Cats have the power to make anything better. Surely I'm not the only one who takes a quick trip through "adorable cats" Google Image search results in the middle of a bad day. (It really does the trick to turn things around.) A new project from the Citizens Advertising Takeover Service proves that feline photos can improve the most miserable parts of your daily routine, even a busy commute.
According to The Huffington Post, Citizens Advertising Takeover Service, or CATS, was created by Glimpse, a creative collective working toward positive social change. This collective came up with the idea to replace all the pesky advertisements in a London Tube stop with images that would make people smile and bring attention to their cause. If the internet has taught us anything, it's that the way to get people's attention is through pictures of cats. So the group settled on plastering cat-tastic images throughout a station. Of course, to make that happen, they would need to raise some money, and for that, they turned to Kickstarter.
CATS' Kickstarter page reads, "Wouldn’t it be great not to worry about the holiday we can't afford, the car we don’t need, or the body we don’t have? Imagine a world where public spaces made you feel pawsitive." The Kickstarter campaign reached £23,000, enough money to take over every ad space in the Clapham Common Tube station for two whole weeks. In addition to the images being more uplifting than advertisements, the art features stray cats from the Battersea Dogs & Cats Home and Cats Protection who are in need of homes. So much good is happening here.
James Turner, the founder of Glimpse, wrote a piece about the project for Medium. In it he explains that the main goal of the kitten take-over was to encourage advertisers to be mindful of the impact they have on the public. For commuters, it's really just meant to be an adorable break. Mission accomplished. Take a look.
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