with unique ad campaigns. When he thinks the idea is good enough, he’ll go out and sees if he can sell it.
The Niagara Falls campaign was born when a student came to him with the idea for promoting Niagara Falls tourism on mail boxes, using the shape of the medium to convey the image of a waterfall.
“The assignment was to look for new locations for advertising but without being obnoxious,” Anselmo says. “And the boxes seemed like a good idea. They’re all over the place. But I thought you couldn’t use them because they’re government property.”
Even so, Anselmo took the idea to the Niagara USA Chamber, which loved it. He then stopped by postal headquarters in New York to pitch it there, and they bought into it as well.
“I guess because of the student tie they let us use them,” he says of the boxes. “We just had to make sure the paper the ads were printed on wouldn’t leave any residue.”
The creative, which ran down the back of the boxes, was an actual photo of Niagara Falls, with the top of the falls where it begins to descend right where the box curves. At the bottom was the tagline “Visit Niagara Falls” and the NiagaraChamber.org web address. The creative was placed on 20 to 25 boxes in New York in spring of last year.
That made it a pretty limited campaign. “If we tried to do this nationally it might be more of a problem, but because we did it in a way that doesn’t obstruct people using the post boxes, it was fine,” says Anselmo.
The Star Wars campaign, which ran in 2007, was collaboration between the postal service and Lucasfilms, which produced the movie, and it was a much larger campaign by comparison, running on 1,000 boxes nationwide.
But as the postal service explains it, the campaign was less a commercial venture than a one-off promotion for the service itself, akin to its issuing commemorative stamps. But instead of a special R2D2 stamp, boxes were tricked out to the robot's likeness. Those boxes directed folks to the special web site USPSJediMaster.com.
