Just when you think traditional advertising is past its prime and nothing can be fresh unless it’s got “2.0” behind its name, someone comes along to remind us that it’s all about the idea, not the medium. Take outdoor advertising, for instance. It’s not all billboards and bus cards. In fact, sometimes it’s something you’ve never seen before. Like an abandoned monorail truss. To most Jakarta motorists driving by one of these ubiquitous urban leftovers, they’re simply an eyesore. But to the creative minds at the ad agency Y&R Jakarta, they were an opportunity—an opportunity to spread an important message for an important cause, in service to the agency’s client Friends of the National Parks Foundation in Indonesia. The picture up top shows the trusses as they usually appear. After the jump, one of the trusses transformed with signage and imagination.

(more…)

Like a significant portion of the world’s population, we here at Big have our eye on the various balls being kicked around right now in South Africa. But our interest is due to more than a love of the sport and patriotric fervor—we recently completed a project tied to the games.

(more…)

What words come to mind when you hear “AT&T” these days? Incompetence? Ineptitude? Ham-fisted, ivory-towered, greed-driven mismanagement?

Suffice to say, AT&T has done its brand no favors during its tenure as the exclusive U.S. carrier of Apple’s iPhone. Hordes of the smart device’s users twitch and salivate at the merest hint of an imminent Verizon version, primed and ready as they are to jump ship to any other option. It’s an anticipation fueled by rage and frustration and indignation: how many dropped calls can a single human soul endure? How many broken promises? How many delays in services? How many outages and zero-bars and connections-lost?

(more…)

The airport experience. Even the most mild-mannered of us can devolve into rage-blinded Neanderthals when confronted with the lines, the delays, the cancellations. How many times have you vented and ranted to friends and family after an especially frustrating encounter? So you can surely sympathize with Paul Chambers of South Yorkshire, England, when his flight to Dublin this past January was cancelled due to threat of snow at Robin Hood Airport in Doncaster. Chambers reacted as you might have—he joked with his friends that the airport needed to get its act together, or he’d blow the place sky high. Okay, maybe you wouldn’t have referred to explosive violence (still, how many of us have said we want to “murder the boss” after a horrible day at work?). And maybe you would have thought twice before making your comment on Twitter. But Mr. Chambers did not. He chose to tweet his frustration. In a manner obviously meant to amuse his friends. Or so he thought.

(more…)