Editorial By Frédéric Sadarnac, co-founder of Ratecard
New York is even more impressive at night. The views are amazing because the towers light up the sky on either side of the city. Time Square, an absolute symbol of the world of advertising, gives the impression in the middle of the night that someone must have forgotten to press the switch when leaving. The luminous halo is visible several blocks upstream. At the end of 2016, when the two founders of Tabmo, Hakim Metmer and Renaud Biet, came to New York to work on a portrait that would then be published in the Mag Ratecard, they wanted to have a photo on the cover of them on this iconic square. But since then the world has changed a lot and not just because Tabmo became Hawk.
Times Square is still impressive. The digital marketing professional sees in it this famous DOOH which you are regularly told about and which comes in a mind-blowing way with these advertisements which are linked on formats each more gigantic than the other. We can hardly imagine the effect on the ego of people who have to find their face on these non 4×3 panels but the one for example which is 100 m long and 14 m high! As for the creatives who worked on these spaces, we then wonder how they manage to design 3-second videos or 468×60 banners.
And then comes this feeling of too much. The carbon footprint? Stratospheric. The real interest? Probably debatable. The impact for advertisers? Theoretical because who really remembers the brands broadcast during this show? So we come out of there a little in shock when suddenly we hear some screams. We turn around and it’s anti-war demonstrators wrapped in Ukrainian flags trying to get noticed. It doesn’t last very long but we still say to ourselves that we live in a very strange world.
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