'Crooked teeth?
Cross right here.'
When does a crosswalk make you think of teeth?
By Toni Fitzgerald
Jan 26, 2010
Sometimes the genius of an alternative media stunt is in getting passersby to look at everyday things differently, just by adding this or that creative element.
An abandoned construction site becomes a vampire lair with the erection of a sign.
A street pole becomes a cigar when it's wrapped with a poster in the shape of a cigar band.
Or in the case of a recent campaign for an orthodontist, a crosswalk becomes a mouthful of teeth when a sign is put up on a pole next to it.
On the sign is a photo of what looks like the same crosswalk but with a twist. The white rectangles are askew, some off to the right, some off to the left, and a few even angling 45 degrees from the ones below them.
They contrast starkly with the straight rectangles leading across the street.
On the sign, above the askew rectangles, is the word "Before."
The simple but clever implication, of course, is that before the crosswalk saw the orthodontist, its "teeth" were all out of line. Afterward, its teeth are perfect.
The client, Altschul Orthodontics in Crawfordsville, Ind., wanted a campaign that would draw the attention of the small community but also have little environmental impact.
But Altschul did not want to promote itself with the image of braces, which don't always draw positive reactions from potential clients. It wanted to emphasize the image of a bright smile.
"The campaign itself relates because it is in fact something bright, white and straight. I have seen traditional crosswalk ads and think most are really creative," says Phil Jones, art director at Marked for Trade, which handled the campaign.
"What I wanted to do was take a new spin on things, not manipulate anything physically with the crosswalk but in turn show that as the final product."
Once the idea had been hatched, execution was fairly simple. Marked identified heavily traveled crosswalks across the city, most of them close to schools, which provide most of Altschul Orthodontics' clientele.
The crosswalks were photographed from both sides of the street. Back at the office, the agency manipulated the photographs to make it look as though the crosswalks were crooked.
Those photos were blown up, printed and hung at either side of the crosswalk. Dozens of the signs were posted in September.
"We are looking to expand the campaign but right now the reactions have been very positive," Jones said.
It has certainly gained buzz in the advertising community. The notoriously hard to please posters on the blog Adsoftheworld.com, where readers can rate ad campaigns, graded the Altschul project a 7.2 out of 10, a high number for the site.
And the campaign received some Twitter and other social media posts as well.
It works because it is a creative spin on an otherwise played-out medium. As Jones points out, crosswalks have been manipulated for years as part of alt media campaigns for everything from zoos (the stripes are a zebra) to pianos (the stripes are piano keys).
By instead envisioning the crosswalk as the desired endpoint for the client's services, the signs make a simple but memorable point, and without involving those dreaded braces.
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