front page October 1996- Comedy Central's outdoor ad campaign in New York uses lenticular printing to display three separate images on/ one phone booth panel.

New Outdoor Ad System Gives Media
Buyers More Bang for Their Bucks

New advances in lenticular printing are letting advertisers put up to three different images in their outdoor advertising. Ads using this new process can now be seen in New York and Los Angeles. Lenticular printing is an imaging technique that combines multiple images under a laminated sheet of clear plastic film with ridged viewing lenses to create animated effects. A lenticular image changes to one of the multiple images according to the viewing angle of the onlooker. Currently, this type of printing is most commonly seen in novelty Cracker Jack-type toys, specialty trading.

LENTICULAR ADS

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cards, and political buttons. The first ads to feature the new lenticular process were purchased by the cable television network Comedy Central to promote their late night news parody "The Daily Show." Produced by Holland Advertising and New York City- based Depthography Inc. These lenticular phone booth prints are standard, rear-lit Duratrans panels with one major difference: they become three-frame (or three-phase) animations as people move past the displays and look at them from different angles.

The Daily Show" tag line, "Same World, Different Take," became the theme for the ad campaign, as well as two different lenticular designs. The first display shows a Big Brother type countenance of Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott. Below her the text reads "Same World." In the second image, a Hitler mustache appears on Schott's face, and the text changes to "Different Take." In the final image, the Comedy Central logo appears, along with the show's air times. Another lenticular ad features buxom"Baywatch" star Pamela Anderson Lee for the "Same World" phase, a bicycle air pump inflating her for the "Different Take," and the Comedy Central logo appears with the broadcast time listings.

All the images, which were designed to reflect the unconventional look at daily American life presented by the "The Daily Show," were created by Chris Watson, art director on Holland Advertising's Comedy Central campaign. "Comedy Central loved these displays because they're very effective at grabbing peoples' attention," says Chris Holland, chairman of Holland Advertising. Each panel costs several hundred dollars to produce because of the need to use a 1/8-inch-thick viewing lens to produce the eye-grabbing animations. But Holland says they're worth the price because of their impact. While there are several companies throughout the United States that produce lenticular images, Depthography has pushed the process to new heights by developing a proprietary software technique used to create photo realistic, animated 3-D images. "We've developed this technology to the point where it has much more potential than what people usually see on Cracker Jack toys," asserts Robert Mann, founder and president of Depthography. Other examples of the firm's handiwork can he seen in the windows of Macy's department store at 34th Street and Herald Square, Disney Store retail outlets in Lake Buena Vista and Orlando, FL, and The Virtual Image Gallery, Depthography's lenticular showcase in the shop's Manhattan headquarters.

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