client: Plymouth Neon
improvement: Hype 666
date: April 1994
San Francisco Bay Guardian
April 4, 1994
CO-OPTING ART? Billboard high jinks
For a brief Moment, antigrafitti organizations like the Utah-based National Graffiti Information Network (NGIN) and local media pirates like the Billboard Liberation Front (BLF) are seeing eye to eye. Both are vexed by the advertising agency BBDO’s billboard campaign for Chrysler’s Plymouth Neon, a compact car marketed to the same media-wary 24-to-30-year-old age group that was recently pitched a Subaru that’s “like punk rock.”
The Plymouth Neon billboards, which went up around San Francisco this past winter, began with only a white background, an image of the car, the car name, and the message “HI.” In subsequent weeks, the advertisers added either a “P” or a “C” and two “L’s” to make the boards read either “HIP” or “CHILL.” On some, they gave the car a mohawk haircut or circled it with arrows.
“I give them credit for cleverness,” said BLF spokesperson Jack Napier (a nom de guerre). “But we can’t sit by while these companies co-opt our means of communication. Besides, they [the alterations] are substandard activity for midnight billboard operators. They’re tacky.”
So far, Napier claims, the BLF has hit a dozen or so Chrysler Neon boards throughout California, including a few on Mission Street, adding the number 666 (the number of the beast), images of human skulls (in the driver’s seat window) and/or changing “Hip” to “Hype.”
Meanwhile, the National Graffiti Information Network (NGIN) forwarded 50 pages of documents and a six-hour video critical of hiphop and graffiti art to the Chrysler Corporation. “It’s NGIN’s hope,” reports “From the Wall”, a graffiti-prevention newspaper in Utah, “that watching artistic vandals heave bricks through train windows, write on police cars, scribe initials in glass, and cuss and swear will somehow educate Chrysler’s marketeers as to what was offensive about their choice of advertising.”
Has it? Jeff Leestma, manager of public relations for Chrysler’s small-car division, told the Bay Guardian, “We don’t promote or condone graffiti or the destruction of property,” and claimed that the controversy is “behind us now.” According to Leestma, objections it) the campaign were not founded on the outdoor billboards so much as a photo that ran with a New York Times story on advertising and was since removed from the Neon press kit. “I guess it all depends on your definition of graffiti,” Leestma reflects. “The picture showed someone using water soluble playground chalk, writing the name Neon on pavement in front of the car…. We never promoted defacing anything.” The billboard campaign, he says, is considered “very successful. It’s given the car a personality.”
– Brad Wieners