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 [...]
January 28, 2010 – 6:57 pm
Should Outdoor Advertising Companies Be Subject To The Same Penalties Grafitti Writers Face?
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 [...]
January 16, 2010 – 12:29 am
Two things happened on my bike today, one which is about advertising and the other isn’t but both are about public space and it’s uses and controls.
One: who owns the street sign posts
This morning I rode my bike to a not-so-close subway stop because I had to run into Manhattan for a meeting and make [...]
December 10, 2009 – 9:00 am
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 [...]
December 2, 2009 – 8:03 pm
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 [...]
December 2, 2009 – 4:00 pm
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 [...]
November 28, 2009 – 9:03 pm
It is looking like City Council will debate the new signs by-law and billboard tax on Tuesday December 1.
According to the City’s Lobbyist Registry, billboard industry lobbyists have had over 80 closed door meetings with City Councillors in the past month alone.
As a result, IllegalSigns.ca has designed, manufactured and is now distributing these custom-made products [...]
There’s a great op-ed in the Chicago Tribune by John McCarron. It starts:
“Chicago’s landscape is being swamped by a sea of unsightly billboards, advertising benches and illegal signs because of a toothless zoning ordinance that city officials admit cannot be enforced.”
Change is all around us, but in Chicago some things never change. Things like [...]
With a wave of business closures in New York, store fronts are being converted over to street level billboards with little regard for New York City’s sign laws. In these tough economic times it seems cheap adhesive vinyl and corporate crime lose to city permits and legal billboards in the corporate cost-benefit analysis. While they [...]
This is like the mafia complaining that law enforcement hurts their business…
Sign companies claim billboard fines are crippling the ad industry
BY Adam Lisberg
DAILY NEWS CITY HALL BUREAU CHIEF
New York’s crackdown on oversized billboards is hurting the ad industry, as sign companies say inspectors are hitting them with huge fines for minor infractions.
“Here is an industry that [...]
February 9, 2009 – 9:00 am
Reporting from Paris — Over the centuries, the French have cultivated the fine art of rebellion. The list of targets encompasses tyrants, wars, colonialism and, above all, capitalism in its many manifestations. The latest enemy may seem unlikely: billboards.
The Dismantlers, as a nationwide group of anti-ad crusaders call themselves, aren’t violent or loud or [...]
December 22, 2008 – 11:40 am
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 [...]
December 2, 2008 – 1:40 pm
The city of San Francisco has been slowly working to enforce a 2002 city proposition which banned new billboards on private property. Of course, we all know city governments are notoriously cash-strapped. So it comes as no surprise that it was only in 2007 that the city had completed a survey of the [...]
November 26, 2008 – 10:58 am
As you probably heard, on November 12th a group of artists and activists unveiled a “Special Edition” of the New York Times dated “July 4th, 2009″ and outlining the end of the war in iraq, a national tax base for schools, and free public universities, among other things. In addition to the print paper, [...]
October 20, 2008 – 7:23 am
Vinyl billboard blankets have been draped over all kinds of buildings, but they’re not usually found obscuring the glittering luxury outlets along East 57th Street.
Chanel, however, has done that very thing: hanging a big piece of vinyl over its building at No. 15, promoting Mobile Art, an exhibition by the architect Zaha Hadid that opens [...]