Recently wrote about urban spam + corporate responsibility and called out the NYC MTA for its hellacious new advertiser offering - total subway train domination. And as pictured here - Google just bought some.
Visual offense aside, the execution (on behalf of Google Maps) strikes me as both uninteresting and a bit off-brand for a company appreciated for its minimalism and cleverness.
Oh, and NYConvergence just noted that some of the ads inside the cars apparently give faulty directions. Whoops. Maybe they’re still in beta.
Photo via paolomastrangelo.
Now you see it
Faris Yakob posts a video illustrating change blindness - the failure to notice massive changes within our visual field, particularly if vision is briefly disrupted or if the changes are secondary to our point of focus.
You can see a real-world example in mentalist/magician Derren Brown’s re-enactment of the door experiment (pdf) referenced in his post. Seems amazing but as Faris explains:
Perception is not reality. But even the stuff you filter out is going somewhere. I was reminded of another Brown stunt played at the expense of some advertising folk:
Subliminal suggestion is interesting, sure. More so is the idea that these two guys could probably give you perfectly good reasons as to why they came up with the poster they did. Well-established psychological territory, but more to come in a follow-up post. Still sorting some things out in my head.