The Power of the Poster

I live in a built up area, near a very busy cafe strip. Quite often, usually late at night, I see scruffy men assiduously putting posters up on telegraph poles. They have this action down pat, wrapping the poster around the telegraph pole, and then deftly looping adhesive tape around it several times in a flash. They clearly get a lot of practice.

The next day you will see their handiwork: hundreds of telegraph poles covered in brightly colored  posters for the latest big rock event or theater show. But only a week later (after several more nocturnal poster runs) these will have disappeared almost completely - covered up by other advertisements for different bands and events!

This process is repeated right throughout the year. These poster layers build up until they resemble bark around a tree. They even start to peel back. Posters from many months past fall down on the ground, along with the dried adhesive tape that held them there!

It's a strange process. But it certainly reveals something: Those posters must be a very effective means of advertising for promoters to spend so much money on them - particularly when they are only seen for a comparatively short period of time.

But it's not surprising. With so many placed on such a busy street they will leave an imprint on tens - if not hundreds - of thousands of people walking or driving past them.

The poster is a great advertising medium because it can feature one large, colorful image. And images are extremely powerful, of course.

Take movie posters, for instance. These are sometimes so striking that they are easier to remember than some scenes from the movies themselves. Remember the poster from Jaws? Or from the James Bond film Octopussy?  Chances are you will be able to.

Quite often, in movie posters, several characters will be shown together, often in a situation that doesn't occur in the actual movie. An example: American Pie. Can you recall this image? I'll bet you can.

This illustrates the great strength of the poster: it can be a distillation of something bigger or more complex. Not unlike a logo, it can effectively capture the essence of something.

For this reason posters generally, but movie posters in particular, are very popular. People become avid collectors, much like stamp collectors, simply because they love the medium. But certainly much of the trade is composed of people who have seen a movie, loved it, and want to hang reminders of it in their rooms.

Being so highly sought after, the rarer ones appreciate in value substantially over time. An example: a private collector in the US paid close to $700 000 for a poster - original, of course - for the Fritz Lang sci-fi classic Metropolis.

Needless to say, a poster is an excellent way to advertise anything, since any commodity or service has a character or essence that needs to be communicated. For much the same reasons that people remember movie posters, they will also remember posters for events, businesses and services.