Rethinking Calendars

AdLab's Rethink: series is about creative that is built around core and often unexpected properties of a particular medium. The first and the most popular post was about print, but I also really like  billboards that give, a road that plays music,  shopping bags that turn into kites, and interesting fishwrap.

Today, we continue the series with these wonderful promo calendars.




Calendars have what?  Leaves. Which makes it a perfect medium to promote a leaf blower. This calendar is rigged so that its leaves fall off automatically one each day and pile up on the floor; see for yourself in a video.




The thickness (or, rather, thinness) of paper has been explored by this knife brand before, in a print ad. This calendar with a slice of onion chopped off every day is a year-long reminder of the knives' sharpness.




The least obvious property of a calendar -- that the dates match up every 28 years -- was tapped into by Italy's League for the Environment to promote recycling.


The calendars below are interesting, too, although in a different way.




This idea is built not so much around the physical properties of the medium itself as a related saying "An apple a day keeps a doctor away". A calendar with 31 real apples in a tube, for a health insurance company.





A calendar in the shape of a photo lens promoting photog's services.




And a bizarre calendar with a leaf for each of the 7300+ days (that's 20 years) of warranty that a solar panel manufacturer gives its clients.