Driving down Los Angeles’s lovely Pico Blvd., I saw that The Last Airbender billboard had been defaced thusly:
It immediately brought to mind the a billboard I’d seen for Iron Man 2, which had been similarly altered:
To my thinking, each billboard looks much, much, cooler with the spray paint addition. The giant posters have been awesome-ified. The graffiti draws the eye to the product, without obscuring the main idea of each movie (which, for each film, seems to be that a red/orange person and a blue/gray person are either friends or enemies.) The graffiti makes the billboards pop. Do things this cool just happen?
It’s tempting to wonder if sneaky, out-of-the-box-thinking movie marketing companies hired top street artist talent to create this engaging effect. I have no way of knowing, but these improvements seem a lot of work for the taggers to put in for free. Maybe I’m cynical.
Counter argument to the guerrilla-marketing theory is that the Iron Man artwork blocks out the month of its release date, and the Airbender tag contains the phrase “No Homo.” Regardless, I hope it was worth almost killing myself to snap the picture of the first billboard out the window while driving.