Lee Tone

A flaming billboard… What could possibly go wrong?

Outback asked us to come up with a simple billboard that told people that they now had the option to have their steak cooked over a wood-fired grill. So we said they should blow up a billboard. We created 108 billboards across the country that looked like they had been burned to a crisp.

*People ask me all the time if this is a real billboard or a comp. I assure you it’s real.

The billboard in Atlanta had billowing smoke and LED lights. People thought it was real and kept calling 911 to report a fire. The local news in Atlanta decided to run a story on it and a producer at CNN saw the story and put it on the national broadcast. (unfortunately the broadcast video is lost to the internet’s fading memory)

Then we made an online video that combined people's love of OOH spectaculars with spectacular fire #FAIL videos.

The whole thing generated $4M in earned media.