Funny backwards bus ad

This advertisement for an insurance company was put on the back of buses in Amsterdam. Link (Thanks Justin!)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Nicole

The Apeldoorn ads are consistently good (I believe they are produced by DDB Amsterdam). They were my favourite along with Delta Lloyd (insurance).

I lived in Amsterdam for seven years and the last Apeldoorn TV campaign before I left for Australia was this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grB2nA09NPM

See “related videos” on the side for more.

“Even Apeldoorn bellen” isn’t easy to translate word for word, but the meaning would be something like “Better call Apeldoorn”.
ggm

having once had a run-in with a vehicle which turned the wrong way into a one-way street, this kind of humouristic street art would be giving me semi-constant heart attacks..

-G
mightymouse1584

anyone have a translation?
howtoplayalone

Isn’t that a little dangerous? Couldn’t someone freak out if they thought a bus was coming at them, especially if they thought the driver wasn’t looking? Maybe not…
Steven

that’s plenty funny in JPEG. kind or (horrifically) irresponsible in practice. at least, you know, if it proves effective.
XuYu

Reminds me of that episode of CHiPS when a double-fronted car caused all kinds of mischief!
lentil

Here’s a blog for other fun street advertising, etc.

http://www.marketing-alternatif.com/

In french, but you can usually get the jist of it.
flyingdutchman

#2:
This ad is for Centraal Beheer, a Dutch insurance company which has its main office in the town of Apeldoorn. They have been doing this type of ads for as long as I can remember, maybe 20 years. The graphic usually depicts some funny and/or improbable kind of screw-up, and the punchline is always the same – and means “Ooops! I’d better make a phonecall to Apeldoorn!”

The ads have run on TV, on billboards, basically anywhere.

I dislike most advertising. But this one is a classic masterpiece.

#1,3,4:
The human eyesight and brain have a wonderful and rather efficient ability to determine if an object approaches or moves away. And, as I implied above, the punchline (always in Helvetica Bold) is so well known in Holland that it would give the game away long before anyone would start worrying.