Are ads polluting our cities?

SAO PAULO - AN AD FREE CITY – IS THIS THE FUTURE?

Sao Paulo in Brazil has taken down all its outdoor poster ads, neon signs, ads at bus stops, flyers, hand lettered signs and ads on transport. People there felt that the city had become polluted by “worthless advertising” and had turned the city into one giant billboard. Since they have removed all ads the public have said the city has been “cleaned” and reclaimed from the hands of commercial brands. Everyone agrees it looks much better. Not surprisingly the Brazilian ad community and many large brands are unhappy. Though some more creative ad agencies are seeing it as an opportunity to be more innovative.

Could this be the future for other cities? Will Times Square and Piccadilly Circus be next? Westminster council are no fans of advertising and have been trying to reduce ad sites in their borough for years.

Do you remember when red buses and black cabs had no ads on?

Or when posters were actually good to look at? Most of them are now just bad.

I believe brands need to take responsibility for the use of media sites. To subject the public to junk ads is anti-social. And it doesn’t sell, that’s the lunacy of it all. Why would you be engaged by a badly written and designed poster that just shouts at you “buy, buy, buy.” We are all prepared to pay for great art, great creativity that engages us creates desire. But the only one who is prepare to pay for ads are the brands.

The expansion of advertising media sites- almost nothing is safe – sandwich bags, benches, lamp posts, floors, even our skies - means it works less. Too much visual noise means the public sees less. As someone who works in the creative end of the London ad industry, this I know is true.

At the turn of the 20th century the tube network suffered a similar problem. There were so many ads people complained they couldn’t read the station names. It took a very smart man, Frank Pick, to solve it. He took all the ads down and replaced them with just a few. Those ad spaces became far more valuable and generated more income. The Underground started using the sites themselves to encourage Londoners to visit numerous attractions and places. Pick commissioned many young upper coming artists, many who represented new artistic styles of time, like McKnight Kauffer and Graham Sutherland. Within a few years the Underground had gone from being a visual cacophony of ugly ads to an art gallery. It was said that Londoners had become the most art educated in the world.

Out of a problem had come a solution that benefited both the advertisers and society. Maybe we are at that time again. Maybe the new Frank Pick could be Ken Livingstone.