Yesterday morning, commuters driving into Montreal from the Jacques Cartier Bridge may have been caught rubbernecking, as a Rona billboard placed strategically underneath Apple’s well-known iPod Nano Chrome ad was designed to turn heads. The Rona poster, about 130 feet in the air, held up by wire and two cranes, appeared as if it was collecting the bright drips from the iPod Nanos into Rona paint cans to advertise the DIY home improvement retailer’s paint recycling program.

The billboard remained there from about 6 to 11:30 am, attracting morning traffic impressions, explains Claude Larin of Bos, account director for Rona. ‘We just want to add a smile on their face,’ he tells MiC. ‘It’s just a wink, to start a day with a smile.’ An art director at the agency came up with the idea while walking to work one morning, says Larin, and ‘we just got inspired. We thought, ‘we have to do this.’ So we presented the idea to Rona and they laughed all the way, so we decided to do it.’

Apple was not officially a part of this OOH stunt, but because the billboards exist as two separate ads, the execution was legal, says Larin. Production was executed in collaboration with street marketing agency Trako Media.

In March, Rona launched a new ‘Doing it Right’ signature that puts the spotlight on the company’s sustainable development efforts, including the sale of eco-responsible products, its paint recycling initiatives and its new policies on pesticide sales and wood products procurement. There have been various phases of the campaign for the chain’s new signature extending across all mediums – TV, print, radio and OOH.

The billboard’s message of sustainable development will appeal to a very broad, eco-conscious demographic, says Larin. ‘We do want people to bring back the old paint so it could be recuperated,’ he says. A video of the production titled the Art of Recycling is posted on Youtube.