Building Your Community Without Billboards

Most people don’t give much thought to billboards. People see them so often and in so many different places and mediums that they assume they are normal and that they should be there. I believe every community has the right to not have any billboards and that they should step up and exercise that right. Vermont, Alaska, Hawaii, and Maine have already prohibited billboards. Being scenic states I assume that they enacted these laws primarily to preserve what is left of the natural habitat.

There isn’t exactly a bunch of nature in Los Angeles, but I don’t like billboards in cities either. While some people believe that every inch of the planet is available for commercial purposes I say no! It is not disrespectful to the rule of law to not have any billboards anywhere. When we allow our communities to be dominated by billboards it takes peoples control over their own communities away and gives it to profiteers that have no interest in the community they are advertising in.

Sao Paulo banned advertising in their city on January 1, 2007. They are doing it to improve the way the city looks. It will do that, but order and cleanliness are not something I’m personally interested in.

I went looking on the web for others who share my views and I found the Anti-Advertising Agency. This is what their mission says:

Outdoor advertising has become unavoidable. Traditional billboards and transit shelters have cleared the way for more pervasive methods such as wrapped vehicles, sides of buildings, electronic signs, kiosks, taxis, posters, sides of buses, and more. In urban areas commercial content is placed in our sight and into our consciousness every moment we are in public space. Over time, this domination of the surroundings has become the “natural” state. Through long-term commercial saturation, it has become implicitly understood by the public that advertising has the right to own, occupy and control every inch of available space. The steady normalization of invasive advertising dulls the public’s perception of their surroundings, re-enforcing a general attitude of powerlessness toward creativity and change, thus a cycle develops enabling advertisers to slowly and consistently increase the saturation of advertising with little or no public outcry.

The Anti-Advertising Agency co-opts the tools and structures used by the advertising and public relations industries. Our work calls into question the purpose and effects of advertising in public space. Through constructive parody and gentle humor our Agency’s campaigns will ask passers by to critically consider the role and strategies of today’s marketing media as well as alternatives for the public arena. Our work will de-normalize “out-of-home” advertising and increase awareness of the public’s power to contribute to a more democratically-based outdoor environment.

I’m so happy these guys exist! What a breath of fresh air.

While I was relaxing downtown I noticed an interesting juxtaposition highlighting two different ways outdoor space can be used. At the intersection of Figueroa and Olympic I took pictures of almost 50 paintings/mixed media pieces of mostly flowers, peace signs, humans, and angels installed on the fence of a construction site. They are interesting to look at, they involve our community (at least they look like they were made by local school children), they use otherwise wasted space, and they don’t advertise anything. Take a look:

I also took pictures of the surrounding area near the construction site and it was very different. I much prefer the 50 peace signs and flowers to Nissan and Grand Theft Auto IV ads.

What if these spaces were given taken back to the community? What if local artists were involved, not people who don’t have anything to do with us? Can you imagine fifteen story EZLN chickens by Cache on those buildings? That would be dope as hell!

Tags: advertising, Anti-Advertising Agency, billboards, Cache, Figueroa, graffiti, Grand Theft Auto IV, Los Angeles, Olympic, outdoor advertising, Sao Paulo