Hey Ladies! Lee Design Firm Draws Attention With Gender-Bending Hockey Ad

Naples Daily News

By: Jessica Lipscomb

A quick word to visiting teams playing at Germain Arena: If you’re wondering why Blades fans are snickering at you, poke your heads forward and look down.

You look like a bunch of girls.

Having snagged the advertising space in front of the Florida Everblades visitors bench, a Lee County creative studio decorated the surface with the legs of five sitting women. The resulting illusion made national headlines earlier this week when it was covered by Yahoo! Sports and MSN Now.

“It’s fun, and it’s really nice to get noticed,” said Matthew Connar, owner and creative director of the Cape Coral-based Boost Creative. “With all our ads, we try to have a little bit of wit with it.”

When fans first saw the dasher board, “you definitely heard a chuckle in the stands,” said Chris Palin, vice president of sales and marketing for Germain Arena. “I’m glad it’s taken off the way it has.”

The small boutique design studio, which recently redesigned the Everblades’ website, employs three graphic artists who collaborate and bounce ideas off each other, Connar said. For the visitors bench ad, the team was inspired by wrap ads that stretch across cars and sometimes give the illusion of something happening inside the vehicle.

Connar said Boost Creative expects to stick with the legs theme but modify it for upcoming seasons with clown legs, joker legs or anything that pokes fun at the other team.

In the past, the dasher board on the visitors bench has typically just shown the advertiser’s logo, Palin said. The legs gag “keeps people interested and thinking about it.”

“It’s perfect for the business,” he said. “You always try with any advertising to cut through the clutter, and this has definitely done it.”

Since Boost Creative put the ad up, the company has had several requests for quotes on projects, although some of the incoming mail was just from fans “patting us on the back,” Connar said.

“It just proves that you don’t have to have a traditional advertisement,” he said. “You just have to have something that creates emotion.”

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