Nice ad...but where's the connection?

This evening, before commuting back to OC, I decided to eat at In-N-Out for dinner. Getting back on the 5 North from Balboa Ave., I noticed a billboard that had, "Spend 15 minutes reading with your child today" (or something very close to that). It had a nice picture of an adult reading with a child (both were smiling, of course). At first I thought it was an ad by a government or a non-profit organization, but I was surprised to see that the very bottom of the billboard had Shea Homes, and a motto about how much they care.

Anyway, it struck me as really odd that they would use such a simple statement (which is a nice statement to make) that has no connection to their supposed business of building and/or selling homes. Are the advertisers hoping people just look at the meaning of the sentence and hope that passers-by will associate "Shea Homes" with something that is good (i.e., the meaning of the sentence on the billboard)?

I'm not an advertiser, but I did take a very informative and delightful class on pragmatics called "The Language of Politics and Advertising" (taught by Farrell Ackerman) where we discussed how viewers (and hearers) usually take the implication of a statement as the statement itself. Most of the time the implication of a statement is subtle, and seems to fit in well with what is being advertised (e.g., the "i'm lovin' it" motto by McDonald's), but in the current case it doesn't seem to be so. How did the advertising agency ever persuade the company to buy it? The agency must save the good persuasion techniques to persuade the company it's selling the ad to.

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