"Mum, Mum, look, LOOK! It's Stella! Stella Artois!"
Grabbing the attention of the average train passenger isn't all that easy these days, but the 200ft-long, 15ft-high billboard outside Clapham Junction station — aka the 'Clapham Colossus' — is in a league of its own. This is the landmark most Londoners know, yet no one has ever actually got off the train to look at. Given the tangle of tracks in front of it, that'd be wholly inadvisable.
True, the Colossus is helped by some serious footfall railfall; 2,000 trains are flung through the south London interchange every day; some 22.8 million train passengers per year.
Even so, it takes something big to prise eyes away from phone screens, and draw them towards whatever's going on outside the window.
The Colossus knows what it's doing. "We know people look out for it. It's iconic. It's unexpected. And it is huge. It feels a very special site," Janet Guest, Head of Communications at JCDecaux, tells Londonist.
While the famous Piccadilly Circus lights upgraded to a single LED megascreen with 3D capability in 2022 — and can now give the illusion that oversized astronauts are drifting over your head — the Clapham Colossus remains proudly first-gen. True, the Colossus is backlit with LED lights (when it was originally established in 2006, the lighting came from fluorescent tubing), but that's as digital as it gets.
Size might not be everything, but it plays a major hand in what makes the Colossus a talking point. Operated by JCDecaux since 2010, the giant billboard hosts in the region of just 12 installations a year. While Piccadilly Circus advertises multiple brands in any given second — all of which can be changed at the flick of a switch — it take five to six days to paste up/construct each new Colossus commercial.
This is a beast that must be treated with the time and respect it deserves.
By the same token, the billboard's unique dimensions (it is very possibly, says JCDecaux, the longest billboard in Europe) encourages advertisers to bring their A-game. Commercials are tailored to the Colossus; it's an opportunity for copywriters and graphic designers to, quite literally, stretch their talents.
Interesting results come about because of this. One of JCDecaux's earliest ads was for the 2010 Hollywood adaptation of Gulliver's Travel — a giant Jack Black tethered down with ropes, as if by Lilliputians let loose in south London. The billboard is a shoo-in for catchy one-liners. "Soo-pah-kah-la-frah-jah-lis-tik-eks-pee-ah-lee-doh-shus" ran a clever ad for Google voice search. Another ad, informing people Uber was now bookable through train apps simply went: "Uber XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXL". Copy-wise, it is, conversely, a case of less is more.
Given that a healthy portion of people who eyeball the Colossus are commuters, many adverts are geared to this market, of frazzled heads that'd been through another weary day. "When you've nine to five'd, circled back, touched base, synergised and taken it offline enough, Uber Eats", winked one ad, with a maki roll dangling temptingly at the end of the sentence from a pair of chopsticks.
Many thousands en route to Gatwick Airport clock the Colossus too, which is why you may also see ads with an A380 lifting off into the Battersea skies. In 2012 Smirnoff took out a rather befuddling commercial that conflated transatlantic travel and cranberry & vodka, with a font that looked straight out of the the London Dungeon. Not everyone can live up to the terrific possibilities that the Colossus affords.
Such is the unique potency of the billboard, when one commuter we spoke to was on the train with her then-young son, and he caught sight of a Colossus commercial for Stella Artois beer, he was instantly compelled to shout "Mum, Mum, look, LOOK! It's Stella! Stella Artois!" (Stella Artois, it turns out, is also the name of the dog in Michael Morpurgo's children's book Kensuke's Kingdom). "My son is 21 now and we always smile and always remember how excited he was whenever we are passing that site."
There are, however, limits to what can be done, as Janet from JCDecaux explains: "We were once asked if we could turn it into a giant fish tank and we said no to that!"
While the lengthy billboard works wonders when it comes to snatching a few precocious seconds of screen-scrolling away from passing passengers, its goal is in fact to get them straight back on their phones: "The scale of large-format ads drives trust and confidence in the brand among consumers. 77% trust the advertising," says Janet from JCDecaux, "An ad like this is the perfect primer for social — if you see it on an OOH ad it will make an ad on social channels even more effective."
In a not-too-distant future, when all analogue billboards have bitten the dust altogether, we will pore over the legacy of the Clapham Colossus, and marvel.
Or perhaps, like one of its protractive commercials, the Colossus will simply go on and on and on.
