Institute For The Future

Bus shelter ad with built-in scale

Amsterdam agency N=5 created this bus shelter ad for Fitness First, the world's largest privately-owned health club chain. The bus shelter displays the weight of the person sitting on the bench. It's a very minimalist design, just a digital read-out and a logo for the health club. But it does force engagement with the advertisement in a very immediate and visceral way. It doesn't persuade directly, but rather indirectly, providing you with data that persuades you to persuade yourself to lose weight. Checking your weight is usually a very private moment, between you, your scale, and maybe your doctor or personal trainer. This ad makes that moment public, availing you to the most powerful kind of persuasion around: peer pressure, real or imagined. And according to some critics, the curbside weigh-in is nothing more than ad-supported public shaming