Barack Obama London Underground ads - Update

When I posted yesterday about Barack Obama adverts on the London Underground, I wasn't expecting to create quite such a mystery, extending to Democrat Party Forums like Democratic Underground!

I hadn't realised that Daily Kos had already picked it up, and a fairly lengthy (but sadly not particularly helpful) discussion has broken out there. My favourite theory is that the ads are from the future.

Dvorak Uncensored also picked up on it, for the same reason as myself and Daily Kos, having stumbled upon the isolated image of Obama on a London Underground platform. Again, debate has failed to identify a plausible reason for the ads and has again become hung up on the meaning of the Number 10 behind Barack Obama. IT'S NUMBER TEN DOWNING STREET! If you don't believe me, watch the footage of Barack Obama visiting Number Ten Downing Street earlier this year below.



The comments on my own site, and things I have discovered through good old fashioned chatting to people at work, have been marginally more helpful. When I originally saw the images on the Jubilee Line, there was a shot of the CERN Large Hadron Collider nearby. I now believe this is part of the same series.

I'm also told that there is an image of David Cameron, the current leader of the Conservative Party, walking past a picture of Winston Churchill. This has been spotted at Oxford Circus.

This gives us a full list of images as follows:

Barack Obama outside Number Ten Downing Street

A golden football

A young boy in swimming shorts

A woman in a sports vest doing some kind of stretch

The CERN Large Hadron Collider

David Cameron walking past Winston Churchill

This is obviously a big outdoor campaign for someone, but they are keeping quiet about it and it is generating a decent amount of buzz around London. My best guess at the moment is that it's for a news outlet, either a newspaper or TV News, or at a longer shot a new TV show. Television is traditionally a big outdoor advertiser, but it doesn't explain why the focus seems to be on the London Underground network.

I'm slightly concerned this might turn out to be an enormous anti-climax, but it has certainly been an interesting day or so. I expected that name-checking Barack Obama on my blog might generate some more traffic, but didn't have a clue to what extent. At Highbury and Islington, I decided to take a snap of his billboard, directly opposite the image of the lady on the other platform.



UPDATE: There's another discussion here on Not of this ilk, which raises the preposterous, but very funny, idea that the Barack Obama image is part of a series of teasers for the new season of Lost.