Tag Archives: the law

Dirty, Dirty, Dirty

By Steve Lambert | Published: March 18, 2010

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 [...]

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Owner Arrested For Hollywood Supergraphic Previously Cited For Sign Law Violations

By Steve Lambert | Published: March 1, 2010

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 [...]

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Public Ad Campaign: Should OAC’s Be Subject To The Same Penalties Grafitti Writers Face?

By Steve Lambert | Published: January 28, 2010

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 [...]

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Who owns & who controls public space?

By Michael Mandiberg | Published: January 16, 2010

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 [...]

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

By Steve Lambert | Published: December 10, 2009

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 [...]

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

By Steve Lambert | Published: December 2, 2009

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 [...]

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Billboard Companies Protest Billboard Tax…On Illegal Billboards – from Torontoist

By Steve Lambert | Published: December 2, 2009

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 [...]

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Free Billboard Lobbyist Sanitizer Now Available for All Members of Council (from illegalsigns.ca)

By Steve Lambert | Published: November 28, 2009

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 [...]

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Chicago Tribune: City losing war against sight blight

By Steve Lambert | Published: June 10, 2009

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 [...]

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Public Ad Campaign’s Recent Five

By jordan | Published: March 29, 2009

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 [...]

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Sign Industry: “The Law is interfering with my illegal income!!”

By Steve Lambert | Published: March 8, 2009

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. [...]

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In Paris, an anti-ad insurgency – Los Angeles Times

By Steve Lambert | Published: February 9, 2009

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 [...]

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More Bad Calls from the NY MTA

By Steve Lambert | Published: December 22, 2008

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 [...]

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Billboard industry gums up anti-blight enforcement in S.F.

By Paul S. | Published: December 2, 2008

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 existent billboards [...]

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DeBeers attempts sleazy take down of parody ad

By Steve Lambert | Published: November 26, 2008

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, an [...]

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