What happens to all those campaign signs after the polls close?
Tuesday night we spotted a little guerrilla marketing operation that might be worth replicating.
Tom Daniels and Missy Stevens, owners of Chicago’s Six Point Pet, a dog collar company that features the work of local artists, pulled up just before midnight to the community center at Welles Park, a Lincoln Square polling site where more than a hundred campaign signs have been crammed into the front parkway for the past several weeks.
Daniels and Stevens hopped out of their car and went to town clearing a spot on the grass and turning a dozen or so signs into three simple but inviting-looking dog houses.
They said the project was a way they hoped to turn the long campaign into some social media buzz for their business. They attached a few stickers promoting Six Point Pet to each house and snapped some pictures before driving off.
Would Welles Park workers clear them away by morning? Probably. (And they did.) But wouldn’t it be fun if the dog houses could stay for even one day?
After such a long — and often ugly — campaign season, what would it hurt?
Heck, let’s make it a citywide thing. The city could turn the idea into a public art project by giving other local creative groups permission to turn campaign signs at other polling places into instant art. Give them from 7 p.m., when the polls close, until midnight and make it a social media contest.
It’d offer a great sense of comic relief after all the mudslinging.
Then the cleaning crews and campaign workers can come through and haul the signs away. And we can laugh about which politicians are now in the dog house.
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