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Catelli’s campaign Fork, developed by LG2 and released in Canada in 2022, brings the brand’s...
How Lg2 Turned a Quebec City Billboard Into a Magic Act
Magic Mop is a 2014 outdoor advertising campaign created by Lg2 for the Quebec City Magic Festival in Canada, in which a billboard-mounted mop appeared to clean the hoarding's surface by moving up and down through a concealed magnet mechanism, transforming the advertisement itself into a live illusion.
Published in November 2014, the campaign ran in Quebec City and comprised a single media asset — a physical OOH billboard installation designed to stop pedestrians and passing traffic with a sight that defied casual explanation. The mop's movement was not random spectacle. It was engineered to be precisely legible as magic: controlled, rhythmic, and apparently self-directed. Audiences encountering the billboard saw no visible mechanism and no performer, only an object behaving impossibly in public space. That sensory gap between observation and explanation is the precise emotional territory the Quebec City Magic Festival occupies as a cultural product.
The campaign's objective was straightforward in concept and demanding in execution: to make the festival's core promise — the experience of genuine wonder — physically present on a street corner in Canada before a single ticket was purchased. In a recreation and leisure category crowded with poster art and event listings, Magic Mop bypassed the representational entirely. The billboard did not show magic. It was magic. That distinction placed the campaign in a tradition Lg2 had been building for the Festival de Magie de Québec across several years, using public media as a stage rather than a surface. Clapboard's editorial team rates Magic Mop 64 out of 100, recognising its creative integrity and conceptual clarity while noting the campaign's reach was bounded by its single-asset, location-specific format.
The Quebec City Magic Festival competes for leisure spending in a Canadian market where live entertainment, cultural tourism, and seasonal festivals all pursue the same discretionary dollar. Festivals such as the Montreal International Jazz Festival and the Festival d'été de Québec command significant public profile and established media presence across Canada, making differentiation through conventional advertising economically inefficient for a specialist event. Lg2's strategic answer was to collapse the distance between the advertisement and the experience being advertised, producing a campaign whose medium was inseparable from its message.
The OOH format was not simply a channel choice. It was a strategic necessity. Magic, as a live performance discipline, depends on the shared presence of audience and illusion in real space and time. A digital banner or broadcast spot can describe that experience; a self-animating billboard on a Quebec City street can produce a version of it. According to Mediapost, global digital out-of-home advertising reached a growing market in 2014, with compound annual growth reflecting increasing investment in formats capable of dynamic, attention-commanding behaviour. That market context made ambitious OOH execution commercially legible to planners and clients alike. In Canada specifically, tourism and leisure advertising was characterised by moderate growth in the years leading to 2014, according to research published at the time, meaning the Magic Festival needed creative distinctiveness rather than media weight to generate visibility.
Lg2 had established this strategic platform for the Festival de Magie de Québec before 2014, as documented by Communication Arts. Earlier executions including Magic Hat and Sliced Girl demonstrated a consistent methodology: render the festival's promise physically visible through impossible-looking transformations in public media. Magic Mop extended that platform with a mechanism — concealed magnets — that was technically simple enough to be reliable in a Canadian November outdoor environment yet perceptually complex enough to sustain genuine bewilderment.
The Magic Mop installation operated on a principle of maximum effect through minimum visible means. A mop head mounted to a Quebec City billboard moved vertically across the hoarding's surface, driven by magnets concealed within the board's structure, with no motor, no performer, and no visible power source apparent to street-level observers. As reported by Adweek, the billboard appeared to be cleaning itself — a description that captures both the literal mechanic and the layered conceptual wit of the execution, which positioned the festival as something capable of making the mundane genuinely strange.
Adweek characterised Magic Mop as an example of what it called meta-vertising — an advertisement whose physical behaviour becomes the entertainment rather than a vehicle for communicating a separate offer. That framing identifies the campaign's creative ambition precisely. The craft challenge was not ideation but engineering: producing a mechanism robust enough to operate continuously in public, legible enough to read as intentional rather than malfunctional, and visually clean enough that the absence of explanation remained a source of delight rather than frustration. The single media asset format, as documented by Clapboard, meant every production resource was concentrated in one installation, raising the stakes for execution quality considerably.
Lg2's creative approach across the Festival de Magie de Québec platform, as documented by Communication Arts, consistently prioritised the transformation of a conventional media format — the poster, the billboard, the street installation — into an object that behaved contrary to its category norms. Magic Mop is the most kinetic expression of that approach. Production credits for the Magic Mop campaign beyond Lg2's agency authorship are not publicly documented in available sources, though the work was attributed to the agency's Quebec City office, which has maintained a long-standing creative relationship with the Festival de Magie de Québec.
No verified performance data for the Magic Mop campaign is publicly available in the form of audience reach figures, ticket sales uplift, or measurable recall metrics. The campaign ran as a single outdoor installation in Quebec City in November 2014, a format and timeframe that predates the widespread deployment of OOH measurement infrastructure capable of capturing impression data at the individual execution level in the Canadian market.
What the campaign's structure makes analytically legible is its mechanism of effect. Adweek reviewed Magic Mop on November 24, 2014, describing the billboard as, in its words, a delightful little document of a whimsical stunt — editorial coverage that itself constitutes a secondary distribution channel, extending the installation's reach beyond its physical location in Quebec City to an international advertising audience. That earned media dimension is structurally significant for a festival operating with the budget profile typical of a specialist cultural event in Canada. A single well-executed OOH installation generating trade press coverage in a publication of Adweek's reach effectively multiplies the campaign's audience without additional media spend.
The campaign's placement within a documented multi-year creative platform for the Festival de Magie de Québec, as recorded by Communication Arts, also suggests strategic effectiveness beyond the individual execution. Platforms generate compounding recognition. Each successive campaign by Lg2 for the festival — Magic Hat, Sliced Girl, The Disappearance, and Magic Mop — reinforced the festival's identity as an event willing to perform its own promise in public. That consistency of approach represents durable brand equity. Clapboard's score of 64 out of 100 reflects the campaign's genuine creative integrity and its clear conceptual logic, balanced against the inherent reach limitations of a single-location, single-asset outdoor execution.
Magic Mop is a 2014 outdoor advertising campaign created by Lg2 for the Quebec City Magic Festival in Canada. A billboard-mounted mop appeared to clean the hoarding's surface by moving up and down, driven by concealed magnets. The installation had no visible mechanism, turning the advertisement itself into a live public illusion.
Lg2 created the Magic Mop campaign for the Quebec City Magic Festival. The Montreal and Quebec City-based agency has maintained a long-standing creative relationship with the Festival de Magie de Québec, producing a series of OOH campaigns including Magic Hat and Sliced Girl that preceded the 2014 Magic Mop execution, as documented by Communication Arts.
The Magic Mop billboard used concealed magnets to move a mop head up and down across the hoarding's surface. No visible motor or performer was present, as reported by Adweek. The mechanism was designed to be reliable in outdoor conditions while remaining perceptually inexplicable to street-level observers in Quebec City encountering it for the first time.
Clapboard rates Magic Mop 64 out of 100. The score recognises the campaign's clear conceptual integrity and its effective collapse of advertisement and experience into a single object. The rating reflects reach limitations inherent to a single-asset, location-specific OOH installation in Quebec City rather than any weakness in creative execution or strategic logic.
Magic Mop was part of a continuing creative platform Lg2 built for the Festival de Magie de Québec across multiple years, as documented by Communication Arts. Earlier campaigns including Magic Hat, Sliced Girl, and The Disappearance established the same methodology of making the festival's promise physically visible through impossible-looking transformations in Canadian public media.
Adweek reviewed Magic Mop on November 24, 2014, describing the billboard as a delightful little document of a whimsical stunt. The publication characterised the campaign as an example of meta-vertising — a format in which the advertisement's own physical behaviour becomes the entertainment, rather than serving as a vehicle for communicating a separate offer about the Quebec City Magic Festival.
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