Advertising

WWAAAYYY back in June 2006 I wrote a little piece on advertising in Saigon, including a snapshot of the new Ford Mondeo hanging from a billboard on Nguyen Hue. The car is now gone, but the advertising has not. Space on the sides of buildings is being utilised like never before, mostly for large, colorful posters. In some places, glowing neon is appearing. Indeed, a large neon Tiger Beer ad now greets drivers arriving into the city just after the Saigon Bridge. I can envisage in a few years streets of colorful flashing lights in the Taipei, Tokyo or Seoul style, some junctions are already reminding me of places like Piccadilly Circus.

The Bridgestone ad dominates Nguyen Thai Hoc.

Samsung aren't shy:

Canon squeezed their billboard here:

LG's winking face:

Now these are the ones that I'm really talking about. In the next picture, it's not the Mitsubishi and Toshiba signs I'm talking about, it's the Fed-Ex one. The building on which the ad is placed is just tall enough to peek out over the roof of the petrol station making it visible to motorists and pedestrians....

Looking across the bus station and down Ham Nghi, one of the boards looks like it has literally been 'hung' off the building. I wonder what the rates are in the hotel for the 'behind the ad board' rooms.

Finally, size doesn't matter, because here and in many other places you can see a billboard maybe twice as big as the house it's balanced on.