Was it a clever marketing initiative that tied together healthy eating and healthy lifestyles, while pumping some always useful dollars into municipal coffers? Or an example of ubiquitous commercialization creeping ever further into public spaces?
This summer, the Egg Farmers of Canada contracted with two southwestern Ontario cities to paint their ‘Get Cracking’ logo onto public bike lanes, in an attempt to tie into an advertising campaign promoting eggs as a good energy source.
“We were trying to find a new way to get our message out,” explains Bonnie Cohen, marketing and nutrition manager for the organization.
It was a tie-in that made sense to Scott Stafford, a Parks and Recreation manager with the city of London. “It seemed like a fun, happy way to promote activity in our community,” he says.
The Egg Farmers offered the cities a flat fee of $250 per logo, which were painted on the bike lanes for three summer months, then removed by a company contracted by the marketing organization.
London allowed 20 logos to be installed along a riverside trail, while the nearby city of Waterloo painted 10 logos along paths throughout their parks.
“I thought they looked fantastic myself,” says Cohen, who said logos were spaced three to five kilometres apart along the pathways.
Stafford says he didn’t receive a lot of feedback – positive or negative – on the campaign. However, it’s clear that not everyone was egg-namoured with the logos.
One London resident, in a letter to the local newspaper, asked, “Surely the City of London does not need $5,000 so badly that it wishes to add corporate graffiti to our parks?”
The perception of the ads as an undesirable corporate invasion into city green space was also the theme of some negative e-mails received by the Egg Farmers, whose web site address appeared on the advertisements. However, Cohen says the organization also received some positive feedback.
She notes the irony in the comment made by one critic, who wanted to know why Waterloo would allow advertising in RIM Park. The park, coincidentally, bears the corporate name of Waterloo-based Research in Motion, makers of the well-known Blackberry.
The bike-lane advertising campaign also caught the attention of Matthew Blackett, publisher of Toronto’s Spacing magazine, which explores issues of public space. In a blog entry, he asked, “What’s the next step? Using the dashes on the road to point you towards a Wal-Mart, or using the traffic screens on highways to promote a new car model?”
Both Stafford and Cohen say this year’s experiment was a pilot project, and neither will commit to whether it will be continued next year. But Cohen compares it to advertising in municipal hockey arenas, where corporate names are routinely splashed along the rink boards.
“I guess people will just have to get used to seeing advertising in interesting and innovative places,” she says.
