Zoo who? The Denver Zoo's new "mystery" billboard campaign

Kudos to the folks at Denver Egotist for first noticing this billboard-size blunder: Two billboards have gone up, one at Cherokee Street and Alameda Avenue and one at West Custer Place between Lipan and Jason streets, emblazoned with Denver Zoo's manipulative ad slogan "Every time you visit you help animals."...

By Joel Warner

July 7, 2009

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Kudos to the folks at Denver Egotist for first noticing this billboard-size blunder: Two billboards have gone up, one at Cherokee Street and Alameda Avenue and one at West Custer Place between Lipan and Jason streets, emblazoned with Denver Zoo's manipulative ad slogan "Every time you visit you help animals.". But the signs are missing a key ingredient: a zoo logo or anything else that would suggest what the ads are actually advertising.

Whoops. So now passersby are left with an impassioned desire to help animals but no idea how to do so. What, exactly, should they visit? A 7-11? A race track? A Furries convention? Maybe the billboard is one of those "teaser" ads in which eventually the correct place to visit will be revealed -- the Denver Zoo! On second thought, it's probably just a major screw-up.

Or it could be that the zoo is in such bad shape financially that they didn't have enough dough to finish the ads. In that case, maybe the billboards should be reworked: "Every time you visit you help zoo marketers"

That should surely inspire some impassioned zoo visitors.

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Joel Warner is a former staff writer for Westword and International Business Times. He's also written for WIRED, Men's Journal, Men's Health, Bloomberg Businessweek, Popular Science, Slate, Grantland and many other publications. He's co-author of the 2014 book The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny, published by Simon & Schuster.

Contact: Joel Warner