Tag Archives: billboarding your message

Creativity: 7 Heads Are Better Than 1

By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to enhance your resourcefulness. Reading time: 2:23.

Your budget has been slashed. Again. You’re under the gun to generate increased sales. Again. Your advertising spots on TV and radio are few and far between. Again. You feel like you’ve been handcuffed, chained and throw into the river. Again.

Snap out of it. Tear a page out of Houdini’s Resourcefulness Playbook that helped him earn the title of The Great Escape Artist.

Bald heads became a billboard to Houdini

Slip out of those financial chains. Unlock new resources. Free yourself and your creative expression –in Houdini fashion. Here’s how:

When Houdini ran out of money to promote his appearances in Paris, he devised a clever flashing billboard in the most highly trafficked areas of the city virtually for nothing. He hired 7 bald guys (for tickets to his show).

Houdini tasked them to sit side by side on a sidewalk cafes around the city. Each had tatooed a letter on the top of his head. They wore suits and large bowler hats and faced the on-coming traffic.

Every few minutes they would remove their hats and lower their heads toward the traffic , flashing H-O-U-D-I-N-I.

Heady stuff. Houdini proved seven heads are better than one to beat the Budget Blues. Continue reading

Billboarding Your Message Just In Time

By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to assure your message is more easily digested. Reading time: 2:03

Chances are you’ll be smiling a bit after reading the following little ditty. Consider the way millions of motorists over some 40 years smiled at the innovative way the shaving cream company redefined roadside advertising beginning in the 1920s.

A peach looks good

With lots of fuzz

But no man’s a peach.

And never was.

Burma Shave.

It was a lot more than just the catchy words that Burma Shave used on their 7,000 sets of billboards: it was how Burma Shave spaced their words on five or six sequentially placed billboards and paced their key messages a few words at time to make sure the passing motorists had enough time to read and digest its message before reaching and reading the next billboard.

Burma Shave parsed its message a few words at time. A motorist could then easily read, understand and digest the message: “A peach looks good….with lots of fuzz etc.

Continue reading