An anti-litter billboard offering three ridiculous options for the question “Why do you litter?” delights one of Reddit’s largest forums.
The original poster (OP), u/rocketboy44, shared the photo to the popular subreddit r/funny, which has over 42.6 million members and received over 71,000 upvotes.
“Why do you sprinkle?” The sign asks, offering “I’m stupid”, “I don’t care about my town”, “Mom cleans for me”, and “All the above” as possible options.
Another photo of the sign can be found on Pinterest, where it received a score of 27,174 when it was posted by 9GAG. The Pinterest post identifies the sign as being in Johannesburg, South Africa, in the Cresta area.
The angle of this alternate photo shows that the shield was installed by Guerrilla IMC. Guerrilla IMC is an African communications company specializing in outdoor advertising with the slogan “Battle Hardened Communications”.
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The campaign was launched in 2012, according to a company press release. The news was first published on an unsold billboard – it’s unclear whether the photo by u/rocketboy44 is recent or not, but in his image the sign looks significantly more weathered than pictures taken closer to the sign’s erection.
Guerrilla IMC also created an alternate, temporary version of the sign for the Earthdance music festival in 2012, changing the color of the original question from gray to green and changing the second option to “I don’t care about my planet”. rather than “city” in the original.
“Guerrilla will start using unsold sites to let people know that littering is wrong and that we really care about the look of our city! We hope that the entire industry will join us in running the gauntlet. We intend to use a hard-hitting message in the hope that people will wake up to this issue, in fact the message might turn some heads!” Daryl van Arkel, director of Guerrilla IMC, said in a 2012 statement.
The sign has appeared on other unsold billboards, including one cited by a Wordpress blog in 2012, elsewhere in Johannesburg.
Although the sign went viral shortly after its release, it appears that 10 years later the sign is due for another round on social media if the Reddit post is any indication.
“This reminds me of demand management research testing which communication elicited the most actions. And it was the ‘your neighbors do it better than you’ that had the biggest impact. Not ‘do it to save money’ or ‘do it to ‘save energy’… but ‘you suck compared to others’ lol,” wrote u/threwaweigh657 in the top rated comment with 1,900 upvotes.
“This is called a descriptive normative approach. There was a study on this. When hotels told guests that ‘75% of guests reuse their towels’ instead of ‘please reuse towels to save the earth’, the earlier message led to more consistency,” u/ le_ramen_connoisseur added.
“Why would you tick all the boxes when you have one for ‘all of the above’?” u/Kazko25 asked.
“Well, they said they were stupid, didn’t they,” replied u/Commercial_Leg_5108.
news week has reached out to u/rocketboy44 and Guerrilla IMC for comment.
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