Every day commuters who travel through the famous London Underground are visually assaulted with dozens upon dozens of advertisements: on the walls, up and down the escalators, and even on the turnstiles. But commuters who pass through the Clapham Common station in South London for the next two weeks will enjoy a vastly more enjoyable experience, as a creative collective group has replaced all of the advertisements with 68 pictures of cats. It’s just like the internet, only IRL!
The project, named “The Citizens Advertising Takeover Service,” or “CATS” for short (get it?), is the brainchild of Glimpse, a self described “group of friends who want to use creativity for good.” Earlier this year, a group of volunteers put together a Kickstarter to fund the project, and ended up raising over £23,ooo. In a blog post, Glimpse founder James Turner is quick to point out that this isn’t some kind of guerilla marketing stunt promoting a movie or pet food, describing the inspiration for the group’s project.
Instead of focusing on the problem, we create ‘glimpses’ of a world where things are getting better. Back in February we asked ourselves to “imagine a world where friends and experiences were more valuable than stuff you can buy”. The team began thinking about crowdfunding to replace Tube adverts with something else. Beautiful forests? Time spent with family? Hmmm. We wanted this to become famous, so we needed something the internet would love. Frame it that way and the answer’s obvious. Cats.
While the initial idea was to just feature aesthetically pleasing pictures of cats, the group eventually decided to take it one step further by featuring photos of cats in need of “furever homes,” many from Battersea Dogs and Cats Home or Cats Protection, the UK’s leading feline welfare charity.
Here are some more of the photos of the project passersby have posted to Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BKRVvUthZZo/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BKRXKImAzfe/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BKSoFggg9Sn/