Advertising in Urban Art: Graffiti & Street Art Marketing

One year after those great Apple iPad ad-bustings in Berlin, the trendy computer giant is going to open a flagship-store in Hamburg. That’s nothing special - I mean nowadays there are Apple stores everywhere - but it’s a super moment for a nice and funny guerrilla art installation! And that’s what also the Hamburg-based intervention art group .WAV (what stands for We Are Visual) thought when they recently installed a big and colorful Microsoft Windows logo right at the construction area of the new Apple flagship-store! ...

Right after I published the post about “Urban Art vs. Ad World”, another big anti-advert action took place in Spain! Around 100 urban artists from all over the world, including 3ttman, Bronco, El Tono, Jerm IX, Know Hope, Ludo, Luzinterruptus, Rero, Skount, Various & Gould and others, joined the “Madrid Street Advertising Takeover” (MaSAT) which recently took place in the heart of the Spanish capital. For that reason, Madrid is now able to get in line with cities like New York and Berlin, were similar events happened before… ...

Urban artists versus the ad world is some kind of a neverending story. One one hand site there are artists taking over billboards, some who replace ads with their own posters, others copying special advert-campaign styles to combine them with their own style and still others who just modify existing poster ads… On the other site, there are artists creating whole advertising campaigns for multinational companies and also viral media in urban contexts is no curiosity any more. But what’s worst than this is when ad agencies start to copy entire, well-known concepts for their own interests! ...

Graffiti Car Advert | Oh, come on boys and girl - it’s getting boring! After Mini did their “Wash Me” cars by the help of KR, Seak One, Tika, Smash 137 and others and Mercedes Benz had Niels Shoe Meulman, who did some calligraffiti on one of their B-Class cars, now it’s Opel’s turn! The car-manufacturer charged the two graffiti legends Daim and Loomit to create some advert for the Corsa. Both spray-painted the background wall for the new Opel Corsa Campagne 2011, which is now extensively used to promote not just the car but its creative-to-be label and reputation. ...

Urban Art Open-Call | Back in 2010, Polo Jeans Co. Ralph Lauren started the so called “Art Stars” campaign, for which famous urban artists like Case, Daniel Tagno, Delta, Herakut, L’Atlas, Roa, Smash137 and Sten & Lex customized their own 3D denim stars. Now, they organized a open-call competition and ask you to create your own “Art Star”! Until February 4th you have time to become a star by downloading the “Art Star” kit, creating something original and submitting it… ...

Adbusting | French street artist Ludo, who is also known as Nature’s Revenge and became famous by pasting paper artworks showing combinations of technology and organic live, recently started a new street art series called “Co-Branding” in Paris. Because of “brands use crappy ultra aesthetic images that no one understands to sell their stuff” (Ludo) he had the idea to create “Nature’s Revenge” posters for Chanel, Dior, Calvin Klein, H&M, and other brands and takeover some advertising light-boxes on the streets of the French capital. ...

Mini had KR, Levi’s had Shepard Fairey, the WWF had Photoshop and now, Mercedes Benz has Niels Shoe Meulman and his calligraffiti… Mercedes-Benz asked the calligraffiti artist Niels Meulman to customize a white Mercedes B-Class with hundreds of women’s names. These names symbolise all the Dutch women for whom the Pink Ribbon foundation works tirelessly. (graffart.eu) Of course, this is advertising but I love Shoe’s flow and style and it’s for a good thing - Pink Ribbon is an international symbol of breast cancer awareness…Now I will go out with my markers and follow the subliminal message of that ad by tagging the next Mercedes! Who’s coming? ...

You know, I have a weakness for tape art and although it seems to be something like a part of a new ad-campaign (unfortunately I’m not able to understand Slovenian…), it’s rather interesting to see what these Slovenian artists, including Kitsch Nitsch, Fejzo, Jurij Lozič, Tilen Sepič and others did with some shopping carts full of tape… …most interesting about the videos is, that they show the flexible possibilities of tape as a tool for artists. It allows to more or less easily create simple as well as quite complex abstract patterns, installations, reduced respectively simplified images and so forth… ...

As you maybe noticed, I don’t really like adverts and the misuse o urban art for commercial things, but that ad-campaign is rather good: The World Wide Fund For Nature (short WWF), the biggest international nature conservation organization, tagged some wild animals for their latest campaign “What will it take before we respect the planet?”. Of course, it’s digital work… Although graffiti is used here as a symbol of vandalism, I really like the idea of that campaign. Maybe it’s because I’d never seen graffiti on polar bears, rhinoceroses or elephants before, or maybe it’s because the tagged elephants reminded me of that elephant, Bansky painted for one of his shows - I don’t know. Fact is, that the WWF’s statement is clear: Keep tagging walls in the urban landscape - Stay away from animals! ...

The oil flows and flows and flows and no one seems able to do something. And also the pressure on the BP Group keeps within a limit… For that reason, creative people started to organize their own protest against BP and its negligently offshore oil-drillings. There are a lot of BP fake press releases, ironic videos and other creative works in the internet. The most recent I found today are nice BP ad-busting illustrations by Imp Kerr & Associates, NYC. ...