This makes me wish I had a big fat marker with me to cover this up in something other than this insidious shit. And i don’t really ever have the impulse to tag.
Canal and Broadway. All you Chisel-tippers and KRINKers go after it.
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 vandalism, illegal billboards have not. Illegal billboards are generally defined as panels for the display of advertisements in public places (such as alongside highways or on the sides of buildings) that have not received the legal permits and safety inspections; panels that display ads not related to structure or property they are affixed to may also quality as “unlawful.†It is my contention that illegal billboards are a form of graffiti and, as a result, should be prosecuted as a form of vandalism.”
In this paper, Mr. Biermann comes to some conclusions that have informed our practice here at PublicAdCampaign for years. In fact, he calls upon the NYSAT project (without credit) as an example of civil disobedience that attempts to challenge commercial control of public messages while promoting a more just public arena, interested in promoting individual identity and citizen directed spatial control.
I highly suggest reading the paper, but if you don’t have the time, I’ll leave you with the final 2 sentences.
In this way, via a constant bombardment of a hegemonic truth, corpo-political regimes control the means by which individuals seek to know, decipher, and act on themselves. Acting as if they were free in within a liberal, democratic system of rule, the good consumer citizen is calculatedly and spatially constructed.
Indeed, this is truly about who we are and who we want to be as people and a society. When our influences come from the corporate machine, we have a hard time defining for ourselves the truths with which we would like to live.
From October 2008… this post was caught in WordPress limbo. I publish it now, well after this NYC microtrend has gone national, if not global. The questions remain the same, the scope has just increased…
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.”
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 another meeting in Brooklyn right after that one. And I was late. I get to the station, find a street sign to lock up to, and the guy hawking the Daily News comes up to me yelling. He tells me that is his sign, and that he is going to lock up his newspaper rack AND stool to it, and I have to go find somewhere else. I tell him he doesn’t own the street sign and start locking up, and he says that if I do that he will simply lock his rack up around my bike and I will not be able to get it out. And I’m running late.
As I scuffled off around the corner to find another street sign on the next block my head was full of expletives, but now, sitting on the ferry to Staten Island I am a bit more calm about it, but I have nagging questions: who owns the space. Who has the right to lock what to signs. Are the rights of individuals different than those of corporations. What about corporations acting via pseudo-independent citizens like the Daily News guy. And what is the answer in principle, what is the law’s answer, and how wide is the gap?
Two: obeying the law like an obedient dog.
I ride the Staten Island ferry three times a week to teach at the College of Staten Island. Sometimes I am on bicycle (not as often this semester as I would like) and usually I have a backpack full of books, student papers and my daily rations for my excursion into the crypto-suburbs. Almost every time I pass through the threshold of security I am eyed by the man with the bomb dog. About half of the time he asks me to take my bag off and let his dog inspect it. But every time one of the bomb-dog-men tells me to take off my bag for inspection he says it as if I should already know that I was supposed to take it off for him.
Today I’m running late (its the theme for today) and I am trotting towards the door to the downstairs bikes-only segregated waiting area in my bike shoes (which means I can’t go very fast), and the man yells out “Hey! You!” and points at me. He is jogging over to me. He simply points to the ground. I’ve done this enough times that I have internalized this procedure. I remove my bag and put it on the floor. Take two steps back. You always have to step back from the bag — as if it is a bomb… The dog sniffs it for 10 seconds. Walks back to his master, and the master walks away.
It is amazing that I have been interpolated into the bomb-dog-man’s vocabulary of power. He calls out short commands, I stop, and respond. He points to the ground. I know what the command means, and do as commanded. I am an obedient, well disciplined dog in the dog master’s control society.
I guess there is a reason they call it Mafia Wars. Business Insider has broken a story about insurance company shills paying Facebook users into sending emails to their Congressional Representatives opposing health care reform.
This is interesting in the context of the Health Care debate (see the attempt to push Komen for the Cure to dump Leiberman’s lobbyist wife) but is more significant as a marker of the way that advertising and advocacy are creeping into places and forms where the information consumer does not expect them.
This is one more place to be on guard. And being on guard changes the place. I’m having nostalgic memories of surfing the web on Mosaic, circa 1994… but I know it is just nostalgia.
Steve sent me someone’s inquiry that came in off of the AAA contact page. Usually these are either “hey you guys rock” or they are lost advertisers who try to sell ad space somewhere they shouldn’t and don’t get it when we shame them.
Here’s the full email. I put it out there in full, and then I will ruminate on why i wavered for two weeks on writing this post at all:
From: Jonathan Ciaccio
Date: December 26, 2009 7:32:31 PM EST
To: antiadvertisingagency.com
Subject: New Blog Post Suggestion
Dear owner of http://antiadvertisingagency.com,
I’m the webmaster of http://www.sharethedamnroad.com.
We came across your blog today and thought that you might want to
know about a cycling jersey we are selling that is stirring up quite a buzz. The new jerseys at www.sharethedamnroad.com send a message to aggressive drivers.
If you decide you want to write a little something about us for your
blog, let us know and we will reciprocate a link back to you!!
Best regards,
Jonathan Ciaccio
Cycling@ciaccioseo.com
So first problem: the guy writing the email is some hired gun SEO “webmaster” who is out fishing for pagerank. Not only is he a SEO, he is a SEO who hosts his domain at blogspot: http://ciaccioseo.blogspot.com/. His client’s site is way down in the search rankings for whatever keywords they are aiming for, and he wants a piece of our pagerank. It appears that his hired gun is doing a fine job as the site has thousands of links to it and a pagerank of 3/10 (which according to his payscale means the SEO is currently charging $250/month), so I’m not going to put in a link. On principle.
But I’ll discuss: If you go to the site (by copying and pasting), you can see he is selling bike jerseys that say things like “DON’T RUN ME OVER!” and “DON’T HONK AT ME.” The word “Thanks” is emblazoned across the front in a mirror image, so drivers can read it from their rear view mirrors, but realistically it is virtually invisible to drivers unless you are sitting up in a victory pose. These are the creation of Phil Gaimon, a rising 24 year old racer and blogger for Bicycling magazine. He writes that it is about trying to:
finally experience the joy of having the last word. The goal is to convey messages of safety and cyclist’s rights, but there is an element of humor and frustration, which we feel cannot be denied in the cyclist/motorist relationship, so these jerseys are not for wimps
I’m not sure where Gaimon is training, but in my experience, this is just the wrong approach to communicating with cars and their drivers. I “train” on the streets of New York, which affords me the opportunity of actually speaking with cars at stoplights, because I can ride faster than traffic. I can have the last word. And I’ll be the first to admit this: I start out calm, but I don’t shy away from someone shouting at me. I love to try to have the last word. This is what the last word sounds like:
I knock on their window and politely tell the driver that they almost hit me, and they should watch out for cyclists, or I tell them that I can hear them coming and there is no need to honk; honking only scares me and could make me loose my balance momentarily and cause me to ride into their oncoming car: the exact thing they were (honestly) trying to prevent.
Then one of two things happens:
1. They are very quiet. They apologize, or say “oh, I didn’t realize that” and we all go on our way happily. This happens about 1/3 of the time. 1/3 of the time, our conversation makes riding a bicycle in NYC safer.
2. They get very loud. They tell me to fuck off, and it goes downhill from there. Sometimes it goes really far downhill really fast. Many times drivers have gotten out of their cars to physically assault me. (Advice, immediately ride against traffic.) One of those times, the driver got back in his car and hit me intentionally with his car. Not fun. He then stood over me and yelled at me in front of several witnesses. I got his plates, pressed charges, and he probably got a warning. Still, not fun.
So it becomes a question of what is the right message. I guess that is an advertising question. Or maybe a social marketing question. I think he is closest to the mark with his shirt that has an arrow pointing to the rider’s left and the words “3 FEET.”
What we need is rider education, driver education and more generally public education. But we also need riders who are not being smart asses about our public image. Just because they are not “wimps” doesn’t meant that the wearers of these jerseys are helping progress the overall image and presence of bicycling in this SUV focused country.
Instead of a funny jersey that is good for a few good quick laughs, I present three different ideas that brings the focus back from having the last word:
One: Transportation Alternatives has spent much of the last year and will spend much of the coming year focusing on bicyclist education. They published their Biking Rules street code guide, ran an enormously successful PSA campaign and massively sold out screening at BAM. They even got Bike Snob to be one of the judges. The point is that the biggest problem is bicyclists themselves: from angry pelotons in Central or Prospect Park cussing out joggers, to hipsters on track bikes without brakes running lights to delivery men riding against traffic, we need to be better citizens if we want to be treated as good citizens.
Two: Passive visibility is a secret weapon. Of course you need to have your front and back headlights at night, but nothing stops a driver dead in their tracks like a fully visible bicycle. Case in point: I wrapped my entire bike in retroreflective vinyl. And then I wrapped my helmet too. There is nothing quite as awesome as watching a car see you in their headlights as they are crawling forward, about to make a turn across traffic, and stop abruptly. Seeing an entire bicyclist completely light up in their headlights shocks them into realizing there are other people out there using the roads too. After a year of people asking for it, I made DIY Kits. See the original video here.
Three: If you really want 3 feet, give yourself three feet! A couple of industrial designers came up with a design prototype for a rear mounted LED with a green laser that marks out a 6 foot wide bike lane around your bicycle. I guess it won’t help during the day, but after dark is when it really matters. And after dark no one will be able to read your jersey anyway.
Now we know what Google would do. What would you do if you had the ability to take over every billboard?
According to a new patent that was just granted to Google, the company could soon extend the reach of its advertising program in Google Maps to Street View. This patent, which was originally filed on July 7, 2008, describes a new system for promoting ads in online mapping applications. In this patent, Google describes how it plans to identify buildings, posters, signs and billboards in these images and give advertisers the ability to replace these images with more up-to-date ads. In addition, Google also seems to plan an advertising auction for unclaimed properties.
In Google’s example, the software could identify the marquis and individual window posters on a theater property and replace them with new information. Through this, a theater could promote a new play in Street View, even if the actual Street View image is completely out of date.
If you were a video game geek in the early 1990’s, this is probably up your alley. A quartet of street artists named Mr. Talion, Epoxy, Baveaux, and Kone have added the heads-up display from the first-person shooter computer game DOOM to a number of billboards throughout Berlin. You can see more here.
Imeem users, bloggers and web users are in for another nasty surprise following MySpace’s acquisition of “certain parts†of the service. MySpace has replaced Imeem songs and playlists embedded on blogs and elsewhere on the web with advertisements for generic ringtones and the MySpace Music service.
Not only are users’ playlists offline until MySpace Music manages to reconstruct them all by hand, but imeem songs and playlists appearing elsewhere on the web have been replaced by bright orange ads for Lady Gaga, Michael Jackson and Jay-Z ringtones and MySpace’s music service. Talk about a bait-and-switch.
A MySpace spokeswoman confirmed on Friday that MySpace is responsible for the ads (updated). The Flash code for the ads in question (example) are hosted by the MySpace Music site iLike, and some of the ads say “Create a playlist on MySpace Music, it’s free.â€
We witnessed firsthand this playlists-for-ads land grab, having used imeem to embed songs and playlists on the Listening Post blog. The ad-supported imeem music service featured a huge catalog and allowed third-party sites like ours to stream full songs, allowing us to play the music we were talking about without securing permission from each copyright holder.
Imeem ultimately couldn’t keep up with its licensing payments, and MySpace swooped in to pick through the wreckage. Now, thousands of independent artists are not being paid money they’re owed and countless posts on Listening Post and elsewhere on the web feature not Imeem’s songs or playlists, but rather advertisements like the ones pictured to the above right.
Granted, MySpace bought Imeem’s system for embedding songs and playlists and is free to do with it as it pleases, and the ads aren’t clickable (as of midday Thursday ET). But they sure look obnoxious.
Someone left a copy of Overspray Magazine at my studio the other day and as I thumbed through it I came across this small blip on Urban Pranksterism. There were some fun quotes I thought were relevant as we redefine some of the motivations for our work to help guide us forward in this new year.
“…it’s about hitting people with something visceral that will force them to confront an unlicensed alternative to the current monopoly on visual space held by our local governments and their corporate sponsors.”
“Part of defining a public space is decorating it, inhabiting it and playing with new uses for it. Just because we weren’t consulted on the design process of our cities doesn't make them any less ours, and shouldn't mean that we have to sit out when our idea of how the space can be put to use doesn't mesh with the official stance.”
“Turning a public space into a vehicle for any kind of art is a politicized act in itself, whether or not the project has overtly political content.”
“The power of street art doesn't necessarily even have to lie within the content of the pieces themselves, but rather in the knowledge that no permission was sought, that someone is still working outside the systems that dictate who is allowed to use public visual space.”
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.
Spam is the definition of disruptive advertising — tirelessly attacking inboxes with thinly-veiled (although delightfully ridiculous) sales pitches: “I know what women do on the farm. NEVER leave them there lonely!†and promises: “Your little friend will turn from a small pumpkin to a big king!â€
However, spam is a much broader social phenomenon: it has leaked out of the inbox and into discussions of art and sociology. Largely a one-way communication system broadcasted from developing countries to the moneyed first world, spam misinterprets its [vaguely-defined] audience’s hopes, fears, and deepest/darkest desires, and indiscriminately spews this material back into our virtual lives.
Spamvisualization.net allows for the observation of spam’s inscrutably absurdist prose — all from a comfortable distance from your inbox. It operates on the premise that spam (when divorced from its primary role as unsolicited advertising) = interesting raw data = cool infographics. The site aggregates spam messages into a database and then analyzes their basic quantifiables (i.e.- what words appear and how often, how broad is the message’s distribution, etc.) The sanitized numbers generated from this survey can then be represented in bar graphs, charts, and bubble form.
The “wordscore†visualization, for example, reveals that “strong†is the most frequently occurring word in spam (which in html code parlance means “boldâ€) while “horse†is about midway down the list of frequently-occurring terms (and regrettably, possesses no html meaning.) The “quantitygrid†reveals the size/distribution of spam “campaigns†in the form of tasteful blobs, proportional to the size of the campaign. The spam represented by these anonymous orbs can easily be revealed upon rollover. A cursory survey of the bubble-landscape revealed advertisements for such unexpected products as “discount menopause gum†and “free sex tubes.†Nice!
Corporate giving is a bad enough deal with the devil, but take corporate giving and mash it up with social networking, and wow! Not only does chase have you scurrying about to give them PR/branding impressions, they get all your personal data in the process.
This makes me angry
This makes me wish I had a big fat marker with me to cover this up in something other than this insidious shit. And i don’t really ever have the impulse to tag.
Canal and Broadway. All you Chisel-tippers and KRINKers go after it.