An interesting development on the anti-billboards front… This post on Talent Imitates, Genius Steals caught my eye. Apparently Auckland have also been discussing a ban on billboards. This time the advertising industry is fighting back with the advertising campaign above, in an attempt to justify their industry by saying that if billboards were removed, all you’d see is ugly buildings behind them anyway. It’s a clever campaign, but a distraction from the fact that billboards add to visual clutter. They’re designed to stand out, and draw your attention to them, so whether or not the building they’re attached to is attractive or not it’s still visual pollution. At least the plain grey building in the photo above is unobtrusive, unlike the red frame which cries out for your attention whether you want to look at it or not.
The comment by David MacGregor on the post linked above was of particluar interest:
First, what is the difference between seeing an ad on a billboard and seeing an ad in a magazine? The answer, in a word, is permission–or, in three words, freedom of choice.
Out-of-home (OOH) advertising is one of the only forms of advertising in which we don’t get much choice about whether we see it. Television, radio, print, online, cinema and so on are all completely voluntary. OOH on the other hand, is forced upon us when we go to work, uni, school, the shops, or anywhere else we might care to go. The only other such form of advertising I can think of is door-to-door. We can now opt-out of telemarketing, and put a No Junk Mail sticker on our letterboxes.
Oh, and SPAM. But I don’t think anyone disagrees that SPAM is repreihensible.
