Pissvertising & The Top 10 Outdoor & Ambient Snowboard Adverts

A couple of weeks ago a UK based advertising company with the sinister name of Captive Media, produced the world’s first piss-controlled computer games system. Finally we’re getting what we thought we were promised five years ago when Nintendo launched the Wii. The main aim of the system (or pisstem) is to find yet another way to squeeze just a few more advertising opportunities into the already advertising-saturated lives of the jaded public. One of the first games is a snowboard game where you control a screen by adjusting your aim. It's spawned a thousand pun headlines across the British press and now it’s spawned this article. We decided to see how this joystick-controlled ad fitted in with the other ambient or outdoor (out-of-home) advertising that's been produced, so here's the top 10 examples we could find...

10. Jibboards
Billboards topped out with fake snowboarders, either that or a small group of street entertainers have recently decided to turn being a human statue into and an extreme sport.

The Mammoth one goes one better by adding a 3D element.

Not sure how successful these things have been. The Nestor’s advert was for a store that closed this year after 59 years of business.

9. Subway Riding

This is an advert for a snowboarding event in downtown Olso, Norway. A board shaped sticker and some posters of a halfpipe were added to that shaky bit between some subway cars, then three semi-pro snowboarders sold their dignity for publicity.

It might just be me but does anyone else ride subway cars hands-free for practice in the summer? Just me then.

8. Bench Lifting

This is a nice and simple idea. It's so good it’s been used at least three times, but so far snowboarding has not been represented so I don’t care about what they are advertising and they only get to number 8.

7. Ad-vert

An ad for a snow park near Oslo using snow heaped in a quarter pipe up against a bus stop. Those Olsotians sure like their ambient advertising.

6. Liftvertising

Another popular advertising opportunity involves jazzing up ski lifts. This time it's for a snowboard school in Laax, Switzerland.

MINI also got on the bandwagon in the same resort, if I read the subliminal advertising on the side of the lift correctly.

MINI concentrate a lot of their marketing efforts on this type of advertising. We’ve covered some of their link-ups with snowboarding before and here are a few other winter-inspired stunt adverts they’ve done.

5. Gum Gun

Nice idea Orbit, given recent history how long will it be until Shaun White steals this idea for his gum brand?

4. Snowboard Tray

An advert for a holiday company used on Malaysian Airlines, probably the least likely airline to find snowboarders.

3. Taking a Piste

We’re down the top three and here’s where the interactive urinal fits in. Here's the explanation video complete with trance music and drunken arseholes, but thankfully not including a live demonstration.

It's not the only toilet to be infiltrated by advertising. Here’s an ad in Japan for a canned coffee brand from Coca Cola.

2. Jumpotron

This is more towards PR than marketing but we're going to put them in here. Like MINI, red Bull are masters of stuntvertising. Almost all of their marketing is done using ambient or guerrilla marketing techniques . They’ve given us the likes of Shaun White’s private halfpipe and the Art of Flight movie with all those bloody helicopters, but this has to be our favourite advertising idea; the Off The Planet light show.

1. Stickers
The rest of this list was just making up the numbers. In at number one is the most successful piece of ambient or guerrilla marketing that has ever, or will ever be seen in snowboarding - the humble sticker. Almost everybody who has ever produced anything remotely to do with snowboarding has produced a sticker to publicise it, and there's a good reason for that. It's become such a big feature of the sport that for no good reason almost everybody who snowboards (including us), is quite happy to plaster free advertising all over their boards, mimicking the pros, but without any of the financial benefits.