Fighting The Outdoor Advertising Invasion: A Trivial Pursuit?

From time to time, someone will take offense at our activities on the grounds that advocating for protection of the visual environment from an onslaught of commercial advertising is a trivial cause compared to fighting poverty, or global warming, or gang warfare, or any number of other social and environmental ills.   In other words, “Can’t you find something more important to be bothered about?”

Well, yes.  We could join the quest to find cures for cancer, or to reduce the rate of infant mortality.  We could go around cajoling smokers to quit smoking, and obese people to lose weight.  Instead, we chose to stick our fingers in the porous dike that separates the public spaces of our city from a tidal wave constructed by those who want you to see commercial messages wherever you drive, walk, bicycle, sit, and otherwise experience the urban environment.

A trivial cause?  Consider the ongoing implosion of our economic system, which in a very large measure was built upon the principle of consumption.  Our jobs, our homes, our cars, our lifestyles dependent upon people shopping, which means reacting to those ubiquitous signs urging us to buy a hot new product or sign up for the latest service.  We don’t need text explaining the wonders awaiting us, just an image to trigger a reflexive desire to consume, as though we were a collective Pavlov’s dog.

We don’t hate advertising.  Retail businesses need to attract customers, so they can pay their employees and fund their owners’ retirement plans.  We don’t even hate billboards, having experienced a tug of nostalgia while browsing the classic billboard images in the June issue of Los Angeles magazine.  And we’re old enough to fondly recall the sight of Burma Shave signs scrolling past the windows of the family sedan as it rolled along a Midwestern highway.

But that was then, as the saying goes, and now is now.  Entire buildings are turned into advertisements.  Digital billboards with their dialed-up illumination dominate the night at busy intersections.  How many times do we need to be told to buy an Ipod or sign up with Verizon or chow down on a McDonald’s hamburger?   In some quaint past billboards urged passersby to eat at Myrtle’s Café, or spend the night at the Shady Rest Motel.  Now they urge-no, demand-that you buy a ticket for the latest blockbuster movie, or tune in to the latest titillation offered by Fox TV.  What we have is a voracious corporate appetite for “branding” that is ubiquitous-seen everywhere, all the time, impossible to evade or ignore.

We understand that some people feel this trend to a Blade Runner, Minority Report-esque future is perfectly okay.   We understand that some serious commentators believe that raising alarms about this future is just the fustiness of people-likely to be white, affluent, middle-aged homeowners-who live in L.A. but want to believe they’re really in some small town with white picket fences, elm trees shading the lawns, and friendly mail carriers who stop to pet the dog and exchange observations about the kids and the weather.  People likely to be frightened by the very things that make the urban environment vital and exciting-pulsating images projected onto the sides of buildings, dramatic light shows, vivid graphic expressions that may be intent upon selling you something, but so what?

Yes, so what?  If you want to hang out in Times Square with the hordes of tourists amidst the oversized ads staring down from all directions, by all means do it.  If you want to drive back and forth on the Sunset Strip gawking at the billboards, nobody is trying to stop you.  If you want to spend your nights at L.A. Live gazing in wonderment at the multi-story Nokia and Coca-Cola ads, be our guest.  You have your idea of pleasure, we have ours.  The problem comes when your idea trumps ours and the experience you want becomes the universal experience, and because you happen to like bright digital billboards and huge supergraphic signs everyone has to see them whenever they venture any distance from their abodes.

Giving people the choice to see or not to see advertising might seem reasonable, even democratic, but it works against the principle at the heart of the outdoor advertising industry, which is that effective advertising is advertising that cannot be turned off, cannot be fast-forwarded, cannot be avoided by turning the page or getting up and walking out of the room.  In a heavily fractured media environment a captive audience has great value, which is the reason that this recession has seen spending on outdoor advertising fall much less precipitously than spending on other media.

But just as the bucolic past of hand-painted billboards and Burma Shave signs has been displaced by digital billboards and supergraphic building wraps, the present will give way to something likely to be bigger, brighter, more insistent, more difficult to ignore.  As the writer Evan S. Connell said in his brilliant historical disquisition, The White Lantern,  ”The ultimate question, though, toward which all inquiries bend, and which carries a hint of menace, is not where or when or why we came to be as we are, but how the future will unfold.”

Less than 10 days ago the Times published a story on billboards appearing on vacant storefronts. It almost reads like an ad itself:

Taking advantage of all the abandoned retail spaces in urban areas, marketers are leasing them at cut-rate prices and filling them with their ads.

At first, advertisers saw storefront advertising as a poor man’s billboard — that is, a bad thing. Now, they see it as a poor man’s billboard — that is, brilliantly frugal.

Nowhere in The Times story did it mention the ads were illegal. I wrote a letter to The Times, I got in touch with the writer, and I am hoping they will do a followup.

Meanwhile in San Francisco…

Today Brent Begin at the San Francisco Examiner published a story on the same phenomena, but with an entirely different take. In the first sentence he mentions that the signs are illegal:

A bright-blue advertisement for Intel popped up on the shuttered storefront that used to be a Disney Store on Post Street in Union Square, becoming one of many vacant buildings that has been illegally plastered with promotions.

Turning empty storefronts in San Francisco into advertisements is against city law and bothersome to anti-billboard advocates, but this latest trend in marketing is catching on.

The rest of the story is worth reading. Begin goes on to talk about the planning department’s effort to fight illegal billboards (at current count 43% of the cities 1532 billboards are illegal) and summarizes a brief history of guerilla marketing gone bad in San Francisco.

Kudos to Brent Begin at the SF Examiner for following the money.

P.S. If you’re interested in reading more, Rami Tabello of illegalsigns.ca visited San Francisco in 2007.

View NYSAT Project Map 04-25-2009 in a larger map

This map shows illegal/unpermitted NPA City Outdoor locations located in Lower Manhattan. All the ads together cover approximately 29,450 square feet of our public environment.

On April 25th approximately 30 participants whitewashed nearly 120 street level billboards in broad daylight between the hours of 10:30am and 2:00pm.

At proximately 3:00pm nearly 50 artists and public individuals came back and used those blank canvases for the production of public messages instead of corporate messages.

These are the results

-Yellow locations were were not a part of this project -Blue dots indicate locations that were painted white -Red dots indicate locations that recieved artwork

Re: As Storefronts Become Vacant, Ads Arrive

Peter Sherman of advertising firm BBDO was quoted in your story, “All you have to do is walk out the door for lunch and notice the number of vacant storefronts — and they tend to be in prime areas, in major thoroughfares, and they’re unused space — so why not get in there and put a message in there?”

I know why not, because it’s a crime! And I was disappointed that the Times didn’t mention this. Outdoor advertising is regulated by the Department of Buildings for several reasons; so billboards aren’t erected in dangerous places and ways, to regulate advertising to specific districts keeping the city livable, and to prevent persuasive messages from being placed anywhere and everywhere a corporation can buy space.

The Department of Buildings has strict regulations on size and these storefronts turned billboards are simply too large for nearly every commercial district in New York with the exception of Times Square.

The Times is mistaken in reporting on this as a “thriving” type of advertising emerging from declining economy.  Call it what it is, advertisers desperate for profits, committing organized crime, and hurting the livability of our city.

New Yorkers who care should call these signs in to 311 and have them removed!  Or just tear them down themselves.

Steve Lambert
Senior Fellow, Eyebeam Art and Technology Center
Founder, The Anti-Advertising Agency

Jordan Selier
publicadcampaign.com

(thanks Liz Filardi)

A certain greasy chicken franchise is adding another item to its menu: pothole patching. In Louisville, KY and potentially in a town near you, what was once a city service paid for by tax payers might become another avenue for advertising. The fried chicken restaurant extended an offer to mayors across the country to have the restaurant fill the city’s potholes and in return be allowed to affix a chalk logo to the newly paved asphalt. I know it’s a recession and all, and municipalities are feeling the pinch when it comes to typical city services like snow plowing and pothole patching, but come on; do we really need a fried chicken restaurant filling potholes for us? – James Ewert

Thanks James!  If you’re concerned about corporation sweeping into rescue us from tax cuts, see these previous posts:

• The Golden Gate Billboard
• Chanel in Central Park
• MTA’s ads on Subway windows
• all posts tagged taxes

1-By producing a piece of illegal art in front of students, I hope to give them both the tools and the confidence to be able to go out and re-imagine the public environment they live in on their own terms. [LINK]

Winter Weave-Easter

2-Are outdoor advertisement companies paying for your protection? They’d like you to think so. Find out what London is up to and how it’s strikingly similar to New York. [LINK]

3-If Fire safety doesn’t warrant supergraphic removal, what does? LA’s ongoing battle with outdoor signage has reached new heights. [LINK]

More at Ban Billboard Blight

4-A valentine greeting you can’t buy. These are the kind of uplifting and personal messages you get instead of advertising when you allow the public access to its visual environment on all levels. [LINK]

5-Why can’t we be on Brian Lehrer Live? Cause we’re vandals. When CUNY can’t entertain socially minded civil disobedience, something is broken. [LINK]

The New York MTA, in collaboration with CBS Outdoor, wants to cover the windows of subway cars with advertising. This story at the NYTimes Cityroom blog is peppered with rationalizations from the MTA. Here’s one of my favorites:

“[T]ransit officials say that advertising revenue is not the main motivation for the program.”

(Transit officials, not CBS Outdoor.)

They say the primary motivator is “to reduce what officials call ’scratchiti,’ or scratched graffiti on the windows…. Scrachitti is a major vandalism problem in the subways, costing the system more than $2.5 million a year to replace the glass and covering it with protective Mylar”

So the MTA would like to replace one form of graffiti with another, from Coke. The result is essentially the same, messages which cover the windows. Except the MTA has an aesthetic leaning toward the imagery of Coke as opposed to a few scratches that read “ZERO.” The Coke ads would be on every window and cover the windows entirely. Which is more obtrusive?

This must be the least creative, most ironic way of dealing with the “scratchiti problem” I can imagine. The MTA seems to be bending over backwards to find new ways and new excuses to work with outdoor advertising companies.

Paul J. Fleuranges, a spokesman for New York City Transit, said the agency hoped that the film, called Scotchcal, would cut down on the frequency of scratchitti.

Graffiti is all about innovation! The Scotchcal can be written on and torn off the same way the vinyl ads in the subway station are right now. The only silver lining is that Poster Boy will have a new forum and material to work with.

What can you do?

Railfan is encouraging riders to email the MTA and let them know what you think – this is a pilot program after all. (I suggest mailing them your junk mail as well.) He suggests emailing the above image, as the MTA didn’t quite get it at first.

What else? We can demand a moratorium on new public advertising as was done in San Francisco last year.

But but but, the city is broke!

“But the city is broke and this is a way it can make money,” you might be thinking. As I’ve mentioned before, advertising creeping into more public spaces should be off the table as a way to generate revenue. Overwhelming public spaces with advertising decreases livability – Times Square is fun to look at, but no one wants to live there. The city can do plenty that will increase revenue while increasing livability by increasing fines for illegal advertising and finally enforcing billboard regulations as well as increasing parking meter rates to raise $5 billion, just as an example.