Diary / Editor / 25 June 2008 / Leave a comment

British online betting company Betfair have been ploughing their efforts into catching the eye of football fans flying into Vienna for the closing stages of Euro 2008 - by growing the world's biggest ever billboard.

Betfair have been ploughing their efforts into catching the eye of football fans flying into Vienna for the closing stages of Euro 2008 - by growing the world's biggest ever billboard.

At nearly one and a half kilometres long and covering an area of more than 50 football pitches, Betfair has spent the last four months cultivating the message 'NO.1 FOR FOOTBALL AND STILL GROWING!'. It's now been officially ratified by the Guinness Book of World Records™ as 'The World's Largest Advertising Hoarding'.

To put the dimensions of 1,380m by 316m into context, its length is equivalent to laying the Empire State Building end-on-end three times, while the 436,000sqm it covers is 62 times larger than London's Trafalgar Square. It's expected that over 1 million airline passengers will see the billboard on their final approach to Vienna International Airport during June.

It took local farmers from the Austrian town of Ebergassing four months - plus nine tonnes of wheat seed, 53,000 marigold plants, 1.5 kilometres of cotton netting as well as rape, camomile, mustard, clover, poppies and grass - to create the billboard. The individual letters are 44 metres 'high' and up to 41 metres wide.

Adrian Murdock of Betfair said: "We may not have a team at Euro2008 but there is at least some corner of a foreign field that is most definitely a piece of the UK - for a short while anyway. The local farmers thought it was a joke when we first asked them about doing it, but the billboard became a real labour of love and now they have a world record to show for their efforts."

Tags: Betfair Guinees Book of Records, billboard record, Euro 2008 record