Especially if you live in a city, billboards can become eyesores. I often find myself critiquing over cluttered and unoriginal advertisements for most of my commute to work. Awful imagery, even more awful tag lines create a response in me that does not cause me to research the company, but actually refuse to.
Twist-Creative.com in Cleveland ran a marketing campaign that caught many by surprise and created A LOT of brand awareness. They matched up words like Butter, Soup, Pickles and Beer with imagery of mountainside landscapes. This caused a lot of reaction from the community and almost all of it was positive.
Most people appreciated the simplicity and quirkiness of the advertisements. The campaign was an experiment about how design is a conversation, and that “any good conversation needs a conversation starter.” The advertisement sends you to a website where you are asked your reaction to the billboard.
Clearly, the campaign worked.