Category Archives: News

Lemonade Movie

More than 70,000 advertising professionals have lost their jobs in this “Great Recession.” Lemonade is about what happens when people who were once paid to be creative in advertising are forced to be creative with their own lives.

via swissmiss | Lemonade.

(Please, you laid off brilliant ad people, PLEASE start doing something ethical and worthwhile. – Steve)

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Its Tappening: Bottled Water is Joke

Bottled water makes polar bears cry

The folks at Tappening have released one of the funniest and smartest PSA-ish social education campaigns I’ve seen in a long time. Well, maybe since the New York Times Special Edition.

Reports are these cute single color posters with white lies about the bottled water industry will be hitting the streets of NYC soon, if they aren’t already up (I’m out of town for another week).

My favorite is “Bottled Water: 98% melted ice caps, 2% polar bear tears.” The small print at the bottom of the poster says: “If bottled water companies can lie, we can too.”

Their “Start a Lie” website is also killer. Anyone can add a lie about the bottled water industry, e.g.: “Bottled water makes me urinate fire.”

They also did these great ones during the Presidential election about McCain and Obama.

Awesome work!

Also, for any educators out there, this is practically a readymade course assignment for any art, design, social studies, activism course.

From Coolhunting, via Marisa Olson

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PosterChild Tells NPA What He Thinks Of Their Contest Promotions

via Public Ad Campaign

Yesterday I went out with PosterChild, Jason Eppink, Steve Lambert, and Packard Jennings for lunch. Our talk inevitably surrounded upcoming personal projects, collaborative street actions and the age of the urinals at the Old Town Bar on 18th street. Posterchild was leaving for Toronto that evening and had one last project to put up before he left. Targeting NPA Outdoor‘s pathetic attempt to convert their third party illegal advertisements into legitimate first party signs, he remade the typical sign that now adorns all NPA illegal signage in the city. This piece was made at the corner of 19th street and 10th avenue in the same location Walker Tieser was arrested during the NYSAT project.

via Public Ad Campaign: PosterChild Tells NPA What He Thinks Of Their Contest Promotions.

See what Charlie Todd at Urban Prankster thinks.

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Green Sleeves – Illegal ads turned planters on Torontoist

It’s 6 a.m. in Kensington Market on a Sunday morning, with the sun out but only barely, and Eric Cheung and Sean Martindale are busy planting flowers. At College and Augusta, on the two large posterboards on the west wall of Sam’s, they cut the outlines of large triangles deep into the thick layers of posters, through and past the topmost movie ads for The Ugly Truth and District 9 on one board and the PSP on the other. Then they pull those triangles out, folding and curving them into a pocket that’s shaped like something between a cone and a pyramid, using a staple gun to firmly attach it to the wall. When all the triangles across both boards are cut and folded and curved and stapled, which won’t be for another few hours, Cheung and Martindale will fill each pocket with dirt and place a plant inside, spraying it with water.

read the rest:

Green Sleeves – Torontoist.

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One can do so much with 1 pen

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CONSERVAS

Leaving tonight for Barcelona where I will be talking at the Innmotion festival tomorrow at the CCCB.  Learn more about the event at the Innmotion 2009 site.

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3 ton sign falls onto Broadway, N.Y. (1912)

Just found this amazing image while doing some research.  Another reason why the Department of Buildings regulates billboards.

Flickr Photo Download: 3 Ton Electric Sign Blown into Brdway, N.Y. (LOC).  Another angle.

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L.A. Weekly Reporter Wins Top Press Club Award For Investigative Article on Billboards

Congratulations to Christine Pelisek, whose L.A. Weekly article, “Billboards Gone Wild,” won this year’s L.A. Press Club Award for best hard news story in newspapers of more than 100,000 circulation. This article that focused on the woeful job the city has done controlling illegal billboards brought the issue to widespread public attention for the first time, and helped spur the city to start a billboard inventory, adopt a billboard moratorium, and rewrite the sign code to make it legally defensible.

L.A. Press Club Awards

L.A. Weekly:  Billboards Gone Wild

via L.A. Weekly Reporter Wins Top Press Club Award For Investigative Article on Billboards.

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Ad Nauseum comes out today

Ad Nauseum Stay FreeCarrie McLaren and Jason Torchinsky’s book, “Ad Nauseum: A Survivor’s Guide to American Consumer Culture” comes out today.  I have a copy and as a long time fan of Stay Free! magazine and, later, writer for the Stay Free! blog, I was still surprised at the great content I missed or forgot about.  This morning I was flipping through it and multiple moments like, “What, David Cross wrote that story?  Wow!”

I always liked Stay Free! because the content was smart and incisive, but always with a sense of humor.  Keep an eye out for it.

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Stay Free! on WNYC

Jason and Carrie from Stay Free! were on Brian Lehrer today talking about Ad Nauseam. You can listen to it here:

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From Jitterbug to Twitter, Motivating Each Generation to Buy

I received this today in my inbox. I don’t think there is any commentary needed:

Hello Michael,

Been wondering about this multi-generational workplace, how social media plays out with each generation and what it really means for how business will be conducted in the future? I have been invited to conduct a training class with a time and cost-saving platform and wanted to invite you to listen — at no charge. My one hour complimentary teleclass entitled “From Jitterbug to Twitter, Motivating Each Generation to Buy”

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Why It Matters (from Ban Billboard Blight)

Dennis over at LA’s Ban Billboard Blight answers the question “Can’t you find something more important to be bothered about?”

Fighting The Outdoor Advertising Invasion: A Trivial Pursuit?

From time to time, someone will take offense at our activities on the grounds that advocating for protection of the visual environment from an onslaught of commercial advertising is a trivial cause compared to fighting poverty, or global warming, or gang warfare, or any number of other social and environmental ills.   In other words, “Can’t you find something more important to be bothered about?” Read More »

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End of Advertising (Igor Stromajer)

the end of advertising is actually the beginning of the rebirth of minimalist painting

end of advertising

From Facebook Gallery: “No Logo (The Future of Advertising is Here?)” Stadtmitte U-Bahn Station, Berlin; 9 June 2009

photo by Igor Stromajer

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Chicago Tribune: City losing war against sight blight

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 the above opening sentence, which I wrote 22 years ago for a front-page feature on how our city was being overrun with billboard blight.

He then explains how loopholes have enabled illegal signs to exist in Chicago for decades. He then talks about a new group, the Coalition Against Sign Pollution, who are looking to close the loopholes with a moratorium on outdoor signs:

Attorney Charles Levesque, a CASP founding member, said a ban would be legal because virtually all signs of any size are a “special use” under the zoning code and require a city permit. “It’s not a guaranteed right.” As for 1st Amendment issues, he points out that four states — Vermont, Hawaii, Maine and Alaska — have banned billboards altogether.

You can read the whole piece, City losing war against sight blight here.

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Taxi Advertsing FAIL

Nothing quite so (dis)comforting as the blue screen of death in place of the usual taxi ads.

Note that the failed program is “Advertising”

Blue Screen of Taxi Death

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