Pulled from the LFR archives, a story we first shared with you back in 2011; Audi vs BMW, the Billboard Wars…
First off, I love this kind of capitalist rivalry. Coke vs. Pepsi, PC vs. Mac… Rarely does the creative juice flow as well as when there’s a dented ego involved, or a perceived sleight that needs to be put right.
Audi started the trouble when they cheekily hired a billboard site situated in Santa Monica within a stones’ throw of a nearby BMW franchise, and posted an advertisement for their new A4 with the taunt, “Your move, BMW”.
Doubtless, this would have been spotted by the BMW folk who worked nearby, and of course with such a blatant poke in the eye, they had to do something. So they hired the nearest available billboard and took the chess analogy one step further, with an image of their M3 coupe, and confidently proclaimed this as “Checkmate”.
At this point Audi might have been forgiven for sending a bottle of something nice to the BMW office with the message “Well played”, and leaving it at that. But No. As the story goes, Audi chap has another temporary billboard site erected specially, adjacent to that now occupied by BMW and its M3 and uses it to host a billboard sporting their exotic R8 supercar with the message “Your pawn is no match for our king.”
Well that’s that then. No billboards left to rent, no space to build another, and even if there was, at that time BMW had no supercar to rival the R8. So a win for Audi then?
Alas not. When the ground war was lost, BMW took to the skies. Enter stage left a blimp adorned with an F1 car and the simple message “Game Over”. To add insult to injury, the blimp was apparently tethered to the R8 billboard.
So game over it was. But just how cool is that story? And of course, both parties will have benefited from the increased exposure and topicality of the whole to and fro of the campaign.
So, Sign & Digital UK this year, what are the chances? HP on one billboard, Epson on another? Maybe you shouldn’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen – but wouldn’t it be fun?!
We’ll continue to hunt for things like this to share with you, and of course if you see anything else equally worthy of sharing, please let us know.
