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Billboard Advertising
| Synonyms: | |
| See also: | Fan Campaigns |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Billboard advertising is a type of fannish activity where a Fan Fund is used to purchase advertising space on a billboard in hopes of promoting the subject of one's fannish obsession. It is increasingly prevalent in K-Pop fandom. As well as being a way to promote one's fandom, these advertisements become hubs, attracting fans to take photos with the boards, and help facilitate unplanned meet-ups.
Billboards might also be used by fans, following fundraising, to protest the cancellation of a show, an event during the show, or as part of a wider project about concerns with media, such as those raised by the LGBT Fans Deserve Better fan campaign.
K-Pop
Purchasing billboards in Time Square has became a tradition in K-Pop circles for celebrating milestones in a group's career. BTS and EXO have has billboards commissioned of their group's anniversaries, and individual idols have had boards erected to commemerate their birthdays.[1]
Other fandoms
As part of the highly publicised PewDiePie vs T-series feud, YouTuber Justin Roberts also bought an extremely expensive billboard in Times Square in support of PewDiePie.[2]
In March 2023, Pipkin Pippa fans purchased a billboard in Tennessee to display an image of her to celebrate her birthday. The billboard became a shrine, with many fans travelling to visit it and stay in the motel that overlooked it.
As part of the fan campaigning after the disproportionately large number of deaths of queer female characters on TV in the beginning of 2016, including the death of Lexa from The 100, the LGBT Fans Deserve Better fan campaign used funds raised to have billboards put up around Los Angeles for the campaign. Following what appeared to be the on-screen death of Villanelle in Killing Eve, fans set up a website (www.killthetrope.org[3])raised funds to have a billboard similar in sentiment — calling out the Bury Your Gays trope via what happened in the show — put up by the Thames in London[4].
In 2022, Warrior Nun was cancelled. The cancellation was another one in a growing number of shows with sapphic main characters being cancelled, and the news prompted a significant fan response, including a campaign. As part of this campaign, funds were raised for billboards in Los Angeles, New York City, London, and Milan[5]. A number of cast and crew of Warrior Nun visited the billboards and took photos, and fans from around the world used the billboards as meeting points for fan meet-ups they arranged.
Criticism
References
- ^ https://nextshark.com/rich-k-pop-fans-spent-hundreds-thousands-year-buy-ads-nycs-times-square Rich K-Pop Fans Have Spent Hundreds of Thousands This Year To Buy Ads in NYC’s Times Square]. DECEMBER 12, 2017.
- ^ Buying PewDiePie a $1M Billboard in Times Square!. Posting Nov 20 2018.
- ^ "Kill The Trope (Website Offline, Archive available)". Archived from the original on 2025-02-19.
- ^ "(Unofficial) Killing Eve Billboard Team, Twitter, Active until September 2022". Archived from the original on 2025-02-19.
- ^ "WarriorNun.com, Billboards". Archived from the original on 2025-02-20.