Stadtwerke München - current poster campaign

Stadtwerke München (SWM), a company that provides electricty, water, and gas to Munich, has recently started a new publicity campaign using the graphic seen here. It's cute, especially when viewed in full-size on the billboards dotted around the city. The style is very, ummm, "Toytown". The buildings almost look as if they're made out of Lego.



Featured landmarks include the Chinese Tower, Olympiapark, Rathaus, Frauenkirche, BMW tower, Highlight Towers, Schrannenhallee, Eisbach canal, and Siegestor. Maybe you can spot more?

Notice also how the layout of the buildings follows an approximate "M" shape. This is a common theme amongst all SWM campaigns.

Related topic: Munich Loves You - tourist board promotional video

Dunno about Toytown, looks like a screenshot from SimCity to me.

Müllersches Volksbad
National Theatre, Max-Joseph-Platz

Can you choose who supplies your water, gas and electricity? I thought you have no choice but to get it from them, in which case I'm not sure why they spend so much money on advertising?

St. Paulskirche:



Theatinerkirche:

I was wondering the same thing.

Anyway, I like the poster and wouldn't mind having one as a future souvenir.

You can change to other electricity suppliers fairly easily. But... other companies were in the market, eg. Yello, offering cheaper electricity but they found it a hard market and the whole admin and changeover thing was crap. I assume the set up could be similar for gas, but the market is of course smaller. For water, the German local authorities are responsible, there's no choice and Munich discharges this duty through the SWM.

So why is SWM advertising itself if it has a monopoly position? Well it wants you to identify with the brand and thus build support for keeping public utilities like this in the public hand. A lot of places in Germany have privatised utilities and the nightmare tales I hear about E.On.

I agree with the SimCity assessment. One of the few video games I like.

I stopped playing SimCity years ago, but when I was addicted, I used to dream about it.

The citizens are gonna get angry soon. There aren't any roads...

The Feldherrnhalle and the new Messe can also be seen in the picture.

You might be able to get the poster at the SWM Shop in the Marienplatz S/U Bahn station.

The style of the advert is taken directly from the website Icontown, which was a much-written-about collective graphic design project in the late nineties. I contributed quite a few icons to the project, including some of their standard buildings and a few of the landmarks of Berlin, where I was living at the time. Bear in mind that I was working for an audit company at the time, so anything was more interesting than actual work, even drawing buildings pixel by pixel. This may be why I never made partner.

Everyone has a free choice (from many!) of electricity supplier. Berlin and Hamburg also have a free choice of gas supplier which will slowly extend to other regions. As Monkstown suggests, SWM are simply raising brand recognition with their new campaign...

SWM raising their profile could be to build a groundswell of opinion amongst consumers to keep it public or alternatively to boost its value if there was a move to sell it.