Optical illusions are a treat — in different parts of the world, clever, clever people in the advertising department come up with different gimmicks to get the buzz going about the products that they are advertising.
According to LiveScience, optical illusions work because the human eye has been conditioned to anticipate what the next type of movement will be, so it’s even better when we first glance at something commonplace, and finding the bizarre hidden in it.
From Mighty Optical Illusions, here are my absolute favorites.
The lightbulb ad — I’m guessing this is for some electric or lightbulb company. But it’s pretty brilliant. Adding a sensor just below the lightbulb, passers-by look like they have something interesting in mind.
Duracell-powered vehicle — In India, Duracell has created a pretty brilliant ad: by adding decals of giant-sized Duracell batteries to the back of vehicles, creating the optical illusion that the batteries are powering the vehicle.
Nissan’s “Impossible” set of ads — These come in a series — and it shows some Escher-esque impossible geographic illusions, further emphasizing the “impossible” distance that the cars reach, on a limited amount of fuel.
National Geographic: Built for the Kill bus ads — By ingeniously placing the right decals on the right parts of the bus, it gives the illusion that a giant shark is devouring passengers — on land!
Cloverfield hidden monster poster ad — The Cloverfield monster has come and gone, and, well, this is still one of my favorites. Months before the actual showing of the movie, fan speculation has it that the studio had released the image of the monster in plain sight.
Here’s a video detailing it. While I’m not sure if this was intentional or not — it got people talking about the movie! Cheers to the geniuses of the marketing teams for including optical illusions in ads for our enjoyment.
1 response so far ↓
1 Mike // Jun 18, 2008 at 4:20 am
Like the pics - rather than being for a light bulb company, I suspect the first ad is trying to say that it is either a bright idea to read The Economist, or that the said publication is full of bright ideas, or both!
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