The billboard battle in Los Angeles is intense. There are a lot of structures and not a lot of land. So advertisers have to use the space wisely. To catch as many eyes as possible in an overcrowded landscape, more and more companies are turning to billboard extensions. That’s additional space built on to the already existing billboard structure.
Movie advertisers like to make the extensions in the form of people, as shown above in the ad for the movie The Expendables 3. It may be the most extensions ever used for a campaign, coming in at a whopping 16! The famous faces amongst the crowd include Jason Statham, Harrison Ford, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone rounding out the bunch, perched on the number 3.
Other films that have gotten in on this trend include Ted 2, Delocated, and Netflix’s Ibiza. The movie ticketing website Fandango has also used this technique. Their “world’s biggest movie fan” persona created for the campaign, Miles Mouvay, was portrayed by Saturday Night Live actor Kenan Thompson. That campaign featured Miles sitting on the billboard structure. Passersby may have had to look twice to make sure it wasn’t a real person perched up there!
We’ve seen some extensions here on Atlanta billboards as well, most notably the famous Chick-fil-A cows scrawling their messages of “Eat More Chicken” across the billboard vinyls.