Poster advertising: noting a difference between Winnipeg & Toronto audiences.

Winnipeg—with its lower, older population and walkby traffic, decentralized outdoor spaces, car culture, infrequent downtown development and frigid winter—doesn’t have the same level of of ground-level outdoor advertising (re: posters) as larger urban centres.

While their certainly are posters for bands and cultural events (a focus Winnipeggers can be proud of), brandvertising makes less of an appearance on our boarded-up walkways. What we noticed in Toronto, though, was the tone of the ads turned way up. Boobies, pseudo curse words, and other titillations prevailed.

My husband theorized this is in the interest of combating visual noise—when there’s just more of everything, everything has to go up a notch, from retail display, to ad messages, to clothing, volume & visuals.

Here’s a sense of what I mean—I know these are hardly shocking, but taken all together you start to wonder about advertiser’s perceptions of their markets.

Did you note the QR code in there?

I love  the high energy created by the media-saturated environment. Abundant messages suggest abundant people to receive them, creating the sense of something happening