Samsung's new billboards are utterly illegible (unless you have a Galaxy S23 Ultra, that is)

One of the most important qualities of any billboard design is arguably legibility. With print ads often viewed at speed – or even from inside a vehicle – information needs to come across quickly and effectively. But Samsung has cleverly turned the idea on its head in the latest ads for its S23 Ultra.

Featuring a 100x zoom, the S23 Ultra is one of the best camera phones around – and you'll need it in order to read the (literal) small print on Samsung's new billboards. (Looking for inspiration? Check out the best billboard ads of all time.)

Created by Ogilvy New York, the Tiny Type campaign features, as the name might suggest, some very tiny type. "For those who haven’t yet seen the difference that Samsung's S23 Ultra 100x Zoom can make," Ogilvy shares in its case study, "the brand and Ogilvy New York partnered on a campaign showcasing the product’s incredible power. An interactive digital out-of-home campaign, “Tiny Type” playfully invites people to pay closer attention to spaces they might otherwise ignore. The campaign takes to some of the most iconic urban spaces in the world – from New York City’s Times Square to London’s Piccadilly Circus to Tokyo’s Omotesando – with large-scale billboards featuring tiny-sized messages that beg to be discovered, while showcasing the power of the Ultra 100x Zoom."

Examples include a billboard in New York which reads, in increasingly small text, "Enjoy Times Square like a local. It's simple. Just leave." It's certainly a clever and provocative campaign, although it's curious that the ads don't actually include a call to action encouraging passers-by to take out their phones and zoom in. To many, these might just look like unfinished sentences or ideas. 

But like a lot of billboards these days, the concept arguably works more effectively when viewed from a distance online, with the context neatly spelled out for us (in this case, in the form of a photos showing the ad through the screen of a zoomed-in S23 Ultra). Still, at least these appear to be genuine, physical billboards – unlike some of the fake CGI "out of home" advertising we've started to see over the last year or so.