How Living Billboards Work

When it comes to elevating vegetation atop a man-made structure, consider these two extremes: a highway billboard overtaken by kudzu and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. While the former simply happens on its own, the latter -- one of the Seven Wonders of the World -- required quite a bit of effort and ingenuity, much like today's living billboards.

Installing a living garden atop a sign requires more work than what usually goes into typical billboard. For instance, the team at Leo Burnett didn't just glue a bunch of potted plants to its Chicago billboard. Team members hired a horticulture expert from the University of Illinois to implement a patented Canadian vertical growing method. The complex structure underlying the sign involved the use of soilless soils and an irrigation system. Plus, the firm had to alter its original time frame for the campaign to meet the needs of the plants, as the lettuce wouldn't have coped well with the summer heat [source: Larson].

A winning entry from the 2008 International Design Awards (IDA) Land & Sea Competition took a promising approach to the notion of a living billboard. TODO Design and Das Studio presented plans for a billboard structure that greens up the area surrounding the sign, while not actually playing a role in the advertisement. The design calls for water to be raised to the billboard's potted plants via a pumping system that, in turn, is powered by solar panels on top of the structure [source: IDA].

Environmentally friendly technology often plays a role in green billboard designs. In fact, Japan's Ricoh Company Ltd. launched a billboard in New York City's advertising-heavy Times Square in January 2009. The buildings in the area are crawling with brightly lit advertisements, like a kind of urban kudzu, but the $1 million Ricoh sign gets all of its electricity from solar panels and specially designed wind turbines [source: Gruber].

Of course, as any fan of the television show "Mad Men" can tell you, advertising executives and hippies don't exactly see eye to eye on everything. Are living billboards truly green, or are they greenwashing?

If you're not familiar with the idea of greenwashing, then think of the last time you turned on the TV. Was that bottle of cleaner really nontoxic, or did it just boast friendly earth tones on the label?

Or what about that car commercial with all the animated leaves and chirping birds? Even if the vehicle advertised is environmentally sound, what about the rest of the manufacturer's policies, products and production standards? Might one "green" product merely serve as a means of distracting from all the damage it continues to inflict on the planet? To learn more, read How Greenwashing Works.

As you might imagine, many critics look at an advertisement such as the McDonald's lettuce billboard, and even the "fresh" menu items it promotes, as a form of greenwashing. Yet, many observers recognize that a living billboard is better than a dead one, regardless of the advertiser's motivations. Even the sustainability Web site Treehugger.com admitted to liking the campaign [source: Alter]. TODO Design and Das Studio's plans also met with praise from some environmentalists, for their use of self-sustaining technologies and oxygen-enriching vegetation.

A lot of options will likely come down to billboard location. Even one lush with vegetation is hardly a part of the natural environment out in the countryside. In an urban environment, however, the billboard would likely stand in the midst of artificiality anyway. Planting greens on a billboard can only serve to enrich the oxygen and maybe even reduce urban heat islands, which contribute to solar radiation absorption and, according to some, global warming [source: Rothstein].

Explore the links on the next page to learn even more about advertising and environmentalism.