Bizarre BART Ad Baffles Everyone

Well, okay then...

​On BART, you can still see plenty of baffling things -- how can people think it's acceptable to spit sunflower seeds on the padded seats, for one? But the ads are usually straightforward.

But then there's this.

On the left of the BART fare gates is an anthropomorphic duck mom with her wee duck daughter clutching a little girl doll. And on the right is a mother and daughter -- a daughter with a duck doll. That's odd enough. But the caption reads "The brainchild of meeting haters."

Huh. That phrase, incidentally, doesn't come up on Google at all. Our calls to BART's media apparatus, marketing people, and the firm responsible for placing the ads, Titan Outdoor, have not been returned. So we ended up calling members of BART's elected board of directors. And we got an answer -- sort of.

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When the above ad was explained to BART board member Lynette Sweet, she replied "You just described something out of The Twilight Zone to me. I can't make head or tail of it."

The bizarre ad rang a bell with Bob Franklin, however. The board member recognized it as part of the "Art on BART Program," in which a small percentage of ad space is turned over to internal messages such as "keep your feet off the seats," no food," or ... whatever this poster is purporting to say. Franklin recalled seeing a similar BART art poster in which a man in a diving outfit is descending a BART elevator and a sea creature is ascending one.

As for the caption "The brainchild of meeting haters," Franklin was stumped there, too, but speculated the poster and caption were not related. Sweet figured the caption may have originally advertised a product that allowed people to get things done via the internet instead of face to face.

Feel free to contribute your wisdom, readers. That, too, would be the brainchild of meeting haters.

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