I have been staring out my office window at a billboard that says “See the World Through Ana’s Eyes” for the past few weeks and had no clue who Ana was, what world she was looking at and what the billboard was advertising. A search on the Net only brought up Flickr albums of people either named Ana or people who know an Ana who thought the billboards were cool. I spammed my company asking “Does anyone know the meaning / purpose behind these billboards?” and got a lot of inspired but in the end incorrect responses.
Finally, bored and starting at the billboard last Friday I tried one more web search and found a link to a tweet (that is a Twitter message for those not in the know – if you don’t know what Twitter is, well, then you are even less in the know) that informed me it was an ad for Ana Tzarev who is opening a gallery of her work in November. I contacted the PR firm Fitz & Co. who is representing Ana and spoke to Bethanie Brady who confirmed that yes, the Ana in the ad is Ana Tzarev. She said,

the text-only black and white campaign will give way to a city wide public art exhibition of colorful large-scale (some 4-stories tall) reproductions of the artist, Ana Tzarev¹s work. In anticipation of their November opening, Ana Tzarev Gallery has worked with New York based cultural marketing firm LaPlaca Cohen to create this campaign to share Ana Tzarev¹s work with all of New York.

The billboard across the way has already changed over and I’ll try to update this post with before and after pics soon. In the meantime, kudos go to all who worked on the campaign as they were able to keep it’s message under wraps for quite some time. My co-workers are all very Net savvy and no one could figure out what the billboard meant. Sure, that pissed some people off but in the end, if you are advertising something, you want people to be talking about that something.
Now, where Ana gets the money to open a gallery and purchase all of these billboard ads is another question altogether…