In many countries, the painted stripes on pavement that define crosswalks are called zebra stripes or zebra crossings.
Why zebras? Because they are often striped like zebras, and in zebra colors, black and white.
That got the folks at the ad agency for the Salzburg Zoo in Salzburg, Austria, thinking. Why not tiger stripes? Well, why not?
Their aim was to build awareness of the zoo among Salzburgers, and tiger crossings seemed just the thing. So last month, with the zoo's go-ahead, they set about to redo crosswalks at 10 locations around the city.
The walkways were painted orange in a wavy pattern to resemble the stripes of a tiger, thus becoming tiger crossings. The accompanying message, painted as part of the crossing: “Salzburg Zoo: More than Zebras.”
“When we were at a brainstorming session regarding media ideas, a junior creative came up with it, and the zoo was very happy to realize the idea,” says Marco Mehrwald, executive creative director at the agency, called .Start, which operates out of Munich.
Such a campaign would usually run into complications with the city, as you can’t simply go around changing the crosswalks on city-owned streets. But Mehrwald says since the Salzburg Zoo is also owned by the city, there was an already-existing positive relationship. “The zoo had good connections to the people in charge of the traffic system,” he says.
The campaign ran for just one day in December.
“It wasn’t really about creating an increase of ticketing, but more about getting it into the mind of the citizens,” Mehrwald says. And to that end, the campaign was a success. Several local newspapers reported the story.
