On news racks,
a message that glows
Agency targets Hispanic readers of LA's La Opinion
By Toni Fitzgerald
Sep 16, 2009
So much of alternative media is about making people take a second look – putting something interesting where they do not expect to see it.
And no one expects to see much interesting on newspaper racks, which blend right into the scenery like fangs at a vampire convention.
Or at least they usually do.
But walking down the street in Los Angeles earlier this month, it was impossible to miss this brilliant newsrack campaign: glow-in-the-dark rack cards for the new movie "9."
When the sun went down, the cards shone, causing passersby to do a double take to make sure that, yes, this really is glowing.
“If you’ve seen the TV creative, it has the number nine in a luminescent glow,” says Elizabeth Barrutia of BARU Advertising, the Hispanic-focused LA agency that came up with the idea. “We wanted to play with it.”
BARU was given the task of reaching Hispanics, and to do that it opted to target readers of La Opinion, the LA-area Spanish-language paper.
Certainly one way to do it was to put the message on the paper's news racks, where it was sure to be seen by La Opinion readers, as well as by the general public.
The glow-in-the dark element fit right in with the theme of the movie, an animated post-apocalyptic sci-fi thriller in which puppet-like creatures battle a group of machines.
Preparation for the campaign began months in advance. The printer experimented, coming up with a special film for printing on regular posterboard.
The poster is rendered in the same cartoon style as the film, featuring lots of browns, greens and yellows. In the background is a city. In the foreground is a masked character peeking over his shoulder and holding a giant light that glows yellow. On the left side of the poster is a giant number nine, which also seems to be glowing.
And it does. During the day, the posters absorb light, which powers the glow for about 10 hours per night.
“It was quite complicated,” Barrutia says. “It took a lot of collaboration and research to get the end result. It’s hard to tell in the pictures, but there’s no seam from the center of the glow-in-the-dark portion. It’s a seamless transition from glow to remainder.”
The campaign ran for two weeks through Sept. 11, the movie’s release date, with 11,000 rack cards placed throughout the Los Angeles area, most of them in high-traffic Hispanic areas and pedestrian areas.
The campaign worked on three levels. First, it attracted attention to something, a rack card, that may have otherwise gone unnoticed.
But it also worked because it hit two targets, passersby who saw the glowing cards and La Opinion readers, who found a tie-in “9” sweepstakes inside the paper.
Finally, it worked as a rather obvious way to get passersby thinking about the movies. Films are shown in the dark, just like this poster.
The campaign clearly captured the public’s interest. The agency had to replace lots of stolen rack cards.
“A lot of the cards have gone missing because I think people are taking them,” Barrutia says. “That’s a great sign that people want to post them in their rooms or maybe even use them for a night light. So we did print an overrun just to be on the safe side.”
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