Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly - Ham on Wry: All About Sandwich Board Advertising

Episode Date: August 15, 2026

From the Under The Influence Archives, one of our favourites....Take a walk down any busy main street, and you’ll probably see one of the oldest forms of advertising: The sandwich board. They have been around for over 200 years. Cities try and ban them.Storekeepers love them. They can make you smile.They can make you angry.They can attract a lot of attention. They are the pop-up ads of the physical world. We know you want to listen to all the ads in this show. On the off-chance you don’t, subscribe ad-free here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Is subliminal advertising real? Superman or Batman? Best Canadian City to do a book event. Best ad of the past year. Well, I answer all these cues and more in a recent subscriber-only bonus episode, Apple or Android. Tap the link in the description.

This is an apostrophe, podcast production. The movie Die Hard with a Vengeance, hit theaters in 1995. It would be the third of five movies in the diehard franchise. Some movie sites say it's the best of the sequels. The original 1988 diehard film, which many consider a classic, made Bruce Willis an action star. In the movie, Willis played Detective John McLean.

While he didn't have the chisel physique of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone, Willis brought something else to the party. He was a smart ass, and he was funny. This third sequel had two key connections to the first diehard film. Original director John McTiernan returned to direct, and the diabolical bad guy named Simon Gruber has a personal grudge against John McLean.

The reason is revealed later in the movie. Hence, the subtitle, with a vengeance. The movie begins with an early morning explosion at a store in downtown Manhattan. The NYPD receives a call from someone named Simon, who claims responsibility for the explosion. Simon, played with icy perfection by Jeremy Irons, threatens to detonate other bombs in the city unless Detective John McLean undertakes a number of specific tasks

as dictated by Simon. It dawns on everyone that Simon has taken New York hostage in a deadly game of Simon says. For the first task, Simon demands that McLean go into the middle of Harlem wearing a sandwich board. Simon only gives the NYPD a few minutes to get there, or he will detonate another bomb. McLean is to be dropped off with the sandwich board,

and there are to be no other police within four blocks. The police rushed John McLean to Harlem. He is stripped down to his boxer shorts and a sandwich board is strapped onto his shoulders. The sign, as dictated by Simon, has a specific message on it, a racist message. Just before a gang of young black men spot him,

a Harlem shopkeeper comes to his rescue. His name is Zeus Carter, played by Samuel L. Jackson. He doesn't know what to make of McLean at first, or the fact he's wearing this very offensive sandwich board in the middle of Harlem. You've got about 10 seconds before those guys see you. When they do, they will kill you, you understand?

You are about to have a very bad day. Just as the gang spots his sign, McLean explains the situation to Carter. Listen, I'm a cop. What? I'm on a case. Somebody blew up on with tellers an hour ago. Did you hear about that on the news?

The same asshole did that. I got to come to Harlem and do this. He's going to blow up something else. Do you understand? As the gang starts to beat McLean up, Carter suddenly commandeers a cab. He and McLean jump into it, and the cab squeals away.

It's an important opening scene as it introduces Simon and his lethal game, and it introduces McLean to Carter, and the two of them become unwitting partners as they try and save New York from more. bombings. That sandwich board prop was an interesting choice to set the movie in motion. When shooting that scene, the filmmakers sent Willis into Harlem with the sandwich board,

except a sign actually said, I hate everybody, instead of the racist epithet you see in the movie. The offensive statement was added later in post-production with CGI. But both versions of the sandwich board were available. eventually used. When the movie was shown internationally and when it was shown on television, the original I Hate Everybody message was used. But when rented or streamed, the racist statement appeared on the sandwich board. The flexibility of the sandwich board allowed the filmmakers to soften the confrontation or ramp it up, depending on where the movie was being shown.

Sandwich boards have a long history in the world of marketing. As a matter of fact, they are one of the oldest forms of advertising. How they came to be known as sandwich boards is an interesting story. And almost 200 years later, they are still used today because they are cheap, portable, and flexible. They can make you laugh, they can make you think, and sandwich boards can sometimes get you in trouble. You're under the influence.

Sandwich board advertising has a long and bumpy history. Our research tells us that sandwich boards were first used in Great Britain as far back as the early 1800s. Advertising grew rapidly in the 19th century. Believe it or not, cities were already cluttered with advertising back then. Ads for merchants smothered virtually every available space. In London, armies of chalkers would roam the streets, drawing ads on walls, sidewalks, and street surfaces with colorful chalk.

Bill posters would paste paper ads to blank walls, windows and empty shops, fences, and poles. It said that bill posters could coat a bare wall with ads from ground to chimney overnight. Ads were hung on horse carts. Advertisements crammed newspapers and the first giant hand-painted billboards towered over busy streets. Then two things happened. The war for existing advertising space escalated and an advertising tax was levied by the government. Those two problems led merchants to think of other ways

to get their messages out to the public. And from that was born, the sandwich board. Merchants would hire people to walk up and down the streets wearing placards that advertise their goods and services. These hired hands would dress. up in eye-catching clothing and hang the advertising boards over their front and back held together by straps that crossed their shoulders. They were ambulatory advertisements, and they weren't subject to taxation.

In the bigger cities, like London and New York, a walking sandwich board could be seen by as many as 50,000 people a day. Sandwich boards became so popular, sandwich employment agencies sprung up. But why are they called sandwich boards? You may be thinking it's because so many restaurants used them. Not so. The origin of the term belongs to Charles Dickens. Dickens is credited with coining the term sandwich man.

He took one look at these new walking advertisements and described them as, quote, a piece of human flesh between two slices of pasteboard. Over time, sandwich man morphed into sandwich board. As an advertising medium, the flexibility of sandwich boards made them very popular at the turn of the century. I always say the 1920s were the heyday of the advertising industry. Money was flowing, the medium of radio emerged,

and advertisers could now send their goods across the country on trains. With that, branding was suddenly required, and advertising agencies began popping up everywhere to handle the surge of business. But as advertising became more sophisticated during that decade, sandwich boards fell out of favor, until the Great Depression hit. When the stock market crashed in 1929, a severe economic downturn crippled countries around the world. Construction virtually halted, crop prices fell by 60%, international trade fell by 50%, and thousands upon thousands of businesses shut their doors. With widespread unemployment, the public scrambled to find work. In this lean and austere time, advertisers pivoted to messages of thrift and patriotism. With that, sandwich boards made a comeback.

They were an inexpensive advertising option for businesses that were squeaking by, and hiring sandwich men was cheap. Much iconic imagery from the Depression shows people walking the streets with sandwich boards, either advertising a merchant's wares or advertising their own availability for work. A newspaper article from 1931 said, Scratch a sandwich man and you'll find a showman. Back then, Charles Henry Buckman was known as the most famous sandwich man in the world. He was an ex-circus Barker, an ex-boxing manager, author, impresario, cowboy, and cattle rustler.

He knew how to attract attention. Buckman would don high-class evening clothes and walk around the theater district of New York. He had a well-manicured goatee and a finely waxed mustache and wore a top hat at a rakish anguish. Buckman was indeed a showman. As he walked through the crowds on Broadway with his sandwich board, he would press a tiny button hidden in his pocket, and pink lights would pop on, illuminating the slogan of the advertiser

he was proudly sporting on his sandwich boards. Buckman was well aware of the spectacle he caused when pressing that tiny button. He was famous and became one of the city's walking attractions. Another sandwich man who also got a lot of attention in the 1930s was named James Finch. He stood 7 feet 6 inches tall and weighed 678 pounds. He wore size 14 shoes and a coat estimated at size 70. Finch also sported the largest sandwich boards, as you can imagine.

He earned $12.50 a day parading in front of local stores. Around the same time, newspaper headlines in the city of Detroit said that police had seized 80 nude photos and one sandwich man. Apparently, the sandwich man had a picture of a nymph cavorting on his front board and a photo of two nude figures dancing with tambourines on his rear board. The sandwich boards were advertising theaters showing, quote, nudist motion pictures. Police arrested the sandwich man, insisted the theaters take down indecent photos from their windows, but the movies were deemed okay by the police chief. Sandwich boards were a big part of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

In February of 68, 1,300 African-American sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee began a strike to demand better working conditions and better pay. Many of the strikers wore sandwich boards that said, I am a man, demanding that they be treated with dignity. The strike would eventually draw Martin Luther King Jr. to the city to deliver his last speech, I've been to the mountaintop. The sandwich signs became a rallying cry for the movement. While sandwich boards have had some meaningful moments in history,

a lot of cities would like to ban them today. In this day and age, the 200-year-old medium of sandwich boards is still heavily in use. They have been used in many strike situations with workers walking the picket lines wearing sandwich boards. Even the striking Hollywood writers and actors recently sported them. In most downtown areas, sandwich boards have been transformed into static advertising signs. Also referred to as A-frames, these tent-shaped boards are rarely carried by people. anymore, but rather placed on sidewalks outside of stores and restaurants. While they do generate awareness, they also create a lot of angst and a bit of an obstacle course

for pedestrians, leading many cities to try banning them. Niagara on the Lake Band sandwich boards on its main drag in 2012, then lifted the ban during the pandemic to help struggling businesses, then, reinstated the ban in April of 2023. In 2018, an Ottawa man got three dozen real estate signs removed from his neighborhood when he discovered the signs violated size and location bylaws. Toronto has been dealing with illegal sandwich signs for decades. According to the city, business owners must purchase a permit to display a sandwich sign.

They must have a registered business, a site plan, a photo of the sign, proof of $2 million in liability insurance, and must pay an annual fee of around $120 plus HST. Nobody does it. And the city doesn't have the resources to police the situation. The city of Dublin-Ireland band sandwich boards only to discover pub owners resorted to wheeling big beer barrels out onto the streets instead.

And now the city has to crack down on beer barrels. In London, England, birthplace of the sandwichmen, the city banned sandwich signs in the West End Theatre District in 2008, calling them cheap and ugly, saying, this is a world-class city, not a junkyard. But bylaws and bad press have not stopped the proliferation of sandwich boards. A shop called Big Star Sandwich in New Westminster, BC, used a clever sandwich sign to attract not only free publicity, but a big celebrity too.

The owners knew that actor Liam Neeson was in town filming a movie called Cold Pursuit. So they placed a sandwich board outside their sandwich shop that said, Liam Neeson eats here for free. Neeson was apparently filming nearby and couldn't resist. So Neeson used his very particular set of skills and brought some of the crew over to enjoy some sandwiches. It was a great photo opportunity and a big social media post. The two owners posed with the movie star beside the sandwich sign.

Clearly, Liam Neeson had been taken with the message. A pub in East London was once broken into overnight. The next day, the owners put a sandwich board out front that said, This pub is so good, someone tried to get in eight hours before we open. The media picked up on it, and the pub got a lot of free press and promotion. A cheese shop sidewalk sign said, Sweet dreams are made of cheese, who are we to disabree? A sandwich board outside a Niagara on the Lake Wine Bar said,

roses are red, wine is also red, poems are hard. A restaurant sign nearby said, Eat here, or we both starve. A sign outside a liquor store said, Buy your mom some gin. You are the reason why she drinks. Hmm, harsh. A coffee shop sandwich board said,

One small coffee, five dollars. One small coffee, please, three dollars. Hello, I'd like one small coffee. coffee please, $1.75. Clearly, manners got you a discount. The sandwich board was uploaded to social media and viewed 1.8 million times. Another sandwich sign had two yellow stickies on it.

One said, welcome to our bar. The second sticky said, we're out of chalk. A sign outside a workout facility said, You've got cute feet. Want to see them? Sign up. Still another restaurant sign touted its Trump sandwich. White bread, full of bologna with Russian dressing, small pickle. I look forward to your cards and letters. Sometimes sandwich boards get stolen.

One went missing from the rogue coffee shop in uptown St. John, New Brunswick. The staff looked everywhere, but couldn't find it. Then the manager pulled the security tape from a camera pointed at the shop's front door. He discovered footage of a man stealing the sign early in the morning. So the manager took a screen cap of the perpetrator and posted it on the rogue coffee shop Facebook and Instagram pages. The response was immediate. Numerous people recognized the culprit.

Then the coffee shop received a message saying the sandwich board was at a restaurant on the other side of town. So the manager drove over to the restaurant and spotted his sandwich sign through the window. But the restaurant was closed. So the manager decided to have some fun instead of calling the police. The rogue coffee shop gathered some coffee,

some cups, a table and chairs and created a little pop-up shop right in front of the restaurant. Then they began to video the restaurant. the event and put it live on Facebook with the hashtag free the sign. Soon, customers started showing up to buy a cup and support their favorite coffee shop. A little while later, two people came to unlock the restaurant. Neither was the guy caught on camera, but the rogue coffee shop manager demanded his sign back,

and the two employees had no choice but to return it. The entire exchange was captured on video. As a local news website later said, the restaurant got a little taste of rogue justice. Sometimes sandwich boards can stir up a little trouble. A restaurant in Charlottetown, P.E.I put a sandwich board out front that asked, How do you tell if a Newlander is gay? The punchline? If he eyes the buys.

It was a play on the traditional Newfoundland and Labrador folk song title Eyes the Buy. The sign caused quite a stir on social media, and the restaurant owners were called homophobic. As it turns out, the restaurant is owned by a gay couple, and the line was coined by the restaurant's transgender cook. The sign had been created during Pride Week in Charlottetown, and the owner said it had gotten nothing but positive comments, and many gay couples took photos of the board and stopped by for a bite.

The trouble started when some of those photos went viral. The owner said they weren't trying to offend anyone. They just wanted to make people smile. Sometimes sandwich boards have another function other than marketing. A San Francisco man was found guilty of stealing mail. The court sentenced him to, jail time and one other unusual form of punishment. He was ordered to stand outside his neighborhood post office wearing a sandwich board that said,

I stole mail, this is my punishment. The judge said the convicted man needs to understand the disapproval society has for this kind of conduct. The man appealed the case, saying that wearing a sign in public amounted to humiliation. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, saying the shaming could put him on a path of rehabilitation. The ruling was upheld. Wearing sandwich boards as punishment is nothing new, and have been metted out to drunk drivers, thieves, and even corrupt police officers. The idea being the fear of public humiliation might prove to be a powerful deterrent, because jail time and fines clearly aren't worn.

A few years ago, a man showed up on a busy street corner in Manchester, England, wearing a sandwich board. He was only wearing shorts and a t-shirt. The message on his sandwich board said, I'm so sorry, I lied. Reports say he stood out in the chilly evening for more than an hour. Eventually, a woman appeared. They had an intense conversation for about half an hour, then walked off together. Either she had made him wear the board as punishment,

or he had used the sandwich board to butter her up with an apology. Years ago, I was working at an advertising agency, and we had a restaurant as a client. It was situated upstairs from street level, so it had low visibility and needed more traffic. As we contemplated doing a radio campaign some print ads and a billboard, the creative director paused and said, Why don't we just do a sandwich board?

It seemed almost laughable. It was so low-tech. But guess what? That little sandwich board generated a lot of customers for that restaurant. We couldn't deny its power. Sandwich boards have survived for 200 years. In the age of ad blockers, sandwich boards suffer no filters,

no ad skipping and no remote control fast forwarding. All you can do is close your eyes and hope not to trip. Someone recently said sandwich boards are the pop-up ads of the physical world. In an era of expensive media advertising, amusing sandwich boards are rewarded with likes, social media posts, and photo ops, resulting in a lot of free advertising. Sandwich boards can attract customers, they can support striking workers, they can make you smile,

they can get you in trouble, they can act as punishment, and every once in a while they can even pull in the odd celebrity when you're under the influence. I'm Terry O'Reilly. This episode was recorded in the Terstream Airstream Mobile Recording Studio. Producer Debbie O'Reilly, sound engineer. Jeff Devine, research Angus Mary. Under the Influence theme by Ari Posner and Ian Lefevre. Tunes provided by APM Music, follow me on social at Terry O. Influence.

This podcast is powered by ACAST. And if you'd like to read next week's fun fact, just go to apostrophepodcast.com.com. And follow the prompts. See you next week. Hi, this is Kay from Willowdale, Ontario. Fun fact. There are literally thousands. of sandwich boards in Toronto, but according to the city, there are only 41 legal ones.