Why New Zealand Billboards Still Shout When Everyone Else Has Learned to Whisper
Drive down any Auckland motorway and it feels like stepping back into a marketing time capsule. Billboards still scream at full volume, as if people are actually craning their necks to memorise phone numbers in three-second glances. The typography is too small, the messages are too many, and the creative feels like it’s been approved by a committee that feared silence more than irrelevance.
What’s fascinating is that outdoor advertising elsewhere has softened. In Tokyo, you can walk through Shibuya and see billboards that feel like art installations. In London, more media owners are offering single-colour takeovers with zero logos, designed to intrigue instead of annoy. Even Melbourne seems to understand the bait of restraint. Yet in New Zealand the majority of billboards still cling to the logic that louder equals effective, like it is still 1998 and a giant phone number painted on corrugated steel is the height of innovation.
I began counting fonts on a stretch of the Southern Motorway just to check myself. Thirteen, in the space of seven minutes. Nothing harmonised, nothing memorable. And yet every single brand had paid premium prices for this visual litter. You wonder if the biggest problem is not cost, but courage. The courage to strip the copy down to three words. The courage to run a billboard that only shows colour, or only a face, because you trust people will connect the dots.
The next breakthrough in New Zealand outdoor advertising is unlikely to be technology. It will be confidence. The confidence to whisper when nobody else does, to play with anticipation, and to let people fill in the blanks. Otherwise, our skylines will remain plastered with billboards that no one reads, no one remembers, and no one misses when they are gone.
What’s fascinating is that outdoor advertising elsewhere has softened. In Tokyo, you can walk through Shibuya and see billboards that feel like art installations. In London, more media owners are offering single-colour takeovers with zero logos, designed to intrigue instead of annoy. Even Melbourne seems to understand the bait of restraint. Yet in New Zealand the majority of billboards still cling to the logic that louder equals effective, like it is still 1998 and a giant phone number painted on corrugated steel is the height of innovation.
I began counting fonts on a stretch of the Southern Motorway just to check myself. Thirteen, in the space of seven minutes. Nothing harmonised, nothing memorable. And yet every single brand had paid premium prices for this visual litter. You wonder if the biggest problem is not cost, but courage. The courage to strip the copy down to three words. The courage to run a billboard that only shows colour, or only a face, because you trust people will connect the dots.
The next breakthrough in New Zealand outdoor advertising is unlikely to be technology. It will be confidence. The confidence to whisper when nobody else does, to play with anticipation, and to let people fill in the blanks. Otherwise, our skylines will remain plastered with billboards that no one reads, no one remembers, and no one misses when they are gone.