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French cities trying to ban public adverts

theguardian.com

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Re: French cities trying to ban public adverts

#91

Post by ljm »

q845712 wrote: post #5

It's kind of an open secret that the city of Santa Barbara (CA, US) has banned several forms of public outdoor advertising: we have no billboards, no promotional posters, no taxi toppers... It's delightful, and very high on my list of reasons why I enjoy living here. Every time I leave I'm reminded how noisy space is when it's filled with advertisements. I wholeheartedly recommend others advocate for similar policies…

I wish we had that on the tube in London. Instead, you ride an escalator and see upwards of 20-maybe 30 video ads on the way. And that's before a marketing firm commissions the redesign of a tunnel so an entire stretch of walkway is 100% ad, like a shitty Disney ride. Or you arrive to one of the big terminals and gigantic screens are blasting even more ads at you. This is, of course, after you spend 40+ minutes on a train that has a continual row of adverts placed just above the eye-level of the person sat in front of you.

Then you look at what the older tube stations looked like and they're quite pretty; lots of mosaics and other works of art, each station having a distinctive style. Now it's white tiles, white LED lights, and adverts.

Re: French cities trying to ban public adverts

#92

Post by criddell »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #72
TeMPOraL wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would like to see all three of your examples banned as well, because they're not statements of fact, they're opinions, of the kind you'd typically find in an ad today. Useful listings of facts look like this: - is carbonated (therefore acidic, refreshing, negatively impacting teeth) - has x mg sugar per 100ml (therefore energizing to some extent, promoting weight gain) - has x mg of caffeine per 100ml (therefore ener…

> they're not statements of fact, they're opinions At this point, you need a federal bureaucracy policing practically all retail commercial speech.

The law could be written so that individuals could sue companies that advertise with opinions rather than facts. Kind of like ow ADA laws are set up in California. The bureaucracy would be the court system.

Re: French cities trying to ban public adverts

#93

Post by criddell »

BurningFrog wrote: post #37

OK, I'll make the case for ads: Ads are disruptive. They allow new businesses to break into markets owned by old dominant suppliers. This way they keep the market healthy and serving consumers. Based on that, you'd expect anti-ad initiatives to be aligned with powerful established industries. Not that I know how to confirm or refute that.

Tesla managed to do it and I haven't seen a lot of Tesla ads.

Re: French cities trying to ban public adverts

#94

Post by andrepd »

cm2012 wrote: post #73
TeMPOraL wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Informative ads, like a new movie being out in theaters, can actually be net-positive financially, at the expense of the strain on public attention. It would be easy to avoid that strain, by segregating such informative ads into places where people can seek them out on their own. Have advertising be PULL, not PUSH. Unfortunately, this is the exact opposite of what the advertising industry wants (and really, what mo…

So more or less enforcing the status quo. If you can't do push marketing, whatever people are used to will stay for much, much longer.

False premise, even more in the age of the internet. If you want to know what's the best x, where x is a phone, a flashlight, a toaster, then you can just google it anytime. In fact, it's very much the opposite: advertising enforces the status quo, since the biggest companies will be able to promote their product at a massive scale (bombardment is a better word) and monopolize attention. Small businesses get squat.

Re: French cities trying to ban public adverts

#95

Post by andrepd »

Joe-Z wrote: post #88
mr_custard wrote: post #32

Quite simply, advertising is visual pollution; whether it be on large billboards, on bus stops or freestanding in the middle of the sidewalk. It's visual pollution and it has ruined our towns and cities. I'm excited to read this article and see that people are taking a stand.

The first time I started thinking about it that way was when I bought a book featuring a selection of Banksy's works [0]. In the opening pages it had a quote of him, making pretty much that point: The public space is ours. It's not their for corporations. It's to be enjoyed by the people and if you want to come in with your hands full of money to make something else of it you can fuck right off. He's a true artist. […

Banksy quote on advertising.

---

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.

Re: French cities trying to ban public adverts

#96

Post by andrepd »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #72
TeMPOraL wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would like to see all three of your examples banned as well, because they're not statements of fact, they're opinions, of the kind you'd typically find in an ad today. Useful listings of facts look like this: - is carbonated (therefore acidic, refreshing, negatively impacting teeth) - has x mg sugar per 100ml (therefore energizing to some extent, promoting weight gain) - has x mg of caffeine per 100ml (therefore ener…

> they're not statements of fact, they're opinions At this point, you need a federal bureaucracy policing practically all retail commercial speech.

You're right, we should just ban it altogether.

Re: French cities trying to ban public adverts

#97

Post by AnthonyMouse »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #66
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ads allow whomever has the deepest pockets to dominate the public's attention. Not necessarily. Advertising has diminishing returns -- we know this because companies don't buy unlimited advertising. If every ad dollar was as good as the first (i.e. it generated more than a dollar in profit) then everybody would buy an unlimited amount of advertising so they could make an unlimited profit. At some point you hit satu…

Advertising indeed seems to give an edge to newcomers over the incumbents, but those same "little guys" would need to advertise less if everyone's attention wasn't already saturated by everyone else's ads. Everyone is still wasting money; new players just waste less.

The question is, if you got rid of advertising, how do the customers find out about a new product from a new business?

Re: French cities trying to ban public adverts

#98

Post by [deleted] »

ajna91 wrote: post #9

I think in the near future we'll have empirical evidence that most ads are malicious exploits of flaws in human psychology. Ideally, all ads should be plain text listing of facts. Pictures only allowed for demonstrative purposes. And they should be listed in "Ad sections", like a phone book.

[deleted]

Re: French cities trying to ban public adverts

#100

Post by alexfromapex »

q845712 wrote: post #5

It's kind of an open secret that the city of Santa Barbara (CA, US) has banned several forms of public outdoor advertising: we have no billboards, no promotional posters, no taxi toppers... It's delightful, and very high on my list of reasons why I enjoy living here. Every time I leave I'm reminded how noisy space is when it's filled with advertisements. I wholeheartedly recommend others advocate for similar policies…

I wholeheartedly feel that advertisements forced on you in public are a type of violence
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