Blow-Up Billboards

I think that I shall never see A billboard lovely as a tree. Indeed, unless the billboards fall I'll never see a tree at all. --Ogden Nash, Song of the Open Road.

These days Ogden Nash might have trouble seeing the forest as well as the trees. Now appearing along American highways are giant, air-filled, three-dimensional billboards. Since Robert Keith Vicino, 28, the president of Robert Keith & Co. of San Diego, created his first inflatable billboard display (a 30-ft. tall beer bottle for Budweiser in 1979), demand has inflated as fast as the blow-up advertisements. This year Vicino expects sales of $1.2 million.

The bulbous parts of the billboards, which are attached to a regular outdoor advertisement, are made out of vinyl-coated nylon, and a small electric fan directed inside the air bag keeps them inflated. The inflatables tout everything from hot dogs to radio stations. One in Toronto that shows a 12-ft.-long airplane nose sticking out of an advertisement for Pacific Western Airlines cost $4,000, and a billboard in The Bronx that has a 23-ft-long hand pulling a cigarette out of a 12-ft.-high pack of Kent Golden Lights was $11,000.

Vicino has erected 50 blow-up billboards, and so far reports few problems. The company says that it has received no complaints from neighbors irritated by the inflated advertising. The only untoward incident was when a prankster in Newport Beach, Calif., stuffed a mannequin's leg into the mouth of a giant killer whale advertising the Los Angeles Marineland amusement park.

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