SURVIVAL OF THE CORNIEST

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

In recent weeks the New York Lottery's Minute to Win It posters and their exuberant spokesman have attracted loads of dickish comments. This emerging super attractor of defacement also illustrates an odd side effect of the now standard vinyl platform poster. The poster material is not just cleanable, much to the liking of the advertisers, but also re-defaceable, much to the liking of smart aleck scrawlers and their fans at New York Dick. 

For several years the material used for subway platform posters has increasingly been a self adhesive vinyl. These posters are much easier to install than the traditional paper posers which needed to be pasted on to the poster frame with thick liquid paste. Their nonporous plastic-like surface can also be cleaned with solvents, something that the paper posters could not stand up to. This easy clean poster material makes possible ever evolving layers of verbal and graphic dialog, and our friend representing the New York Lottery really gets the conversation started.

1 - CORNBALL ROYALE
In our first example our spokesman is aptly and specifically dubbed "cornball royale", the impression is that this graffitist isn't writing that phrase on just any poster they encounter, it seems to be a unique comment about this ad and it's spokesman, very nice work. But such accuracy could be a problem for the sponsor of this ad, something must be done, soon.

2 - PLUS AVATAR
Alas not soon enough. The second iteration shows a standard word "tag" defacement, which does further break up the "cornball" face making it even less persuasive, but is not especially clever. Unless the meaning is that James Cameron's film  "Avatar" is in fact an outstanding example of "cornball royale," very true but that's probably not what's going on with this defacement. This poster is becoming an image problem, and the media maintenance team is ready to apply the solution.

3 - BLAND AGAIN
Ad power regained. In the third phase the doofus comments are stripped away leaving a vague cloudy smear (although it's impossible to fix the rip cracking right through cornball's head.) 

4 - RIDICULOUS REBIRTH
The cycle of defacement life begins again. In the fourth and final (for now) evolutionary stage our beloved former cornball sprouts a very odd mustache right on top of his only slightly odd real mustache, loses a tooth, and gains subtle but stylish square frame glasses. Our spokesman is cornball royale no more, but he's still an outstanding idiot magnet and an ever adapting winner in the evolutionary defacement struggle.

NYD congratulates our adaptive defacers and the rich gene pool of annoying advertisers that supplies their inspiration.