The Great Outdoor

Outdoor advertising no longer means eight-sheet billboards on the side of a highway. These days, you’ll find off-premise advertising on trains, behind planes and on vending machines. Like the media themselves, outdoor-advertising messages and images are diverse. From baby clones to bouncing lottery balls — you name it, you’ll find it on an outdoor display.

Vehicle Graphics Bat 1000

It sounds more unbelievable than your Uncle Henry’s fish tale. But the Florida Marlins — only five short years after the ’92 expansion draft in which they and the Colorado Rockies were born — won last year’s World Series.

Some might attribute the Marlins’ grand-slam year to good pitching and scrappy play. Still, one can’t help but wonder whether the team’s ever-growing legion of fans — and their "Fish, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah" cheers — also contributed toward the ballplayers’ success.

You see, last year, the Marlins experienced a 36% increase in attendance, part of which may be attributed to a graphics campaign initiated by Marlins’ personnel. At the end of the ’96 season, the Marlins hired Burton Photo Industries, Inc., Philadelphia, PA, and its sister company, CLM Imaging Services, Miami, FL, to create strike-ing new graphics for Miami’s metromover and the team’s road-show trailer.

Burton and CLM stepped up to the plate early on, assisting in every phase of the project — from original design concept through final installation. The two companies worked with outside designers and Marlins’ staff to design colorful, cartoon-style artwork for the vehicles. For the metromover, depicted here, the pictorial shows the team cheering on the fans, thanking them for their support. In contrast, the road-show trailer depicted a Marlin player sliding into homeplate.

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Printing the graphics was no problem. Thanks to the company’s new 3M Industrial Adhesives & Tapes Div.’s Scotchprint