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This tweet has been making the rounds about the dangers of bad kerning:

"Cover your home in a click" advertisement

Supposedly the letters "c" and "l" are run together so that "click" looks like "dick" instead.

I call shenanigans. Surely someone noticed the problem while the sign was going up? Has the image of the sign been modified from the original? Or is this an optical illusion?

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  • 5
    A bit OT but the blue tag line had me choking on my coffee.
    – Basic
    Sep 4 '14 at 7:24
  • 8
    @Rocketmagnet it's supposed to be "click"
    – SIMEL
    Sep 4 '14 at 10:43
  • 5
    that's what bad kerning will do for your billboards
    – ratchet freak
    Sep 4 '14 at 12:11
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    If it's the kind of billboard poster that's actually many smaller sheets glued next to each other, it's possible that the "c" and "l" were either side of a join and the person who put this particular billboard up accidentally (or deliberately) placed them with too much overlap.
    – David Richerby
    Sep 4 '14 at 17:56
  • 2
    @ratchetfreak Ahh... F*ck Yeah Keming. click is a particularly problematic word.
    – user21023
    Sep 4 '14 at 23:34
40

The image was stated to have been photoshopped.

UPDATE: Welp, the fun's over. Esurance contacted us today, and they're saying the image above is photoshopped. To be fair, we were incredulous when we first saw the photo, but decided to roll with it when we saw Esurance addressed the lady who first tweeted out the above image, and said they'd removed the billboard.

enter image description here

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  • 6
    Hm, so I wonder why Esurance's initial tweet appeared to confirm that the problem existed? Or were they being sly - if no billboards were affected, then "we have removed all affected billboards" would be vacuously true.
    – Nate Eldredge
    Sep 6 '14 at 2:49
  • 1
    @NateEldredge Extra publicity for free?
    – Izkata
    Sep 7 '14 at 16:04
31

It's real and was confirmed by esurance in a tweet.

Just in case the tweet gets removed later, here is a screenshot:

enter image description here

According to several sources online, the billboard was put in Chicago, not in New York:

redeye Chicago

Esurance removes Chicago billboards with NSFW typo

A blog post

Here's A Big Billboard That Says Dick In Downtown Chicago

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  • 8
    Even with the apparently confirming reply, I'm still a bit skeptical. Given the how many people carry cellphone cameras around these days, and how obvious the mistake is (it doesn't just sort of look like it says "dick" if you squint at it, it actually, unambiguously, says "dick"), surely there should be more than one photo of that billboard.
    – Ilmari Karonen
    Sep 4 '14 at 13:44
  • 1
    Definitely Chicago. The billboard in the picture is mounted on the "bridge" that is train yard behind the Metra station at Madison and Canal.
    – longneck
    Sep 4 '14 at 15:50
  • 3
    sounds like a clever marketing trick if you ask me.
    – n00b
    Sep 4 '14 at 19:20
  • 1
    Evidently not, eh?
    – HopelessN00b
    Sep 4 '14 at 22:33
  • In Chicago, I'm inclined to think the photoshopped version is less NSFW than the original.
    – corsiKa
    Sep 5 '14 at 22:40

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