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New 2007 Ford “Edges” Off Billboards
Detroit, Michigan—If you’ve driven by a billboard with a car hanging off it, then you’ve probably seen the new Ford® Edge. This past December, Ford created a billboard campaign to promote the 2007 car; it ran seventy-five billboards nationwide, nine of which featured the three-dimensional car.
The nine 3-D boards were scheduled for installation in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. The remaining boards will be a mix of a 2-D version of the 3-D boards and traditional billboards.
“The 3-D models are attention-grabbing and really drive home the point that Ford has an all-new crossover called Edge,” says SUV/CUV Marketing Communications Manager Dave Sanabria. “The cool thing about the 3-D model is that we’ve pushed the limits of traditional outdoor boards and we’ve taken it to the next dimension—literally.”
Each 3-D Edge is a full-size scale foam model, created by MMT, a company specializing in large-format visuals. Prop Art Studio of Detroit, Michigan, sculpted the 3-D Edge models in its downtown studio, working from photographs of the actual vehicle, blocking in the basic shape by gluing four-inch thick sheets of Styrofoam® together, and then carving the shape of the body.
The finished foam bodies and the extraneous parts—like wheels, tires, and side mirrors, which were made separately—were sprayed with urethane; this created a hard surface that could then be sanded smooth and painted. When finished, the bodies were primed black and sent off to a local bumper shot, where they were painted in factory-correct Blazing Copper with chrome three-bar grilles and chrome eighteen-inch wheels.
“It’s important to have the proper wheel styles, details, and colors,” states MMT Account Director David Paschke. “The billboards may spur potential customers, and you want the vehicle to be representative of what’s available.”
Once the bodies are complete, they are fitted to a urethane-sprayed Styrofoam chassis, which is built around a steel support structure that includes the mounting structures and the hookups that will allow cranes to lift the vehicles into position. The wheels and tires are added last, along with real windshield and back window wipers (the only true Edge parts on the models).
Each Edge 3-D model takes about three weeks to complete and weighs about 600 pounds without the steel structure and nearly 1,200 pounds fully built and ready to install. They come complete with an engineering certification—a requirement from many billboard companies, assuring that each foam sculpture will stay put.
“These were built with a lot of extra detail with the intent of being repurposed,” says Paschke. “A lot of times, if they’re being done just for billboards, we don’t have to put in a lot of detail. But Ford wanted to be able to reuse these, so we added as much detail as possible.”
Ford’s foam Edge fleet will spend about four months aloft before accepting their next assignment.
—Lori Andreozzi
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