The California Department of Corrections (CDC) has unveiled a new campaign of billboard alterations on behalf of the State of Israel. On July 28, 2010 a total of nine billboards were apprehended, rehabilitated and discharged throughout San Francisco, including the intersection of Guerrero and 18th Street (see attached photo). Additional billboards were discharged into Polk Gulch, the Tenderloin, South of Market, the Mission, the Haight, Potrero Hill and Bay View/Hunters Point. The nine billboards represent the number of civilian fatalities incurred during Israel’s May 31st raid on a flotilla carrying supplies to Gaza.

The CDC released the billboards to highlight the two month anniversary of the raid. The billboards also cap the month of July which saw a White House reception for Israel’s Prime Minister followed by an Israeli military investigation of the May 31 incident. The White House visit reaffirmed America’s unbreakable bond with Israel, and the army investigation exonerated Israeli soldiers of any wrongdoing during the raid. As a compliment to these public relations activities, the CDC has contributed its specialized services to defend Israeli soldiers facing international scrutiny.

The CDC recognizes that our colleagues in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) may require additional support and financing as they expand Israeli jurisdiction into international waters. Annual US aid to Israel will increase to only $3.15 billion by 2013. Although our Israeli allies are thankful for such generosity, the CDC believes that America can do better. In order to encourage additional tax-supported financial donations for Israel, the CDC launched the “Blank Check” billboard campaign.

The corrected billboards read, “THANKS FOR THE BLANK CHECK, AMERICA,” featuring a US Treasury bank note for $7,000,000. The amount is a daily average of America’s $2.70 billion aid package for Israel in fiscal year 2010.

Reflecting Israel’s national colors, the blue and white billboards also include the following caption along with a discreet Israeli flag:

“In May 2010, Israel was attacked by an unarmed flotilla carrying humanitarian aid for Gaza. Decisive action by Israeli soldiers stopped this assault. Though only 9 people were killed and hundreds were detained, Israeli prestige came under fire. With your support, Israel can prevent future attacks. Our troops are waiting to execute anyone entering Gaza, but the cost of ammunition will strain daily U.S. aid of $7 million. Your additional tax dollars can overcome this challenge. Please contribute generously and help us bring peace to the Middle East.”

As a private correctional facility, the CDC recognizes the need for control and security in areas under Israeli jurisdiction. Therefore, the department salutes our Israeli colleagues in their efforts to maintain Gaza as the world’s largest open air correctional institution, exposing Palestinians to the safety, efficiency and discipline found in California facilities.

The California Department of Corrections is a private institution dedicated to the alteration, rehabilitation and improvement of California’s most criminal advertising. Initiated in 1994, the department is operated by individuals who feel that California’s correctional facilities have been insufficiently managing the state’s most criminal elements.

For additional information on department programs and policies, contact the CDC Office of Communications at cdc@revolutionist.com.

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San Francisco has a proposition on the ballot today which seeks to blow a huge hole in the city’s municipal billboard ban. Proposition D, if passed, will allow high definition electronic billboards to be placed on buildings down Market Street between 5th and 7th Streets. The proposition would allow building owners to avoid two anti-billboard ordinances. The first, passed in 1970, banned advertising along the downtown portion of mid-Market, and the other, passed in 2002, which banned new billboards throughout the city.

What Proposition D would allow, is a ribbon of huge lighted billboards to wrap all the way down Market Street. The proposition is very loosely worded, and essentially would allow unregulated erection of the billboards. Prop D’s language says the billboard can be “flashing, blinking or rotating” with the only limitation that they cannot rotate or spin faster than once every four seconds. The signs can also be located 25 feet above the roof-line… and therefore visible throughout the city. Also notable is that there is no limit to the number of billboards which could be erected.

The purported idea behind the proposition is that the new massive electronic billboards will somehow magically re-vitalize an area of the city that has been blighted for decades. How, is not exactly clear. Supporters (i.e. building owners) say that the billboards will drive foot traffic and increase business. However, what is more likely is that the eyesores will drive people away from the already depressed area. Make no mistake, Proposition D is not about re-vitalizing Market Street, it is about enriching the current slum-lord owners of the dilapidated buildings in the area. Currently, a single printed sign on a Market street kiosk sells for $210,000 a month. Just estimate the income from an electronic flashing and blinking 500 square-foot billboard, visible throughout the city.

What is clear, is that the city leaders have completely run out of ideas. A majority of the city council has endorsed the proposition, as has the mayor. The city previously spent over a decade on a redevelopment plan for the area, which was stymied by gridlock in city hall. There is no doubt that the area targeted by Proposition D is the definition of urban blight. Porn theaters, drug dealers, methadone clinics, and flop houses line the streets.

The situation on Market Street is a serious urban problem. There appears to be such a dearth of ideas coming from city hall, that a ludicrous proposition like this one actually can get serious support. If this proposition passes, the city will most certainly be poorer, and the slum-lords will most certainly be very, very rich. And there’s no provision for removing the signs when the effort fails.

Let’s hope Proposition D goes down in flames at the ballot box today.

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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.

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Now, the city has three full time people working on the code-enforcement detail stopping illegal billboards. Unfortunately, San Franciscans who don’t want to be bombarded with billboards across the city-scape have a new problem to contend with… the billboard industry’s legal team.

As this article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle explains, although the city has issued citations in over 250 cases, almost none of the fines have been paid by the billboard owners.

According to city Planning Department officials, a three-person enforcement team has located more than 250 illegal billboards and sought fines against the company owners and landlords totaling about $1.5 million. Only $50,500 of that has been collected, however, in part because the majority of the fines are tied up in unresolved legal actions. “We’re trying to stop any new billboards from going up and finding the ones that have been put up without permits,” said Dan Sider, the city planner in charge of the program. “Outdoor advertising is a lucrative industry, so the companies are hiring very skilled lawyers who are waging legal challenges.” It didn’t take long for the outdoor advertising industry, which handles $7.2 billion in business each year, to file legal challenges. Two cases recently argued in Los Angeles federal district court may not bode well for San Francisco. In both cases – which are now pending at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals – the district courts ruled that restrictions on billboards are not enforceable because they violated the Constitution. In one case, the court ruled that Los Angeles created a double standard by restricting private advertising signs, but simultaneously sold ad space on bus shelters and other public places. “It’s a violation of the First Amendment if the city allows some signs, but not others without justification,” said Rex Heinke, a Los Angeles attorney, who is representing a company in one of the Los Angeles cases.

I guess we’ll have to see what the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (also located in San Francisco) has to say about this issue. Once again the business interests fall back on the First Amendment to purportedly protect their trampling on the public’s enjoyment of a blight-free public space. Of course, the First Amendment, as any grade school kid will tell you, is the right to free speech enshrined in the Constitution. However, the right is not absolute, but rather elastic. It applies absolutely to some speech and less so to others. The most protected is political speech, while commercial speech requires much less deference. It remains to be seen how much import the judges on the Ninth Circuit will attach to visual clutter…

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I remember seeing KAWS work in San Francisco when I was temping in downtown office buildings. It was a black and white ad for something in a Market Street kiosk and there was a green, multi headed snake attacking the model in the photo. I remember studying it trying to figure out if it was an actual campaign or if someone had broken into it. And if they had, why would they do that? For me this was pre-internet, pre-art education, pre-public work. I was a 21 (?) year old college and high school drop out with a shitty office job and half an eye open. And this work was one of the many, many, many, many, many, many things that came out of the Bay Area that expanded my idea of what was possible in the world.

via Wooster

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Market Street Kiosks.
Background: Three sided containing four by six foot poster advertisements. Introduced to San Francisco on the condition that one of the three sides is used for art – handled by the San Francisco Art Commission. Interestingly, advertisers are only interested in the 2 sides that face car traffic.
Cost: between $1367 and $1473 per panel. But with a 16 panel minimum cost ranges from $21,866 to $23,562. This does not include production which could easily be thousands more.

Wildposting
Background: While seen pasted all over San Francisco’s construction sites, these two by three foot posters are displayed without permits and are illegal. Regardless of the law, the less scrupulous can still pay to have them made and pasted up. Because one hires a contractor, it’s possible to argue plausible deniability if one ever were caught. But most likely that wont happen because the law is so poorly enforced. (Conversely, throw up some graffiti on a wall and see what happens…)
Cost: For a week of wildposting you can get 40-60 posters. Cost (including production) is about $4,250.

Other Factors: Campaign design, testing, and evaluation costs not included. Advertising expenses are tax deductible.

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The new PDF of their The Art & Science of Billboard Improvement is free to download now.

To whet your appetite for more knowledge, I’ll post the introduction below:

Look up!

Billboards have become as ubiquitous as human suffering, as difficult to ignore as a beggar’s outstretched fist. Every time you leave your couch or cubicle, momentarily severing the electronic umbilicus, you enter the realm of their impressions. Larger than life, subtle as war, they assault your senses with a complex coda of commercial instructions, the messenger RNA of capitalism. Every time you get in a car, or ride a bus, or witness a sporting event, you receive their instructions. You can’t run and you can’t hide, because your getaway route is lined to the horizon with signs, and your hidey-hole has a panoramic view of an 8-sheet poster panel.

There are a million stories in the Big City, and as many reasons to want to hack a billboard. We have our reasons, and we don’t presume to judge yours. In this manual, we have made a conscious effort to steer clear of ideology and stick to methodology. The procedures outlined here are based on our 20+ years’ experience executing billboard improvements professionally, safely, and (knock wood) without injury or arrest. In most cases, is should not be necessary to follow the elaborate, even obsessive precautions we outline here. A can of spray paint, a blithe spirit, and a balmy night are all you really need.

Blank DeCoverly
BLF Minister of Propaganda

from: The Art & Science of Billboard Improvement

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Declare that the proliferation of advertising in the public right of way contributes to urban blight and visual clutter, as well as the commercialization of public spaces within the City. It is the policy of the voters of San Francisco as follows:

There shall be no increase in the number of general advertising signs on the street furniture on the public right of way, including, but not limited to, transit shelters, kiosks, benches and newspaper racks, over the number authorized by the City law and City contracts as of July 1, 2007

There shall be no increase in the number of general advertising signs visible to the public on the exterior of City owned buildings

Even though the outdoor advertising industry seemed to make an attempt to pump a bunch of money into opposing Proposition K, it looks like it is sailing towards passage. Early returns today have Proposition K at Yes:60.66% No: 39.34%. With numbers like those, it is virtually assured of passage.

Way to go San Francisco!!

Check out IllegalSigns.Ca’s coverage of illegal billboards in San Francisco.

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