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Sao Paulo presses the delete button on “brandalism”
Imagine walking into Times Square and all the huge electronic billboards had disappeared. Imagine that all the outdoor advertising in a major city like San Francisco just came down one day. Â
That’s now a reality in Sao Paulo, Brazil where the city council, on a vote of 45 to 1, completely banned outdoor advertising in an effort to “beatify” the city. Yes, that’s right - they completely banned outdoor ads. In January the law went into effect and the billboards, on building ads and even ads on blimps are now history.
According to the International Herald Tribune:
“the city of 11 million, overwhelmed by what the authorities call visual pollution, plan[ned] to press the ‘delete all’ button and offer its residents unimpeded views of their surroundings.’ The report described the new law’s broad-sweeping ambitions: ‘The statute’s most visible impact promises to be at eye level and above. The outsized billboards and screens that dominate the skyline, promoting everything from automobiles, jeans and cellphones to banks and sex shops, will have to come down. All other forms of publicity in public spaces, like distribution of fliers, will also stop.
The law also regulates the dimensions of store signs, and will force many well-known companies to reduce them substantially by a formula based on the size of their facades. Another provision, much criticized by owners of transportation companies, outlaws advertising of any kind on the sides of the city’s thousands of buses and taxis. The law, as passed, also applied to advertising banners trailed by airplanes and ads on blimps.’”
From MediaPost.com:
“The law’s been in effect a few months now, and the absence of brandalism is eerie; just check out Tony de Marco’s photo set. What’s left are either skeletons of giant billboards, or freshly painted building facades, covering what was once bold advertising and logo libido.
The rationale is simple: It’s one thing for uncontrollable advertising clutter to denigrate commercial media platforms like television, Web sites, radio channels or print. This kind of clutter can be easily ignored, boycotted, turned off or avoided through ad-blocking technology; it exists only if granted attention. And people are doing just that, in increasing numbers, because they’ve had enough clutter and irrelevancy. They want more control.
But advertising clutter in public spaces is very different. Public spaces belong to all of us, and they become what we collectively make of them. Moreover, we simply don’t have the same ability to avoid public spaces should we feel invaded. They’re immersive and located where we live. That clutter is even extending our definition of public, to include venues such as textbooks, classrooms, movie theaters and planes.”
I for one support this idea. I hate big ugly ads all over the road and sides of buildings. Interruption advertising will surely be here forever but as an effective marketing tool it takes a back seat to permission based marketing.
(Thanks to Ron Hartley for pointing me to this story)
This is awesome…
Any word on what these business owners are coming up with to replace their public-sign-as-marketing tactics?
Or how their companies have been impacted by the ban?
Left by Carolynn Duncan on 05/08/2007