The Big E “Unexpect Everything” OOH Campaign

Turn Unexpected Ideas Into High-Impact OOH With BM Outdoor

Some of the most memorable outdoor campaigns work because they are willing to exaggerate the thing that makes a brand or experience different. BM Outdoor can help brands bring bold billboard, DOOH, special-build and experiential concepts to life across high-impact outdoor formats.

The Big E takes exactly that approach with “Unexpect Everything,” a campaign that embraces the fair’s unpredictability instead of trying to explain it away.

The Big E Turns Its Unpredictability Into the Main Idea

Where else can visitors see a more than 600-pound butter sculpture, eat a deep-fried calzone, watch a horse show, enter a quilting competition and shop for a new hot tub in the same trip?

That unusual combination of experiences is the starting point for “Unexpect Everything,” a new campaign created by Boston-based independent creative agency Colossus for The Big E, America’s only multi-state fair.

The fair brings together all six New England states for 17 days of food, agriculture, entertainment, shopping, rides and attractions that rarely seem as though they belong in the same place.

Instead of trying to make the experience feel more orderly, the campaign celebrates that lack of predictability.

OOH Makes the Fair’s Scale and Absurdity Impossible to Miss

The outdoor work uses oversized food photography, large typography and humorous copy to communicate the fair’s personality quickly.

One of the most striking executions features an enormous chili cheese hot dog extending across the bottom of a billboard beneath the line:

“If you want a small, you can give your friend half.”

The physical scale of the food becomes part of the joke. Rather than simply describing generous fair portions, the billboard visually exaggerates them until the food dominates the entire structure.

A Campaign Built Around Unexpected Combinations

The Big E is difficult to summarize because its appeal comes from the number of different experiences happening at once.

Visitors may arrive for outrageous fried food, agricultural competitions, concerts, midway games, shopping or classic fair attractions. The campaign turns that variety into a creative system by deliberately combining things that do not normally belong together.

According to the supplied campaign information, mobile digital executions even appear to house live goats, while extended OOH billboards showcase the fair’s oversized portions alongside lines such as “The kind of foods invented on a triple dog dare.”

The result is a campaign that does not try to create one neat definition of the event. Instead, it communicates that the unpredictability is the point.

Transit Posters Turn Fair Food Into American Icons

The campaign also adapts its visual language to smaller OOH formats.

Transit posters feature individual fair foods against bold red, blue and purple backgrounds with oversized white typography.

Examples include a deep-fried apple pie under the line “As American as deep fried apple pie” and a funnel cake paired with “Ride the amber waves of funnel cake.”

Another execution celebrates “250 years of questionable diets” with an intentionally extravagant dessert combination.

Bold Typography Helps the Campaign Work at a Glance

The visual identity is built around strong color, large type and simple compositions that can be understood quickly.

That is especially useful in OOH, where audiences may only have a few seconds to process the message.

Instead of filling each execution with detailed information about the fair, the creative focuses on one strange or exaggerated idea at a time.

The event branding and dates then provide the necessary context.

The Campaign Flexes Across Different Audiences

Colossus creative director Ryan Dalton described the campaign as versatile enough to work for people who come to The Big E for completely different reasons.

Some visitors are drawn by outrageous fried foods. Others come for horse shows, concerts or regional traditions.

The campaign does not force those audiences into one narrow message. Instead, it creates a flexible platform that can highlight different attractions while maintaining the same visual tone.

Entertainment Becomes Part of the Unexpected Creative

The campaign also combines The Big E’s entertainment lineup with the same unexpected logic.

One ad reportedly promotes country artist Jessie Murph as a butter sculpture, combining a concert announcement with one of the fair’s most recognizable traditions.

The supplied information lists performers including Alice Cooper, Jessie Murph, The Beach Boys, deadmau5, Styx and Ice Cube.

That gives the creative platform another way to generate surprising combinations without abandoning the central idea.

More Than 1.5 Million Visitors Give the Campaign a Large Cultural Stage

According to the supplied campaign information, more than 1.5 million people attended The Big E in 2025.

That scale helps explain why the campaign needs to work across so many interests and media formats.

The work extends beyond billboards and mobile digital advertising into CTV, Meta, print, radio and experiential activations throughout New England and surrounding states.

OOH plays an important role because it can communicate the fair’s energy through scale, physical presence and highly visual executions.

What Makes the OOH Work Stand Out

• The product imagery is intentionally oversized. Large food photography makes the fair’s generous portions feel impossible to ignore.
• The copy is playful and immediate. Headlines are short enough to work in outdoor environments while still carrying a clear sense of personality.
• The campaign celebrates contradiction. Food, agriculture, music, rides and shopping all appear within the same creative platform.
• The visual identity is highly adaptable. Bold type and simple color fields allow the campaign to move between billboards, transit posters and digital formats.
• The media scale matches the event scale. Large-format OOH helps communicate the oversized, energetic nature of the fair itself.

Why “Unexpect Everything” Works as an OOH Platform

The central idea gives Colossus room to create many executions without making the campaign feel fragmented.

Each ad can focus on a completely different part of The Big E while still reinforcing the same message: visitors should expect combinations they would not normally encounter anywhere else.

That flexibility is particularly valuable in outdoor advertising because different locations, audiences and media formats often require different creative treatments.

For brands looking to build similarly flexible real-world campaigns, BM Outdoor can help plan billboards, DOOH, transit media and special-build executions that adapt one central idea across multiple physical environments.

The Takeaway for OOH Advertisers

The Big E’s campaign demonstrates that a complicated experience does not always need to be simplified into a conventional message.

Sometimes the complexity itself can become the creative platform.

By using oversized food, unexpected combinations, bold color and humorous headlines, “Unexpect Everything” translates the chaotic appeal of the fair into advertising that feels equally energetic.

For OOH teams, the broader lesson is that the most distinctive brand truth can often become more powerful when the media format exaggerates it rather than explaining it.

Bring Your Next High-Impact OOH Idea to Life With BM Outdoor

If your brand has an idea that needs scale, physical presence or a custom outdoor execution, BM Outdoor can help turn the concept into billboards, DOOH, transit advertising and special-build OOH campaigns designed to stand out in real-world environments.