The agency used everything from pencils, Post-it notes and Lego, to wool, string and crushed cans to depict water, creating artworks installed in bus shelters around Denver. These were accompanied by the take home message that ‘You can't make this stuff’ (water), something South Africans have also had to keep in mind lately.

“It’s really appealing when the line between advertisement and art is blurred”, comments Primedia Outdoor’s Marketing and Marketing Services executive, Terry Murphy. “The Apple ‘Shot on iPhone 6’ campaign is another great example of this.” 

The Apple campaign was created by TBWA\Media Art Lab. This campaign, which fashioned a ‘world gallery’ by installing selected photographs taken by iPhone users on billboards around the world, also took home a Gold Obie Award.

Another example of successful art/advertising came from MRY & Colossal Media, whose ‘Make it with Creative Cloud’ for Adobe won the first 2016 Best Wall Mural Campaign Award. For this campaign, Adobe chose 10 out of 1600 submissions from female artists in 60 different countries. These were hand-painted onto walls in Brooklyn, New York, to create The World’s Biggest Student Art Show. 

Other winners included the Jackson Marketing Group’s ‘2015 Season Kickoff’ campaign for the big League World Series, which took home the 2016 Best Billboard Campaign Award, and Downtown Partners’ work for the Adler Planetarium, which scored the 2016 Best Multi-Format Campaign Award. Their billboards proclaimed that “Space is Freaking Awesome”, and backed this up with entertaining and astonishing facts about the universe – for example, “There is a planet that rains glass”.

“The Obie Awards really put creativity in out of home advertising under the spotlight,” says Murphy.

For more information and to see the full list of Obie Award winners for 2016, visit obieawards.org.