The supergraphic sign above for the movie “Prince of Persia” on a Westwood office building is legally permitted as an on-site sign, which the L.A. sign code defines as a sign directing attention to a product or service generally sold or offered on the premises where the sign is located. There is no movie theater in the Wilshire Blvd. building, or the offices of the movie production company, so how can the sign be considered legally equivalent to the sign on the local hardware store or dry cleaners?

For an answer, one most go back more than a decade, when Michael McNeilly (the self-proclaimed artist responsible for the giant statue of liberty images around the city) put one of the “Lady Liberty” images on the side of the building at 10921 Wilshire Blvd. He was charged by the city with putting up the supergraphic without a permit, as well as violating a local zoning prohibition on any such signs in the Wilshire corridor from Beverly Hills to Santa Monica.

While that case worked its way through the court, McNeilly changed the sign to one he claimed to be a memorial to the New York firefighters who died on 9/11 in the World Trade Center collapse. Again, he was cited by the city, and this time filed a lawsuit in federal court with the aid of the ACLU, which asserted that McNeilly’s First Amendment right to free speech allowed him to erect the sign without city interference. Two years later, then L.A. City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo agreed to a settlement of that lawsuit that allowed McNeilly to keep signs on the 12-story wall of the building, as long as those signs fit the city’s definition of “on-site” signs.

According to the settlement, only current tenants of the building with “bona fide office space” conducting “bona fide business” would be allowed to place messages on the signs. Furthermore, those tenants would have to provide proof to the city that they were conducting such a business by having an employee present during normal working hours.

Yesterday, we went to the office at mid-afternoon with a local community activist who has tried in the past to convince the city’s building department that the various signs that have been put up on the wall do not comply with those requirements. On the sixth floor, there was an office with the sign, “Sky Posters, a Creative Service Agency” beside the door. (Sky Posters is one of the terms used by McNeilly, who is president of a company called Skytag, Inc.) The door was locked, and knocks went unanswered. We spoke to a woman who was going into the office next door, and she said that in the four years she worked there she had never seen anyone enter or leave the Sky Posters office.

As we’ve pointed out in previous posts, McNeilly is a fraud. He claims to be an artist defending freedom of expression when the obvious fact that he is an entrepreneur making millions by putting up supergraphic signs wherever he can find willing property owners and then suing to block enforcement of the city’s ban on such signs. He has used one of the country’s most revered images—the statue of liberty—as a placeholder for signs hawking movies, TV shows, and other corporate products.

In 2008, he put up a huge “Lady Liberty” image on the opposite end of the Wilshire Blvd. building, and then sued the city in federal court and succeeded in getting a judge to order a preliminary injunction protecting it from city enforcement. Lady Liberty is long gone, of course, and now a Nike Ad featuring a 10-story image of Kobe Bryant greets pedestrians and motorists navigating the single most heavily-trafficked intersection in the entire city of L.A.

Nike ad featuring Kobe Bryant on east end of building. Credit: Curbed LA

Based on statements by media buyers and ad agency professionals, advertisers pay upwards of $100,000 a month for supergraphics like that in those kind of locations.

The “Prince of Persia” supergraphic on the west end of the building, visible from the 405 freeway almost half a mile away, made news two days ago when Curbed LA reported that the building owner was speaking out against a proposed development across the street that would block some views of the sign, including the one from the freeway. A statement, perhaps, on how valuable those views are for a sign that is “on-site” in name only.

via How Was This Eight-Story Supergraphic Ad For a Movie Permitted as an “On-Site” Sign?.

This is smart. Super smart. It’s getting more and more rare to see an actual, honest to goodness guerilla campaign that involves both a surprise and an insight tied together with a purpose. Slapping decals on the hand-rests of escalators just isn’t enough anymore.

To bring some attention to ocean pollution and just how disgusting it really is, Surfrider Foundation teamed up with Satchi & Satchi LA to create “Catch of the Day.” Simply and brilliantly, they collected actual trash from beaches around the U.S., packaged it like food, and left it on display at farmer’s markets. It’s site-specific, appropriate, impacting, meaningful, shocking, and an actual consumer insight into the very act they’re in the middle of. Someone about to buy fish from the same ocean as the trash in their hands can’t help but be at least a little more enlightened as to how pollution isn’t someone else’s problem.

see more pictures – surfrider foundation: catch of the day. « shape+colour.

Friday night’s arrest of Kayvan Setareh for allowing an 8-story supergraphic ad to be wrapped across three sides of an historic Hollywood building was not the first time the Pacific Palisades man has run afoul of the city’s sign code, according to building department records. In January, 2007, a citation was issued for an illegal supergraphic on the building at 6777 Hollywood Blvd, and In November, 2006, citations were issued for a total of four illegal supergraphics on another building owned by Setareh at 5858 Hollywood Blvd. As reported by the L.A. Times, the arrest of Setareh followed concerns that because there was no inspection of the gigantic ad’s attachment to the building it could come loose and cause injury to pedestrians and motorists in the busy street below.

via Owner Arrested For Hollywood Supergraphic Previously Cited For Sign Law Violations.

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Seen in a subway station.

BC Biermann, a PhD Assistant Professor of Film/Media Studies California Baptist University – Riverside has recently published a paper on “Spatial Distributions of Power: Illegal Billboards as Graffiti in Los Angeles.” In it he argues…

“While graffiti has regularly been prosecuted as form of vandalism, illegal billboards have not. Illegal billboards are generally defined as panels for the display of advertisements in public places (such as alongside highways or on the sides of buildings) that have not received the legal permits and safety inspections; panels that display ads not related to structure or property they are affixed to may also quality as “unlawful.” It is my contention that illegal billboards are a form of graffiti and, as a result, should be prosecuted as a form of vandalism.”

In this paper, Mr. Biermann comes to some conclusions that have informed our practice here at PublicAdCampaign for years. In fact, he calls upon the NYSAT project (without credit) as an example of civil disobedience that attempts to challenge commercial control of public messages while promoting a more just public arena, interested in promoting individual identity and citizen directed spatial control.

I highly suggest reading the paper, but if you don’t have the time, I’ll leave you with the final 2 sentences.

In this way, via a constant bombardment of a hegemonic truth, corpo-political regimes control the means by which individuals seek to know, decipher, and act on themselves. Acting as if they were free in within a liberal, democratic system of rule, the good consumer citizen is calculatedly and spatially constructed.

Indeed, this is truly about who we are and who we want to be as people and a society. When our influences come from the corporate machine, we have a hard time defining for ourselves the truths with which we would like to live.

via Public Ad Campaign: Should OAC’s Be Subject To The Same Penalties Grafitti Writers Face?.

According to a new patent that was just granted to Google, the company could soon extend the reach of its advertising program in Google Maps to Street View. This patent, which was originally filed on July 7, 2008, describes a new system for promoting ads in online mapping applications. In this patent, Google describes how it plans to identify buildings, posters, signs and billboards in these images and give advertisers the ability to replace these images with more up-to-date ads. In addition, Google also seems to plan an advertising auction for unclaimed properties.

In Google’s example, the software could identify the marquis and individual window posters on a theater property and replace them with new information. Through this, a theater could promote a new play in Street View, even if the actual Street View image is completely out of date.

via Google Plans to Upgrade Old Billboards in Street View.

If you were a video game geek in the early 1990’s, this is probably up your alley. A quartet of street artists named Mr. Talion, Epoxy, Baveaux, and Kone have added the heads-up display from the first-person shooter computer game DOOM to a number of billboards throughout Berlin. You can see more here.

via DOOM Display Billboards « Urban Prankster.

Imeem users, bloggers and web users are in for another nasty surprise following MySpace’s acquisition of “certain parts” of the service. MySpace has replaced Imeem songs and playlists embedded on blogs and elsewhere on the web with advertisements for generic ringtones and the MySpace Music service.

Not only are users’ playlists offline until MySpace Music manages to reconstruct them all by hand, but imeem songs and playlists appearing elsewhere on the web have been replaced by bright orange ads for Lady Gaga, Michael Jackson and Jay-Z ringtones and MySpace’s music service. Talk about a bait-and-switch.

A MySpace spokeswoman confirmed on Friday that MySpace is responsible for the ads (updated). The Flash code for the ads in question (example) are hosted by the MySpace Music site iLike, and some of the ads say “Create a playlist on MySpace Music, it’s free.”

We witnessed firsthand this playlists-for-ads land grab, having used imeem to embed songs and playlists on the Listening Post blog. The ad-supported imeem music service featured a huge catalog and allowed third-party sites like ours to stream full songs, allowing us to play the music we were talking about without securing permission from each copyright holder.

Imeem ultimately couldn’t keep up with its licensing payments, and MySpace swooped in to pick through the wreckage. Now, thousands of independent artists are not being paid money they’re owed and countless posts on Listening Post and elsewhere on the web feature not Imeem’s songs or playlists, but rather advertisements like the ones pictured to the above right.

Granted, MySpace bought Imeem’s system for embedding songs and playlists and is free to do with it as it pleases, and the ads aren’t clickable (as of midday Thursday ET). But they sure look obnoxious.

“…it’s about hitting people with something visceral that will force them to confront an unlicensed alternative to the current monopoly on visual space held by our local governments and their corporate sponsors.”

“Part of defining a public space is decorating it, inhabiting it and playing with new uses for it. Just because we weren’t consulted on the design process of our cities doesn't make them any less ours, and shouldn't mean that we have to sit out when our idea of how the space can be put to use doesn't mesh with the official stance.”

“Turning a public space into a vehicle for any kind of art is a politicized act in itself, whether or not the project has overtly political content.”

“The power of street art doesn't necessarily even have to lie within the content of the pieces themselves, but rather in the knowledge that no permission was sought, that someone is still working outside the systems that dictate who is allowed to use public visual space.”

via Public Ad Campaign: Situationist Methodology Still Sits Well With Me.