The Big E Celebrates the Unexpected With Bold OOH in “Unexpect Everything”

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When a brand has a lot to say, outdoor advertising can turn that variety into a simple, memorable visual idea. Local OOH can help brands plan billboard, digital OOH, transit and experiential campaigns built for real-world attention .

From oversized special builds to street-level placements and digital screens, the right format can make a campaign feel as distinctive as the experience it is promoting.

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The Big E Turns Its Unpredictability Into the Campaign 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 potentially shop for a new hot tub in the same destination?

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

The campaign does not try to make the fair feel neat or predictable. Instead, it embraces the variety that makes the event difficult to describe, presenting unexpected combinations as one of the strongest reasons to visit.

The Big E brings together all six New England states for 17 days of food, agriculture, entertainment, shopping, rides and experiences. More than 1.5 million people attended the fair in 2025, according to the campaign information supplied for this article.

OOH Makes the Fair’s Larger-Than-Life Personality Physical

Outdoor advertising is a natural fit for a campaign built around scale, surprise and visual excess.

The supplied creative shows The Big E using bold colors, oversized typography and close-up food photography to turn familiar fair food into highly visible public advertising.

One set of executions promotes deep-fried apple pie, extravagant desserts and funnel cake with playful lines that connect indulgent fair food with exaggerated Americana.

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The creative works because it does not need to explain every part of the fair. Each execution isolates one surprising detail and gives it enough visual scale to become the message.

That approach is especially useful in OOH, where audiences often have only a few seconds to process an idea.

Oversized Food Becomes a Billboard Spectacle

Another execution takes the campaign’s appetite for exaggeration even further with a billboard built around an enormous chili cheese dog.

The headline reads, “If you want a small, you can give your friend half.” The line turns the product’s scale into the joke while the visual pushes the food beyond the boundaries of a conventional flat billboard.

This is where the campaign moves from simply advertising food to dramatizing the fair experience itself. The oversized presentation suggests that The Big E is a place where normal expectations about portions, combinations and experiences do not necessarily apply.

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Mobile Digital Ads Add Another Layer of Surprise

The campaign also includes mobile digital advertising designed to appear as though live goats are being transported inside the media unit.

That idea extends the same creative logic beyond food. Agriculture is part of The Big E experience, so the media format itself becomes a way to surprise audiences with something they would not normally expect to encounter in an advertisement.

Using mobile formats can also help the campaign move through different neighborhoods and markets rather than depending on a single fixed location.

A Visual Identity Built for Many Different Audiences

One of the campaign’s challenges is that The Big E attracts people for very different reasons.

Some visitors come for outrageous fried food. Others are interested in agriculture, horse shows, concerts, Midway rides, regional history, shopping or competitions.

Colossus Creative Director Ryan Dalton described that variety as one of the campaign’s strengths, noting that people with very different interests can all exist within the same fair experience.

Instead of creating a separate visual identity for every audience, the campaign uses a flexible system of bold colors, large typography, unexpected pairings and playful headlines that can adapt across different attractions.

Entertainment and Fair Traditions Collide in the Creative

The campaign also combines The Big E’s entertainment lineup with some of the fair’s most recognizable traditions.

One execution promotes country artist Jessie Murph as a butter sculpture, deliberately merging a concert announcement with one of the event’s more unusual visual traditions.

The fair’s lineup also includes Alice Cooper, The Beach Boys, deadmau5, Styx and Ice Cube, giving the campaign additional opportunities to keep pairing entertainment with unexpected fair imagery.

These combinations reinforce the central idea: at The Big E, things that would normally have little connection can appear side by side and still feel completely at home.

The Campaign Extends Beyond Outdoor Advertising

Although OOH provides some of the campaign’s most visually immediate executions, “Unexpect Everything” is designed as a broader integrated platform.

The work also runs across CTV, Meta, print, radio and experiential activations throughout New England and surrounding states.

This allows the campaign to repeat the same creative promise across multiple environments while adapting the execution to the strengths of each channel.

OOH can deliver spectacle and scale. Mobile digital can introduce movement and surprise. Social and CTV can extend the variety of attractions and entertainment, while experiential activity can bring audiences even closer to the personality of the fair.

Why “Unexpect Everything” Works as an OOH Platform

The campaign is effective as outdoor creative because it does not fight the complexity of the product it is advertising.

The Big E is difficult to reduce to one category, so the campaign makes that difficulty part of its identity.

The strongest executions use a straightforward formula: one unexpected attraction, one oversized visual and one headline that makes the combination feel intentionally excessive.

That creates a system that can continue producing new creative without losing recognition.

What Brands Can Learn From The Big E Campaign

• Turn complexity into a creative advantage. If an experience offers many different things, the campaign does not always need to simplify them into one conventional message.
• Use scale intentionally in OOH. Large food imagery and oversized typography make sense because the creative idea is built around excess and surprise.
• Let the format participate in the joke. Extended billboards and mobile digital units can make the media placement itself part of the concept.
• Create a system that can flex. A consistent color palette, typography style and tone allow very different attractions to live under the same campaign platform.
• Keep outdoor messages fast. The Big E executions communicate through one dominant image and a concise headline that can be understood quickly.

Final Reflection: OOH Makes the Unexpected Feel Bigger

The Big E’s “Unexpect Everything” campaign shows how outdoor advertising can capture the personality of an experience without trying to explain every detail.

By combining exaggerated food imagery, surprising headlines, mobile digital media and extended billboard executions, Colossus turns the fair’s unpredictability into a recognizable visual platform.

For brands promoting destinations, events or experiences with many different attractions, the campaign offers a useful lesson: sometimes the most effective idea is not to make everything fit neatly together, but to make the unexpected combination itself the reason people pay attention.