by Amber Larkins, OOH Today
Curb Your Enthusiasm, which airs on Max, recently featured an OUTFRONT billboard in S12 E6 “The Gettysburg Address.”
“We were thrilled to participate in a moment where a billboard became the star of a major hit series episode,” Clive Punter, EVP CRO at OUTFRONT, said.
Character Susie Greene, played by Susie Essman, used one of OUTFRONT’s Los Angeles billboards to promote her “Catch as Caftan” business.
Alas, graffiti artists paint dicks on the billboard. If you saw the show, you would know as I discovered watching it, the storyline had the billboard with one penis ‘drawn on’, then a second appeared the next day.
To promote the show, Max posted the same ad on the real-life billboard featured in the episode. The next morning, the ad had been vandalized in the same way as its fictional counterpart.
Showrunner Jeff Schaffer was delighted. He had previously told The Hollywood Reporter, “I don’t know how many graffiti artists are fans of the show, but I’m praying for a few dicks.”
“We had no idea this would happen,” Punter said. “Once the episode was released, we did keep an eye on social and had a feeling it might happen based on the social chatter and celebrities prompting someone to do so.”
The CatchasCaftan.com website on the billboard redirected fans to the HBO Store, where they could buy one of Susie’s signature garments. The inventory quickly sold out.
There was also a huge social out-of-home response, which continued for days. According to Sprout, the billboard had a potential reach of 42.6 million on social media plus 289M+ UMVs worth of mainstream media attention in various outlets.
Typically, media owners do not like or endorse graffiti (or genitalia) in their campaigns, but OUTFRONT decided to leave the graffiti up for a few days to soak up the cultural moment.
“We do take pride in maintaining our inventory, but we decided to leave it up through the weekend, Friday to Sunday, because it was a cultural moment, and the client was also okay with leaving it up for a few days,” Punter said.
The graffiti was cleaned by Monday, and OUTFRONT is delighted with the campaign’s success, especially its cultural response.
“It is art imitating life, imitating art! This is the type of engagement we want to see. This billboard illustrates the place billboards (OOH) can have in the cultural zeitgeist. We were part of the conversation, and our billboard/OOH became a focal point and destination within the entertainment community,” Punter said.
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