The double-decker bus is a London icon, so when one of them appears to be putting on makeup, well, people are going to pay attention.
Late last week, Maybelline posted a video on TikTok of some new outdoor advertising work that essentially appeared as if giant mascara brushes had been attached to the side of a London building and inside a tube station, and a double-decker bus and a subway train passed underneath with giant lashes attached to the front.
The social media reaction was both instant and effusive, with comments like “this is literally the best ad ever” and “raise the salary of the employees who have [sic] this idea.” The coverage spanned not only U.K. outlets but global media as well.
Thing is, it was all fake. Created with artist Ian Padgeham, the project only looks incredibly real, but it is actually completely made with CGI. Padgeham specializes in making surreal fun out of everyday scenes and settings. Maybelline’s U.K. brand manager Lauren Chapman broke it all down on TikTok, saying that when working with a big brand, it can be difficult to make cool, weird work due to the often, um, robust approval process. “We had this idea of doing this, is it real or is it fake-type content. We wanted people to genuinely think that Maybelline’s actually managed to pull this off.”
The brand did something similar in New York for its Falsies Surreal Mascara the previous week, creating a very real looking bus shaped like the mascara’s tube, which has more than one million TikTok views.
Despite these projects’ success, brands should be mindful that there is likely a “Best Before” date on these kinds of stunts. Thanks to more and more IRL experiences such as the just-unveiled Las Vegas Sphere as well as 3D Times Square billboards that blend digital wizardry and physical presence, the public’s patience with fake fun will wane and our expectations will grow to the point that yes, Maybelline will actually need to pull off its brushes and lashes magic, for real.
At the dawn of digital advertising, old school media—print, radio, and outdoor billboards—were often dismissed for being too boring or basic. However, once the thrill of a microsite died down, these legacy platforms, particularly outdoor advertising, have witnessed a renaissance once marketers saw the potential of blending real-world magic with social amplification. All it takes is one social post to make one billboard on one block in one city to go fully global.
Back in 2016, long before Ryan Reynolds was considered the patron celebrity saint of creative advertising, he hilariously used a couple of Los Angeles billboards to make the most of 20th Century Fox’s marketing budget for his then-underdog superhero film. Thanks to social posts from comedian Patton Oswalt and Reynolds himself, these essentially became worldwide ads for Deadpool.
In November 2021, BelliWelli launched a campaign called “Hot Girls Have IBS,” with a single, static Los Angeles billboard, soon adding two more in Portland and New York (in, yes, Times Square). Within a few months, a TikTok video featuring the Portland billboard had two million views, and the company reported the billboards reached more than 2.8 million people on Instagram, and quickly drove an estimated $40,000 in product sales.
While a well-placed, witty billboard can still get plenty of attention, increasingly, brands are stepping things up with cutting-edge technology. New York’s Times Square and Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station have become a haven for anamorphic or 3D outdoor ads. At the latter last year, Nike brought to life an Air Max 1 sneaker. Last summer, BMW worked with agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners to create a 3D Times Square billboard to hype its collaboration with streetwear brand Kith on a new custom-edition BMW i4 M50. “I’d argue that a massive 3D billboard in the heart of New York City, with incredible sharing potential on social channels, is the most powerful way to launch [the car],” BMW VP of marketing Marcus Casey told Muse by Clio at the time. “So far, the strategy has paid off. There has been a huge amount of buzz, including over 11 million views on TikTok.”
Further boosting our expectations and standards of what constitutes a truly amazing amalgamation of experience and technology is the new MSG Sphere near the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas. At about 34 stories high and 516-feet-wide, the concert and event venue took seven years and more than $2 billion to create.
U2 guitarist the Edge told Rolling Stone that the Sphere will be a quantum leap forward in what a concert can be. “It gives you the opportunity to bring people back in time, and to worlds that are completely computer-generated, but completely believable,” he said. “It’s a new genre of immersive experience, and a new art form.”
This new genre of immersive experience is also a 34-story canvas for brands and event advertising, the likes of which we’ve never seen. And it’s in person.
For another creative perspective, I got in touch with Nils Leonard, cofounder and chief creative officer at Uncommon London (which made news earlier this week when Havas acquired a majority stake in the agency). Uncommon won the 2023 Cannes Lions Grand Prix for outdoor advertising last month for a British Airways campaign that put a witty twist on the usual “business” or “pleasure” travel questionnaire. It included 500 individual print, digital, and outdoor executions, as well as more than 32 short films.
Leonard says that outdoor is a stage now. “[It’s] precious space,” he says. “A destination for brands that want scale and power. The win when you do outdoor right is huge. The best work doesn’t just appear on the poster, but on the phones pointing at the poster.”
Work like Maybelline’s recent projects are a lot of fun, but they skip the crucial step of that in-person experience, only imitating the result of those phones pointing at the poster or billboard. Just as brands used to be able to get away with creating a fake stunt product for April Fool’s Day, but are now expected to actually make these gags and put them up for sale (see: The Coors Light), so too will they be expected to bring these cool, weird, fun ideas to life. “There is a fragility to a physical idea not made real, the world enjoys and respects endeavor,” says Leonard. “No matter how well-crafted the video, it just won’t live as long in the memory. No pain, no champagne.”
The Maybelline work has been a bonafide hit this week, but will undoubtedly seed a sense of doubt for any future work. I asked the brand how it might follow up on these recent CGI projects, but did not heard back by press time. Either way, brands need to embrace the extra endeavor Leonard speaks of, seamlessly combining physical space and digital wonder in order to match new expectations set by the likes of Vegas’ Sphere and 3D Times Square. Otherwise, the tagline might as well be, “Maybe it’s real, or maybe it’s Maybelline.”
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