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?.

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.

This is 16 minutes long animated film of logos and and advertising characters produced by a serious 3D house in France, and nominated for an Oscar, but yet in dire threat of lawsuits for use of corporate logos. At least this is according to the blogs, which, are… well… contradictory. But it is a hell of a great 13 minutes. Great villains, chase scenes, and a surreal vision of contemporary corporate life. It helps if you know Los Angeles.

Great fun. Sad truths. Fantastical visions.

Almost a year after the L.A. City Council approved a moratorium on new off-site and supergraphic signs, and four months after it replaced that temporary measure with a permanent ban, advertisers and sign companies continue to wrap, hang, and otherwise display their multi-story supergraphic signs on the walls of buildings throughout the city.

So why are property owners and sign companies willing to risk open violation of the law, and advertising agencies and major corporations willing to look the other way?  The answer is easy to surmise from the fact that a large supergraphic in a high-traffic location can generate upwards of $50,000 in monthly revenue, while the maximum fine for violating sign law provisions is $100 a day.

The City Attorney’s office has filed at least two civil suits under a public nuisance provision that allows fines of up to $2,500 a day, but those lawsuits are slowly moving through the courts and any resolution is likely to be months away, if not longer, depending upon appeals.

In the meantime, absent any sudden displays of social and civic responsibility on the part of the outdoor advertising industry, expect to see the city’s public spaces occupied by more and more of these huge sales pitches demanding the attention of everyone driving, walking, bicycling or otherwise moving past them.

via Sign Companies, Property Owners, Advertising Agencies, Major Corporations Thumb Their Noses at L.A.’s New Off-Site Sign Ban.

Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco, New York; what big city has the outdoor advertising industry under control?

Last March, we reported on the case of an illegal supergraphic sign advertising Chase Bank installed over the second-floor office windows of a building at 7201 Melrose Ave. The city issued a citation to the building owner, Macculloch Properties of Brentwood, and in May referred that citation to the City Attorney’s office for criminal prosecution. The sign was then removed, but replaced in August by one advertising the TV show, Melrose Place. Then in October, a third supergraphic sign went up, this one advertising HTC cellphones. As of this writing, the sign was still in place.

Read the rest at: Office Tenants Plagued by Series of Illegal Supergraphic Signs; Do the L.A. City Attorney and District Councilman Care?.

L.A. Press Club Awards

L.A. Weekly:  Billboards Gone Wild

via L.A. Weekly Reporter Wins Top Press Club Award For Investigative Article on Billboards.

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.”

via illegalbillboards.ca and they have more coverage there.

Steve Lambert solo show walkthrough from Steve Lambert on Vimeo.

See more pics at visitsteve.com

(thanks Liz Filardi)