Big Times Square Billboard Makes Selfies Part Of Visual Illusion Creative For Beauty Brand Campaign

April 5, 2024 by Dave Haynes

You can only see so many products and animated characters kinda sorta popping out of big LED billboards using visual illusions. Most tend to do variations on the same thing, and a spinning box or bottle seemingly escaping the confines of a display can get old – especially for people paying attention to this stuff.

I note that it is my job to pay attention, so maybe the general public continues to be Wow’d.

With that stated, it’s interesting to see something done a bit differently – a visual illusion piece tied to selfies shot by people in the immediate vicinity of the billboard.

This is a campaign for the beauty brand Redken and it involved scanning a giant QR code on the billboard, which launches a web app, and encourages the users to take selfies. The selfies then get pushed to the display and appear in the content.

A lot of the material I’ve seen in videos seems to be much more about the illusion than the brand or product, but with this spot the products and point are very evident.

None of what’s done here is entirely new, but it’s well executed and gets people looking. I don’t ever want to see my mug on something that big and public, but lotsa people would.

The media company is Silvercast Media and the creative was done by Bravo Media.

This video shows the interaction …

This one is more of a look at the overall creative …