So us here at Ye Olde Barbarian have been whipping up a really awesome li’l site for this company you may have read about, Hello Health. They’re changing the way you’re going to interact with your doctor from “hardly at all” to “whenever you need to, using the Internet” and it’s all very awesome and exciting for those of us who grew up in the Kosmo.com days and thought, “Man, why can’t everything be like this?”

So aside from our usual internetly duties, we’ve stretched ourselves to take on creating their brand and ideas on how to get the word out in NYC that don’t depend on 3G or WiFi (you know, IRL). One of the things they asked us to do was come up with a concept for some local subway station ads that would run only in the zip codes they service.

Now, I’m not sure, but I think this might mark the first time we’ve designed print subway ads in TBG history. And, as such, we approached the problem with our usual parallel kind of thinking:

Granted, subway ads seemed a bit…premature. After all, when you’re building a great national brand that specializes in hyperlocal service, you don’t come in both guns blazing, ESPECIALLY when you’re a healthcare brand advertising to 20-something creative, independent urban dwellers like our customers in Williamsburg. That’s brand suicide, and threatened to undo all the other brand-building initiatives we were planning in parallel.

But what if it wasn’t an ad at all? What if it didn’t provide answers about the brand, but instead sparked some curiosity. What if instead of talking to the people, it asked them to join in the conversation?

So we came out with this:

Now, the guys at Hello Health were instantly into it. Despite a 24 hour deadline from concept to proof, we had almost no changes. They got it, they were into it (isn’t it awesome to have the occasional courageous client?). But as the launch date approached and the printer started churning them out, even we weren’t sure how people would interact with them. We knew our theories made sense, but how would it work in the wilds of Brooklyn?

Well, this is how they looked the night of the opening, mere hours after they were installed:

So great. I remember running down the platforms, snapping photos of each one I found. The Manhattan-bound side was more creative (more volume), but the Brooklyn bound side more thorough (longer wait, thanks G Train)!). But each and every one had something to say. A lot of it was funny, some of it risqué, some of it even kind of sweet. But none of it was evil or racist or hating. It was awesome.

So, we headed over to the launch party, where we approached the client to share our excitement. “Didn’t you hear?” he asked, “The MTA is making us take them down.”

Huh?

It seems that the MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority, for those of you living anywhere else) has a bit of a problem with vandalism, and won’t stand for any advertisement that “encourages vandalism”. Now, in all honesty we expected our ads to be written on – that was a bit of the point. But we didn’t design them to encourage vandalism; being subway riders ourselves, we simply recognized that boredom + creativity + mischief often leads to ads being written on and remixed (sometimes with hilarious results), and we decided to capitalize on it.

No dice, says the MTA our Media Placement company. Can’t do it. When we contacted our rep, he said that we wouldn’t even be able to run ads with a voice bubble graphic because that might violate their sensibilities (important to note here that the Hello Health logo itself contains a blank voice bubble).

And in a scant 72 hours after launch, they were gone.

Huh?

Why do we see this as successful, even though we were forced to remove our work and scrap the subway ads altogether? Well, quite simply, we were more interested in getting people talking about Hello Health then we were in advertising to them. And sure, we would’ve liked to have them up longer, have another round with more writing, but in the end, people saw them, used them, and recognized them for what they were. Our theories held, and when Hello Health pops it’s little voice-bubbled logo up somewhere else in the periphery, at McCarren Pool or on a Vespa, those people will have that touch of familiarity and positive feelings, and hopefully go get that rash looked at.

Or, to put it more bluntly, this is what happens when you get an interactive group to create a subway ad. You get interaction.

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UPDATE: So apparently it wasn’t the MTA, but our Media Placement Company who made the call to strike the Hello Health ads. So, deepest of apologies, MTA, for being under the mistaken impression that you were bad guy on this one. Tell you what? I’ll buy an unlimited Metrocard and promptly lose it as penance.