God Speaks - Charles Robb - Hardcover - 1 ED

Introduction This all started in June 1998. 1 was working as the creative director for the Smith Agency, a small advertising firm in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Andy Smith, the president of the agency, came into my office one afternoon to discuss an unusual assignment from an unusual client. The client, who wished to remain anonymous, wanted us to create a billboard campaign that would reach people who had, for whatever reason, drifted away from church or synagogue. The idea was to get people to think about their spirituality and having a relationship with God in their everyday lives. At the time I thought it somewhat ironic that I would be asked to work on an advertising campaign designed to reach.... well, me. Because like a lot of people, my attendance at religious services had become pretty much limited to weddings and funerals. We didn't think that overtly religious messages would be the answer here, but rather that this campaign would have to be something contemporary yet totally unexpected. That's when I thought of creating the series of quotes in God Speaks. My method was simple: As I thought of the fundamental lessons I had learned from my parents and in Sunday School, I tried to put them into the language of today, often with a sense of humor. Later, when the campaign was a success, an interviewer asked me how I knew God had a sense of humor. I said, "If he doesn't, I'm in serious trouble." From more than one hundred lines created, we chose eighteen to run as ads in the Fort Lauderdale campaign. While those first "God Speaks" lines ran the gamut from serious to poignant to funny, all were designed to make you smile in recognition-and then think about some of the deeper levels of your life and yourself. The look of the campaign, we believed, should be simple, straightforward, and stark. The result: black signs with white type. No logo, no phone number. The client liked our ideas, added a couple of lines, and shelled out in the neighborhood of $150,000 for the first billboards. It still astounds me that someone could be altruistic enough to pay for something like this and not want recognition for it. I believe what he said was, "The message is what's important here, not who paid for it." At any rate, the campaign we called "God Speaks" began running in September 1998, and the billboards were scheduled to be up for three months. Almost as soon as the ads appeared, the local press began to cover the story. It seemed as if we were doing interviews daily. Everybody wanted to know who the anonymous client was, but on that subject, we weren't talking. Soon, the story began to get national attention: Peter Jennings closed World News Tonight one evening with it, and CNN ran it internationally. (I know this because I got a call from a woman who saw it on TV in Israel.) There was also a segment about "God Speaks" on the Today show. Three months later, just as the original billboards were coming down, the Smith Agency got a call from Eller Media, perhaps the largest billboard company in the world, saying that Mr. Eller himself had heard of the campaign and wanted it to run nationwide! He wanted to know if the anonymous client would donate the billboard sayings. The answer: In a heartbeat! The Outdoor Advertising Association of America (OAAA), the trade group made up of all the companies who own and rent billboards, was approached by Eller, and they agreed to coordinate making "God Speaks" their national public service advertising campaign for 1999. And by the end of 1999, the campaign appeared on something like 10,000 outdoor signs in 200 cities around the United States. It has also been translated into Spanish for Puerto Rico and there are plans in the works to take "God Speaks" worldwide. I've been asked why I think "God Speaks" has generated so muchRobb, Charles is the author of 'God Speaks - Charles Robb - Hardcover - 1 ED' with ISBN 9780375504273 and ISBN 0375504273.