Change of direction (again)

I began to develop this idea of a brand and it's blank advertisements only to realise within a discussion with some friends that I had a much stronger idea from the very beginning that I didn't choose to follow through with for whatever reason.

The idea to take the format of advertising (so the traditional advertising methods with bill boards, on buses and such) and to use it to communicate positive/thought provoking messages or useful information that people would benefit from. Topics such as exercise, meditation, the environment, something along those lines. Because I think the format of advertising is useful and considering they are everywhere, people will see a lot within a day.
I think that this tackles the problem I posed to begin with of advertising promoting products in an unethical way and instead can be used to communicate more useful messages than those just of consumption. All of this would hopefully promote happiness and lighten up people's days, rather than to decrease it by degrading people's self worth through photoshopped models/ celebrities on bill board posters etc.

My first thoughts on how I could visually represent this is by using already commonly seen colours and typefaces used from brands to grab the attention of passers by, but the content would instead be positive/useful messages.

A perfect example of this would be from Stefan Sagmeister's talk Happiness by Design where he shows an example of a friend's piece of work that does a similar take on this idea. A group of designers overruled the usual subway instructions. They replaced the typical informative posters with posters that evoke genuine happiness, posters with a funny side to them whilst retaining the same design as the previous posters. Typically the posters would have been boring but although the format of it stayed the same, the content changed to be something interesting and funny.

An example of how I could present this would maybe to use the attractiveness of ads that already work by this I mean take the bold, striking colours of existing ads and use them to my advantage such as McDonald's red and yellow for example. The same goes for typefaces, using Nike identifiable typeface to catch the attention of passer-bys that would typically think it's an advertisement and will instead take in the positive message it's stating.

Colours

McDonald's Key Colours

Pepsi's Brand of blue

Coke's Distinctive Red & White combination

Typefaces

Adidas' Brand Typeface

McDonald's Typeface (Best Guess)

Nike's Brand Typefaces (Old&New)

The messages within these advertisements would be positive ones or ones that provoked some sort of response within the person to think about. A couple of topics that came to my mind that I feel everyone could benefit from knowing the benefits about was meditation and exercise.

Rather than telling people what to do and stating the benefits, instead I think that wording it in such a way that sounds more like advice would be better received by the audience. By using purely typography I feel like a strong message can be communicated when combined with bold colours and common, recognisable typefaces as previously mentioned.

Following the usual combination of red and yellow of McDonald's plus their usual typeface used within ads, it will hopefully catch the eye of the audience whilst communicating an important message that would contradicts typical advertisements.