I’ve noticed a new NYC microtrend of people wearing billowy checkered cotton scarfs around their necks. They remind me distinctly of Yasser Arafat’s Keffiyeh. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keffiyeh). Fashion can be pretty fascinating in its ability to absorb and appropriate otherness. So while we are at war with much of the Arab world, and Arab-Americans are feeling threatened and misunderstood enough that they have had to launch an advertising campaign in the subway, NYC consumerist fashionistas have appropriated the Keffiyeh. I wonder whether the wearers know what they are wearing, and whether they see it is some kind of statement, or just “cool.”

The billboard industry is—obviously—in the business of getting messages across.

This they have managed to do, with a vengeance.

In anticipation of today's City Council debate on a proposed new billboard bylaw and tax, the billboard industry has been using its own platform to communicate its deep opposition to these measures. The Out-of-Home Marketing Association of Canada (OMAC), which represents the vast majority of billboard companies operating in Toronto, launched this campaign last week, setting aside 139 billboards for the cause.

Inconveniently, it turns out that at least two of these 139 billboards have been deemed illegal by the City. As pointed out and explained to us by Rami Tabello of Illegal Signs, both are in violation of existing regulations and neither should be doing what they are doing, namely expressing just how aggrieved and put-upon the billboard industry is feeling.

And this, say public-space activists, is precisely the point.

[snip]

The proposed regulations will not eliminate billboards, and they aren’t trying to. Nobody is attempting to strangle the industry to death, stamp out all billboards across the land, or otherwise start a revolution. The City has every right to govern what goes on in our public spaces, and it has every obligation to be a good steward of those spaces, balancing the commercial interests of the industry and the property owners to whom billboard companies pay rent with the civic interests of the majority of Torontonians, 70% of whom support this tax according to a recent poll [PDF].

Nobody likes to be forced to play by the rules. That doesn’t make refereeing an unfair practice.

via Billboard Companies Protest Billboard Tax…On Illegal Billboards – Torontoist.

From Jon Winet’s Electoral College project (now on Add-Art):

Best inadvertent No on Prop 8 in California video (wait for it)

Gay Scientists discover the Christian Gene

Batman for Mayor – the posters

Batman in the Debates

Just because you saw it already doesn’t mean it’s not great; Wassup 2008

P.S. Bring your book in case there are lines.

This New York Times article from Saturday, October 18th takes a look at Obama’s recent spending flurry. Ads in Guitar Hero? I hear he can shred on Master of Puppets. I’m sold.

• it’s spray paint
• it’s done without permission on someone else’s property
• it’s illegal
• politicians hate it

It’s the expression of a citizen (or small group of citizens) in public space speaking to fellow citizens. Anyone, willing to take the legal risk, can do it.

This is advertising:

• it’s printed vinyl
• it’s done with permission from the city
• it’s legal (When it’s not legal there’s often little to no consequence.)
• legal or not, it makes money – though often not enough
• politicians love it

It’s the expression of a corporate interest. A small number of people who have thousands of dollars, a specific and narrow interest and some influence can do it. They speak to people as consumers, not citizens.

For the first time, the MTA is turning the outside of their trains over to advertising company, Titan Outdoor. It will start with the Times Square shuttle in a test program. But with the potential for more (my emphasis added):

If this test at Grand Central/Times Square stations is successful, other high-traffic stations could easily be included for similar sales packages.

In addition to the above efforts in the GCT/Times Square Area, in the first quarter of 2009 Times Square Shuttle tunnel will also become the home of the first in-tunnel advertising installation. The shuttle riders will be able to view a full motion video presentation through the window of the shuttle car. The MTA is also planning to pilot test a digital dominated station concept at two of the NYCT stations, Grand Central Shuttle Station and 42nd and 6th Avenue Station mezzanine (Bryant Park).

To further expand the advertising revenue base, MTA in partnership with Titan Outdoor (its MTA bus and commuter rail advertising contractor), will be pilot testing digital advertising on one of its NYCT buses and, if successful, hope to expand the program to approximately 200 buses. In addition, a similar digital advertising pilot test is planned for in car commuter rail displays in the near future.

One thing I’m sure of – this install will be amazing. This will likely be bold, and inventive and incorporate amazing new technologies. It will be novel and smart, maybe funny. People will be impressed, if not wowed. And why wouldn’t they be? There will be some of the most creative people in the world working on it with years of research and experience and millions of dollars behind it.

So what’s wrong with this?

First, as usual, it’s not a worthwhile deal for the city. With an annual budget of 11.5 billion, the MTA hopes to bring in another 20 million in ad revenue with the program during the next year – a whopping total of .17% of their budget.

The MTA and New York City are becoming outdoor advertising companies themselves, turning over the captive eyes of commuters for a handful of revenue. Many don’t realize this conflict of interest is making it difficult for the city to regulate advertising, even when it’s clearly illegal.

Another point is that it creates a “read-only” culture. If you’re not familiar with the concept, Lawrence Lessig talks about “read only culture” versus “read/write culture.” He uses this analogy to talk about copyright, but I’m going to radically extend his argument to the city.

Our city is read-only. You’re free to read advertising, business signs, and city signs. But dare you write or hang anything of your own; you will be labeled as a criminal – a graffiti vandal. In many cities it’s even illegal to hang a sign for a garage sale on a light pole. If you happen to have a several thousand dollars, you might be able to say what you want – as long as it’s not too political.

But this is public space. You’re free to say whatever you want in public space, but freedom of speech does not extend to the visual environment. The visual environment is pay to play. Public visual space has become commercial space.

The visual environment is read only.

Why is read/write better? Because you can consume, process, and respond. This is how we think critically. This is how we learn. You can talk back. You can express yourself. You don’t just consume expression, you create expression.

Read/write is how democracy works.

There’s a reason kids want to write their names on walls. There’s a reason why people take graffiti seriously. Granted, graffiti writers don’t always know how to direct this energy, but I’d argue there’s some overlap with the reasons one writes their name on a wall and the reasons one runs for the school board. Being able to write means being able to affect your environment. To change it. You exist in the world not as a consumer, but an active citizen.

Read only culture creates apathy.

So how could the MTA do it right? Strip all the advertising from the transit system. Demand more tax revenue for public transit. Don’t worry, there’s plenty of brilliant ways that to raise money that will also make the city more livable, like increasing parking meter rates to raise $5 billion dollars. Use the surplus money to fund better, more dynamic, and temporary art in transit programs. Create an open application process and let some of New York’s great artists and designers wrap a car. They’ll liven up the system and speak to riders as fellow citizens.

Yes it sounds impossible, but as the Situationists said, “Be realistic, demand the impossible!“

To give more credit, beyond Larry Lessig, I’m also synthesizing some ideas from artist Brett Cook-Dizney and others I can’t think of right away.

The L.A. Times is reporting Clear Channel has its eye on 674 state owned digital billboards on California Highways. The billboards were installed to alert drivers to road hazards and for Amber Alerts providing “urgent bulletins in the most serious child-abduction cases.”

But now the state is listening to Clear Channel.

Apparently California needs money. In the Governor’s budget it says, “chronic underinvestment has increased congestion and has resulted in California having some of the most distressed highway and road conditions in the United States.”

Of course, this is the neo-liberal fantasy:

1. the government under-funds infrastructure
2. infrastructure falls apart
3. Conservatives claim that government can’t be trusted and we need private industry and competition!
4. Conservatives then make private, exclusive deals with corporations so they can sweep in to the rescue/for the profit.

I can’t imagine this proposal going very far, but the whining about being broke and the publicity that follows may be intended to prepare voters for a comparatively less disgusting option.

As argued in the L.A. Times story, yes it’s an eyesore, yes it might be dangerous to drivers, yes it will train people pay less attention to a sign designed to help abducted children and tell them about emergencies – thereby nearly nullifying it. But more important that that, it’s public space and public property that belongs to us, not corporations.

But perhaps you’re more fiscally minded. This is another bad deal made by politicians with advertising and marketing companies. (Politicians who are most likely being lobbied by and receiving campaign donations from Clear Channel.) Sen. George Runner (R-Lancaster) says the money will be used for highway repair and potentially may be “tens of millions of dollars.” The California Transportation Commission’s annual budget is $28,466,000,000.

Another drop in the bucket. Sorry Amber.

Thanks for the tip from reader Sam.

I know, total cliche’d title. Oh well.

I bought carbon offsets on a Continental flight. I particularly like the fact that you could choose your own science… and your own cost…

I really wonder about offsetting. For a while I thought of it as a useful costing mechanism. And planting trees is a barely useful short term mitigation, though repairing deforestation is always good. But I feel deeply cynical about it. Especially as greenmarketers send me email after email wanting to get their carbon offset product into my carbon plugin The Real Costs. It ads carbon footprint information to airplane and travel websites.

I had an email exchange recently about this with Mark Purdon a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at University of Toronto. We also talked quite a bit about Carbon Taxes. I sent him this article from the NYTimes on why Carbon Tax is a tax you actually don’t want to have to collect.

Being a political scientist, he has a distinctly different viewpoint on these issues. It is interesting to see is approach. He says:

I agree, a carbon tax is great but politically difficult to implement. It’s actually a leading election issue in Canada now: see the opposition party (the Liberal’s) website on The Green Shift as well as the Green Party of Canada. My feeling here again is about costs: the tax starts out low but at a certain level people are going to start resenting it and pushing back. There’s really no reason we can’t do a carbon tax within a cap-and-trade system, with offsets to mop up what’s left over.

How do people behave is such an interesting question. It comes back to marketing and social marketing. I mean, we have such problems with tax marketing in the US. Republicans stand for lower taxes and Democrats stand for higher taxes, right? WRONG. They all tax, they just tax different people. Just look at this amazing graphic from ChartJunk:

Sadly, its all about the marketing.

City government and citizen vigilantes wage a losing battle against Clear Channel and illegal ads

By Elizabeth Dwoskin

Over the past seven years, Jordan Seiler estimates that he’s taken down hundreds of billboards, posters, and other signs to replace advertising in public places with his own artwork.

Armed with a screwdriver and anti-vandal bits, Seiler commits his acts of vandalism both as an ongoing art project and as a political statement: Thousands of billboards in the city, he says, are technically illegal.

And he’s right. According to the city, all billboards within 200 feet of “arterial highways”—the West Side Highway, the FDR, the BQE, and major thoroughfares such as Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway—have been illegal since the 1940s. All ads put up on scaffolding and construction sheds are illegal, too, unless they’re advertising the business whose signage has been covered up.

As Seiler has discovered, once you know the rules, you realize that illegal ads are, literally, everywhere: on building walls, sidewalk sheds, phone kiosks, and alongside highways. There are so many of them, it makes you wonder if that city has given up on enforcing its own laws. The city hasn’t given up—over the past two years, New York has been fighting what amounts to a sign war with outdoor advertising companies. The Department of Buildings claims the ads are a threat to public safety and a major cause of visual pollution. The advertisers argue that the signs can’t really be so bad if the city has neglected to take them down for decades.

In 2000, Mayor Rudy Giuliani announced that the city would be cracking down on the hundreds of illegal billboards lining the highways. The City Council raised the criminal fines for an illegal billboard from $5,000 to $25,000 and put size limits in place. Until then there had been no limit at all, and most advertisers had considered the fines to be “a small cost of doing business,” according to city lawyer Gabriel Taussig. Billboards in high-traffic areas are estimated to draw more than $50,000 each month. Some can draw hundreds of thousands in revenue.

Eight years later, however, not a single billboard has been removed. After the zoning resolution went into effect in 2006, Clear Channel sued the city, saying that the laws infringed on its First Amendment rights. (According to SEC filings, the company had more than 16,000 advertising displays in New York that year.) Until the lawsuit is resolved, the buildings department can’t take down any illegal billboards.

In 2007, the city was also sued by another advertiser: Metro Fuel LLC, which is owned by the hedge fund Och-Ziff Capital, has erected 360 illuminated “panel signs” throughout the city. By the company’s own estimate, 90 percent of its signs are technically illegal—their brightness is considered a safety hazard, and their locations violate zoning ordinances. (Panel signs look like rectangular flaps or flags and are attached to the signs of buildings.) Jacksonville-based attorney Bill Brinton, who has fought more than 30 cases against advertising companies in the past two decades, says Metro Fuel is following a pattern around the country: putting up illegal signs and, when a city objects, challenging the constitutionality of sign laws. The strategy worked in Los Angeles, where a district court, ruling in favor of the company, struck down the city’s outdoor-advertising laws (Los Angeles appealed the case to the Ninth Circuit Court. Oral arguments were heard in June). Fuel Outdoors, which is involved in another pending lawsuit in San Francisco, hired a mighty legal team in the Los Angeles case: Harvard constitutional-law expert Laurence Tribe and the politically connected Washington law firm Akin Gump.

As in the case of the highway billboards, the panel signs will stay up during the legal battle.

Like Clear Channel, Metro Fuel contends that the city has been inconsistent— and not only because it’s been lax in enforcing its own laws over the years. The company’s lawyers also claim that New York operates under a double standard, attacking privately owned outdoor- advertising companies while profiting off the city’s own ads—ads that Metro Fuel argues violate the very same regulations.

And New York makes a lot of money on public advertising. The ads placed on the city’s 13,000 public-phone kiosks— many of which contain phones that no longer work—bring in more than $13 million each year for the city. That’s triple the amount of revenue that comes from the phone calls themselves.

But the real moneymaker is the city’s 2005 contract to build thousands of pieces of street furniture, including bus shelters, newsstands, and public pay toilets. The Spanish company Cemusa—which beat out Clear Channel in its bid to build the structures—secured rights to place advertising on every piece of furniture, and has promised the city half the gross revenues from the ads: $1 billion over the 20-year life of the contract.

“The city has shot itself in the foot by putting up all this coordinated street furniture,” says Vanessa Gruen, special projects director for the Municipal Art Society, which has been campaigning against illegal billboards since 2001. “They’re breaking their own regulation—obviously. Sooner or later, some advertising company was going to come along and say, ‘If they can do it, I can do it, too.’”

Seiler, the anti-advertising artist, has joined a group of activists who have been reporting suspicious ads to the city. “I don’t have issues with advertising, but with your ability to turn it off,” says the 28-year-old, whose day job is a freelance photographer for fashion magazines. Making his way back to his Chelsea studio after prowling for illegal ads, Seiler used his Verizon Key—a special key that the company makes to prevent vandalism, which he’d bought from a Verizon worker on the street a few years ago—to remove a movie poster from one of the company’s phone kiosks.

“I have no remorse,” Seiler says cheerily. “I think we can all agree that public advertising is a manipulative, powerful medium that isn’t in the best interest of the general public. It takes up my mental space, and it’s assaulting.”