Commuters are inundated with advertising daily, and it’s annoying to look at when you haven’t had your first cup of morning coffee. What if, instead, you were greeted by billboards of, say, adorable cats? Would that make your subway ride a bit more enjoyable, or at least less stressful? That’s the basis behind Citizens Advertising Takeover Service, or C.A.T.S., a Kickstarter project that’s raising the funds (around $33,076) needed to take over advertising space on a single London Underground station, reports PetaPixel.
Not only would it look amazing, but it would get people’s minds off things like “holiday we can’t afford, the car we don’t need, or the body we don’t have,” the campaign claims.
“Dumb yes, but also this is about trying something, flexing our collective voice in the most idiotic of ways,” Glimpse, the creative cat-loving collective behind the project, wrote on its Kickstarter page. “From all this madness something amazing could happen. Perhaps we’ll start to realize that buying stuff isn’t making us happy. Maybe cats won’t make us happy either, but it’s got to be better than insurance adverts. Maybe during this moment of cat related calm we might have a brilliant thought, or a dumb one or even… spend a moment thinking about nothing at all.”
The campaign’s cost would cover one platform of ads inside a small station, and Glimpse said authorities would approve it.
“We spoke with the ad company who deals with the Tube,” James Turner, a member of Glimpse, told the Washington Post. “They said for that kind of money we could get the equivalent number of ads to take over one of the smaller stations, something like Wimbledon or Cockfosters. If we go beyond our target, we have every chance of getting into Oxford Circus, Bond Street or Marble Arch — one of the big ones.”
As for why they picked cats, Turner said, “There’s an infinite appetite for cats on the Internet.”
Pledges start at £5 (or around $7) for a C.A.T.S. Ad Blocker that replaces online ads with cat photos, while £100 (or about $144) will get your own cat featured on one of the billboards. If you love your cat, pledging £2,500 (or about $3,595) will put him/her on an entire poster. You can back the project here.
With 15 days left in the campaign, the group has only raised $7,841 – far short of the goal, so we’re uncertain if it’ll get funded. But even if it doesn’t, the campaign could bring attention to Glimpse’s practice of “culture jamming,” and highlight the need to reclaim public space from ads. According to the WaPo, the group is thinking about launching a social network focusing on extracurricular activities, called LinkedOut.
