An ad campaign dreaming of the future… (Photo courtesy of Yorkville Blog)
Via the Yorkville Blog comes a special sighting of the Second Ave. subway on ads for Absolut Vodka of all places. But, hey, I’ll take it.
The ad is part of Absolute’s new “In an Absolut World” ad campaign. Much like Virgin’s latest You Rule campaign, these ads seem targeted to specific neighborhoods. The photos snapped by Yorkville Blogger show up at 2nd Ave. and 86th St., the future spot of a stop on the Second Ave. subway.
They present a nice glimpse of the future (or the past as it should have been). But just how accurate are these ads? The answer at which this subway-obsessed blogger is “not very.”
For starters, look at the turquoise T, and then look at the one to the left of this paragraph. Notice something? That’s right; the Second Ave. subway bullet is turquoise with white lettering and not turquoise with black lettering as Absolut shows us. Only the N, Q, R and W trains have black lettering.
Next, take a gander up at this site’s header image. Notice the turquoise and yellow strips running along Second Ave. Well, that’s because the Q will make all the same stops as the T. In fact, as I noted in March, the Q train extension will constitute Phase 1 of the construction. The T won’t exist until the entire line is finished.
Finally, look at that old, tiny station entrance in the Absolut ad. The real Second Ave. subway entrances may look quite ostentatious according to the preliminary designs.
But for all the flaws, it’s a fun ad campaign. The Second Ave. subway has entered the collective consciousness of our city’s advertisers. Can the real line be all that far away?
For more pictures of the ads, check out Yorkville Blog’s post.
6 comments
Love the ad–very eye-catching. And in my opinion, it wouldn’t work as well with the new fancy entrance that’s in the planning designs. Everyone who knows subways knows that the entrance above is what they look like.
The problem I see is that we don’t live in an Absolute world, but then is everything relative?
I saw this ad for the first time today. Loved the concept, but now it’s going to bother me since you pointed out the errors.
Thanks a lot Abolute Ad ruiner.
They probably couldn’t use the white T for copyright reasons or something like that.
And the old-style subway entrance in the ad doesn’t bother me because in an “absolute” world, the second avenue subway would have been built in the 1930s and would have featured those old-style entrances in the first place rather than the new styles planned.
Finally, if it had been built in the 1930s, it would have been a simple north-south T line – not incorporated with a make-shift Q line.
Therefore, I have no problems at all with the ad – think its great, but wish it could be here about 15 years earlier than planned.
Good points Kevin. The MTA, after all, forced “F Line Bagels” at Smith and 9th street to take down their F bullet sign for infringement reasons . . . which is a shame, because it was a great logo for a business down there on a shabby corner.
I wish they would bite the bullet and spend the extra $$ to make all the entrances into the streetwall, instead of the sidewalks. The sidewalk entrances take up too much sidewalk space on busy streets.
True, sidewalk entrances take a good deal of space from the sidewalk. And also, had the Second Avenue Subway been built there would have been an express/local service because that was in the 1920s-1930s! (See IND Second System)