Toyota’s New Billboard Campaign Cleans The Air

With their new billboard campaign Toyota wants to address the issue of air pollution. This spring, the car brand launches a series of 37 air-purifying billboards on the American west coast.

With this campaign Toyota wants to promote their hydrogen-fueled Toyota Mirai, a car that produces no emissions except from water. Placed along the highways around San Francisco and Los Angeles, the billboards will clean the exhaust of around 5,285 vehicles per month. This eventually will help prevent smog and acid rain.

Brands seem to do everything to position themselves in the ‘clean urban era’. Doing so they increasingly spend marketing budgets to make cities better. With this rather ironical campaign — there are still many Toyotas out on the streets that producing tons of NO2 — Toyota takes at least a step in the right direction. Using billboards to improve the air quality is interesting as many people hate billboard advertising. This campaign shows that these structures, that are omnipresent all around the world, could potentially have a new function, right there where they are needed most: along and above the highway.

Toyota is not the first advertiser to purify the air with billboards. In 2014 the University of Technology and Engineering in Lima created a billboard transforming dirty air into potable water.