• by Les Luchter , 4 hours ago

It’s been quite a week for oversized OOH fingers in Times Square.

On Monday, Wet Ones and BBH USA put up a five-screen board displaying fingers, palms and knuckles that looked like buttocks as part of a campaign driving home the point that the brand’s wipes are “Just for hands. No ifs, ands or butts.”

On Tuesday, Goodwipes -- an unrelated brand -- worked with Quan Media Group to meet the moment with own billboard and mobile trucks declaring, “We’re actually just for butts.”

On Wednesday, Wet Ones responded with its own new signage. “Very cheeky, @Goodwipes,” read the billboard text. “Together, we can clean up this city.”

And on Thursday, kicking off a major campaign in an entirely different category, Oura Ring and the nice&frank agency displayed fingers and hands not as butts, but as… legs and torsos?

In the out-of-home (OOH) content, fingers wearing Oura rings stroll along as if they were legs.

Coming a year and a half after another Oura campaign told New Yorkers to “Give Us the Finger,” this one -- titled “Wear Your Best Life” -- could well evoke memories in older consumers of the decades-long “Let Your Fingers Do The Walking” Yellow Pages campaign, created by “Mad Men”-era agency Cunningham & Walsh in the early 1960s.

In addition to five placements in Times Square, running through Sunday, Oura will unveil a hand-painted mural in San Francisco next Wednesday, followed by what the brand calls “spectaculars” in both hand-painted and digital formats in not only New York and San Francisco, but also Los Angeles, Toronto and Vancouver.

The OOH content -- and emphasis on “handmade” elements --  are offshoots of a :30 campaign hero spot in which the brand and agency assembled a team of 35 master modelmakers in Prague to build a scale-model city -- by hand, of course -- that included a nearly 20-foot-long street, working miniature subway cars, a rooftop pool with real water, a skate park, brick walls and a motorized taxi.

Then, choreographer Lilach Chen -- whose "fingerbreaking" (finger breakdancing) YouTube videos have more than 1.35 million followers -- worked with 14 Oura-clad hand dancers from 14 countries to, in the brand’s words, “bring rhythm, stride, and emotion to hands stepping through tiny streets, diving into water, and navigating everyday moments.”  It’s all done to a soundtrack that the brand calls an “Oura Handthem.”

The campaign’s point: Oura helps people with wellness no matter what they’re doing throughout the day.

“The ring is small, so Oura has always had to shoot extremely close,” the brand stated. “This time the team leaned into that constraint completely with a campaign that is, fittingly, handmade.”

The spot kicks off Oct. 8 during Prime Video’s “Thursday Night Football,” and will also run during NBA Opening Night, Oct. 20 on NBC/Peacock and baseball’s World Series on Fox, as well as on NFL Sunday pregame shows, and other streaming services like Hulu, Netflix, Paramount+, and HBO Max.

In addition to the TV and OOH, Oura has also posted a making-of film on social media, and promises additional content “from hand and craft creators” as well as retail media.

“Wear Your Best Life” is set to run through year’s end in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany, UAE, and Australia.