Here’s the latest edition in a billboard advertising campaign that goes back to 1987 – when downtown’s LeRoy Jewelers began taking a whimsical look at goings-on in Tacoma.
This board, at South 10th Street and Pacific Avenue, points to the nearby and soon-to-be-vacated Russell Investments building.
“How do you tell a story in a way that’s going to be different? We also like to make people laugh, in this year in particular,” said Steph Farber, LeRoy Jewelers co-owner, on Tuesday.
“If you look at jewelry advertising, it all starts to look the same,” he said. “I think that not only do we not want to look like everyone else, we are not like everyone else.”
“We’ll have 18 billboards in the county,” said Kurt Jacobson, president and creative director at the Tacoma advertising agency JayRay. Jacobson designed the campaign with Farber’s help.
Other billboards will carry messages including “We are not moving to Seattle since 1941” and “I’m fine in ’09.”
With the downtown billboard, Farber said, “This is our way of saying, ‘OK, something happened, and now it’s time to turn around.’ We want to salute the Russell workers and the community. Let’s be able to laugh as well.”
C.R. Roberts, The News Tribune
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