At “Rock of Ages”
I really wish I could spare you all from any reminder that Rock of Ages exists, but this ad is much too stupid to withhold comment.
So here we have the main billboard for Rock of Ages. This isn’t the stupid one. It actually works fine, in that it represents a movie that will play in theaters and it tells you the title of that movie and it is a giant picture in the sky that sometimes you can’t avoid looking at.
My problem with this campaign (apart from everything) is this extremely vertically oriented poster on Sunset & Vine tower.
“Who could have thought this was a good idea?” you ask. I think it must have gone something like this:
Hey we bought some ad space on this tower for that movie where Tom Cruise sings hair band songs instead of sprinting everywhere screaming at things.
-Okay, how do you want to use it?
Well, instead of coming up with something relevant to the frame, we thought we’d just shrink down the widescreen image we’ve used for everything else and then fill in the rest with a bunch of illegible text on a black background.
-You’re promoted!
You might mistakenly think this isn’t that hard to see, but driving or walking down the street, it looks something like this.
On the plus side, this makes the cast and tone of the film virtually unrecognizable, a real boon for the studio regarding the “has a shred of dignity” demographic.