The City of St. Louis is tackling car break-ins by placing advertisements:
In an effort to reduce car burglaries and thefts, billboards and posters will carry the message across the city’s central corridor, coupled with concentrated police enforcement and proposed legislation aimed at stiffer penalties for first-time offenders.
The ads already proved successful in a test in the Police Department’s Third District, where car break-ins dropped by 40 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007. Soulard businesses plastered the posters throughout their establishments, said Bill Shelton of St. Louis-based Left Field Creative, which managed that campaign and is donating his help to broaden it.
Was it the ads or was it the concentrated police enforcement? It doesn’t matter. What does is that the advertisements are more effective at the most important thing: getting city officials invited to ad agency parties rife with hot 22-year-old creatives.
(Here’s a related sign from downtown St. Louis whose image I seem to have temporarily misplaced.)
