Outdoor Advertising and Public Space

So, there was controversy here in Sydney a couple of weeks ago about the NSW Government's decision to force the Opera House to display an advertisement for a horse race.

I wrote an opinion piece for the Sydney Morning Herald about the broader issue of advertising and its impacts on public space.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian's intervention to insist the Sydney Opera House allow blatant Racing NSW advertising on its sails is objectionable for many reasons.

Most worryingly, it signals a new intensification of the ongoing privatisation of our public spaces through advertising. The surfaces of our city are being remade as advertising space before our very eyes. ...

You can read the rest of the piece here.

There was a great protest down at the Opera House on the night in question - you can read about that here.

I've had a bee in my bonnet about advertising in public space for a while now ... and published an article in Antipode a few years ago about the global outdoor advertising industry. You can find that here (email me if you're interested and have a hard time accessing it).

And there's also a piece about hacking outdoor advertising and the decommodification of public space in the new book I've been involved with writing, Sydney We Need to Talk!.

Review of Alice Arnold Film 'Electric Signs'

OK, so ... it's been a while between posts. I'm mostly blaming industrial action (which kept me too busy to actually write about politics for a while!) and holidays. And a little inertia. But it's time to get things rolling again.

First up, then, a quick link to something I've written elsewhere that might be of interest here -- it's a review of Alice Arnold's documentary film Electric Signs, which is coming out in the journal Antipode and (like all their book reviews) is available free online here.




It's a great film, which explores the ways in which new forms of screen-based signage are transforming the public domain in cities around the world. Given my on-going fascination with outdoor advertising and its impact on the possibilities of urban public address, I found the film really interesting.

And as I say in the review, one of my favourite scenes in the movie features New York artist Jason Eppink, who has found a beautiful way to hack the screen advertising on the New York subway ... check out a video about his pixelator project below.

Outdoor Media Landscapes: Tokyo

Sensō-ji, Asakusa

A couple of months ago, I was lucky enough to spend a few days in Tokyo ... getting there has been an ambition of mine for a long time, and it was a real thrill to finally make it.

To mark the occasion, here's a little photo essay devoted to Tokyo's outdoor media landscape. Since this is a blog on cities and citizenship, I'm basically dressing up some holiday snaps with a few observations on some of the forms of public address that are jossling for space and attention in the city.

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The density of text and image on the surfaces of the city is one of the many things that is striking about (parts of) this city ... not a very original observation, I know, but there you go! There's just so much commercial communication. But because I can't read Japanese, I experienced most of it as a brilliant jumble of colour and light (and movement and sound in some cases). The density is exciting, even if its purpose isn't. Could we imagine this kind of media infrastructure being re-purposed?

Shinjuku at dusk

Akihabara

Shinjuku

This video above gives a bit of a sense of the soundscape that goes with the eye candy in Shibuya ... intense!

Train Carriage Advertising

While the advertising and shop signage seems to crowd out almost everything else, it's a city that also rewards you for paying attention to some of the nooks and crannies in between the bright lights and colours. Some of the urban infrastructure like street signs and drain covers were beautiful to look at too...

Street sign on the famous Ginza St, one of the main shopping strips of the city, which was off-limits to cars on this particular Saturday and lined with furniture and stalls...

This ornate drain cover was in Shimokitazawa....

There were also a few spaces set aside for what appeared to be community notices, and lots of maps ... an essential bit of media infrastructure given the address system in use in the city, even in these days of mobile internet and Google maps.

Here below are some demonstrators trying to make themselves seen and heard in Harajuku ... they had a large and captive audience, but the crowds seemed to have other things on their mind (ie shopping!!). Sadly I have no idea what they were demonstrating about ... nuclear power, the need to repent and get with God, who knows?! Mass protests must have to generate a lot of colour and noise to get any attention...

Of course, I was on the look out for any signs of graffiti and street art too. What I found seemed to be concentrated in Shibuya and around Shinjuku station. Stickers seemed to be particularly well-suited to the context here ... there was hardly any space left for anything larger, and not many times of the day/night when you might have a place to yourself long enough to hang around painting. The sticker artists typically made good use of space below eye level, which was less crowded because it is of less value to advertisers. In fact, paying attention to the graffiti kind of drew my eye away from all the advertising and other media, and gave me a different perspective on the landscape.

One of the ubiquitous vending machines being used as a platform for various unauthorised media, Shibuya

I love this one in so many ways ... one of a series of "I hate nuclear rain" stickers I saw by the same artist throughout the city.

Melbourne, represent! :-) It was a nice surprise to see some familiar names ... stickers from Reka, Meggs, and Phibs of  Everfresh crew on this pole, among others.

Shop shutter, Asakusa

Finally, there was a whole genre of plastic food art on display outside restaurants that warrants a mention...

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OK, that's probably enough! Back to our regular program with the next post...

Augmented Reality Ad Takeover, NYC

I'm getting increasingly interested in the various possibilities afforded by new mobile media technologies for different forms of public address.

Here's an application of augmented reality that I can get behind!

A little over a week ago PublicAdCampaign and The Heavy Projects launched the AR I AD Takeover in Times Square, NY. The Augmented Reality Junaio channel used 5 separate ad campaigns to trigger their own replacement with the artwork of 5 of our favorite public space artists including, Ron English, John Fekner, PosterBoy, OX, and Dr. D.

Check out the short project video here...


Augmented Reality Advertising Takeover (AR | AD) from The Heavy Projects on Vimeo.

For more details, see the PublicAd Campaign website:

http://daily.publicadcampaign.com/

"Reclaiming Public Space"? Australian Parliamentary Inquiry reports on Outdoor Advertising

A few weeks ago, I posted here about a controversy over the censorship of an outdoor advertising campaign for safe sex. At the end of that post, I mentioned that the Australian House of Representatives' Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs was in the middle of an Inquiry into the regulation of outdoor advertising. The Inquiry was established in response to a series of controversies about outdoor advertising in Australian cities in recent years.

Well, that Committee has now finished its Inquiry, and has published its final report, called Reclaiming Public Space. You can see the report online here.

The Inquiry was overwhelmingly focused on the content of outdoor advertising. But of course, as with all forms of public address, questions of content cannot easily be separated from questions of form. Outdoor, by virtue of its location in the urban public realm, is a unique form of advertising. Precisely because of its form and location, advertisers can't really use the 'freedom of choice' arguments that they typically mobilise against any efforts to regulate advertising in other media more heavily. As outdoor media companies are usually the first to boast in pitching their media to advertisers, "it's the only medium you can't switch off". This means that they can't use the old "no-one's forcing you to look at it" rebuttal that is used with regard to advertising in magazines, newspapers, television and the like.

The importance of these questions of form is (sort of) reflected in the Committee Chair's foreword to the report. MP Graham Perrett says:

Community sentiment supported the Committee’s opinion that there is a need to reclaim public space from any wayward interests of commercial advertising. ... Public spaces are for the use of all members of the community—men, women and children—and the right to enjoy the amenity of a space should not be compromised by an advertiser’s array of inappropriate images. This report has listened to the Australian community and, on behalf of the Australian community, it says enough is enough. It is time to reclaim our public spaces.

Perrett's foreword also makes reference to the growing 'dominance' of advertising in public spaces, and the potentially harmful consequences of 'increasing, sustained and cumulative exposure' of 'inappropriate' imagery. So, how exactly do they suggest that we 'reclaim public space' from the advertisers?

The politics of outdoor media in 'branded cities'

Earlier this week,  a controversy erupted in the city of Brisbane when Adshel, the outdoor advertising company contracted by Brisbane City Council to provide its bus stops, removed a safe sex advertisement featuring two men cuddling ("Rip and Roll") from Brisbane bus stops. It said that it had done so in response to community complaints.

"Rip & Roll" advertisement ... offensive, right?!

After an outcry, and a small demonstration led by the organisation that had placed the ad (Queensland Association for Healthy Communities), the decision was reversed and the ads re-installed. Adshel CEO Steve McCarthy acknowledged that his company had been the target of a co-ordinated campaign by the Australian Christian Lobby for the ad's removal.

This is just the latest in a series of censorship controversies in Australia and elsewhere about the censorship of outdoor media. Advertisements by animal rights activists in favour of banning eggs from caged chooks, and by atheists in favour of doing something other than going to church on Sunday morning, have been banned from outdoor media by media companies in Australian cities in recent years. (I had an opinion piece published in the Sydney Morning Herald commenting on one of these episodes.)

I've been conducing research on the changing face of outdoor advertising in our cities for the last few years ... and have developed a fairly unhealthy interest in bus stops, billboards, news and fruit stands, garbage bins, flower stalls, bicycle racks and other bits of urban infrastructure as a result!

Increasingly, these bits of infrastructure are provided by private outdoor advertising companies contracted by state authorities. The companies agree to provide and maintain the infrastructure for 'free' in return for being allowed to sell advertising space. A relatively small number of multi-national outdoor media companies like Adshel (part of the global Clear Channel Outdoor group) and JC Decaux dominate the market worldwide. The companies and the (often cash-strapped) urban authorities say this is a 'win-win' arrangement, but I am not so sure...

In this particular episode in Brisbane, the last line of the Herald's article about the episode is the most revealing:

Brisbane City Council, which owns the bus stop panels, declined to comment on the removal of the advertisements, saying “the council had no involvement in this matter”.

In Brisbane as in many other cities, the power to determine the content of outdoor media is increasingly in private rather than public hands, even on publicly-owned urban infrastructure.

And possibly more importantly, these arrangements are also reducing access to the outdoor media landscape in many cities. These outdoor advertising companies are only profitable to the extent that they can monopolise the outdoor media landscape (it's harder to charge money for your advertising space if other people can get their message up for free somewhere else, or if the ads are vulnerable to hacking and defacement...). So, the private companies and their public sector partners are increasingly clamping down on other uses and users of the outdoor media landscape in order to ensure their arrangements remain profitable.

I think this is having harmful consequences for the use of outdoor media by the kinds of people who use the city as media because it's free -- including artists, activists, and musicians who can't afford (or just don't want) to pay commercial media rates to get their message across.

Of course, these are also the kinds of folks who are unlikely to let the advertising companies have things all their own way! We are certainly starting to see examples of folks push back against the commodification and monopolisation of their outdoor media spaces.

We are also starting to see some urban authorities wind back the amount of commercial outdoor advertising in their cities, and/or make sure that 'free' spaces are provided alongside commercial spaces.

If you think you might be interested in reading more on this... 

• my submission to a recent Parliamentary Inquiry into outdoor advertising, with some recommendations for how these arrangements ought to be regulated, is here
• an almost final draft of my article "Branded Cities" (appearing soon in Antipode, and focusing on the contested politics of outdoor media) is here. Thanks to my man Jordan at Public Ad Campaign for hosting this ... you should check Jordan's awesome campaign efforts on outdoor advertising while you are there!

Meanwhile, I leave you with a favourite find from this outdoor ad research ... yes, KFC are even fixing potholes in Louisville, Kentucky, in return for the right to stencil KFC advertisements on the road surface. Go Colonel!!!