Public Ad Campaign

Fuel Outdoor-Illegal Ads

noreply@blogger.com (JordanSeiler) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 23:09:00 +0000

This article appeared on illegalsigns.ca and should be read by all New Yorkers. It not only heightens the deep distrust I have for the public advertising industry but makes real the lack of respect they have for the city, its government and thus its people.

Fuel Outdoor Builds 324 Illegal Signs in New York City Then Sues New York City

by Rami Tabello

We previously took a look at Fuel Outdoor in Fuel Outdoor - The Dirtiest Billboard Company in America. Fuel Outdoor is expanding nationwide with an aggressive legal strategy that sees them build hundreds of illegal billboards in a city, then sue the city on First Amendment grounds.

In New York City, Fuel is rampant. The problem is, they won their case against Los Angeles in Federal Court because of Los Angeles’ street furniture program, and they are attempting to take that precedent nationwide. Here ares some of the 324 illegal Fuel signs that are popping up all over NYC:

According to the lawsuit that Fuel filed :

-Out of the 360 signs Fuel installed in NYC, 324 are illegal under the NYC sign code. Paragraph 4.

-NYC’s sign code is “stark government hypocrisy” because it doesn’t apply to New York’s street furniture program. Paragraph 1.

-The sign code’s justifications are “blatantly pretextual.” “It is axiomatic that the City cannot infringe on core First Amendment rights when its reasons for doing so are blatantly pretextual especially where, as here, the City’s true motivation is to destroy competition and reserve for itself a monopoly in the outdoor advertising business.” Paragraph 11.

-Fuel should be allowed to operate its panels until a comprehensive sign code is implemented that also applies to street furniture. Paragraph 12.

-Fuel installed signs visible from the sidewalk but inside the walls of parking garages, like the ones in the last photo above. Fuel claims that such signs are not subject to the NYC sign code because they can’t be seen when the parking garage door is down. Page 7, footnote.

-Cemusa’s street furniture contract allows up to 200 scrolling ads. Fuel’s ads don’t scroll. “This provides yet another reason why Cemusa’s bus shelter signs are even more dangerous and unattractive than Fuel’s panel signs allegedly are.” Paragraph 58

-Cemusa’s ads are equipped with Bluetooth technology “that actually enables these signs to detect passing cellular telephones and to send advertisements directly to these passing phones…. Needless to say, the fact that unsuspecting motorists may be bombarded with text message advertisements emanating from nearby bus shelters provides yet another reason why -Cemusa’s bus shelter signs are, if anything, significantly more dangerous and unattractive.”

The City’s scheme for regulating outdoor advertising therefore does not directly advance its purported interest in promoting traffic safety and aesthetics and is therefore unconstitutional.

Here is the whole complaint: [PDF]

According to this letter [PDF], New York City entered into an agreement to stay prosecution against Fuel’s signs pending the outcome of this case. Fuel apparently continued to build new signs, and the agreement does not cover all the Fuel signs in NYC:

The Fuel case is scheduled to be heard in tandem with a case against New York by Clear Channel. More on the Clear Channel case soon.

Zast Berlin Subway TV Takeover

noreply@blogger.com (JordanSeiler) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 03:42:00 +0000

Zast somehow took over the video feed on the Berlin subway system and ran his own video. For how long I dont know. Why? Because he could. Bravo.

MOMO ad rework

noreply@blogger.com (JordanSeiler) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 03:18:00 +0000

Went to the Eyebeam information session today on how to identify and then go through the proper channels to remove illegal billboards. Aside from that being absolutely amazing and incredibly informative, I finally met a street artist I've wanted to meet for some time, MOMO. Here is an unusual piece of his but in keeping with this sites interests. Visit his website for more of his goodies, I promise its well worth your time. www.momoshowpalace.com

Scenic America Visual Essay

noreply@blogger.com (JordanSeiler) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 03:28:00 +0000

Found this visual essay by Scenic America and had to share it.

Sao Paolo

noreply@blogger.com (JordanSeiler) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 02:28:00 +0000

Ive wanted to make a comment on the Sao Paolo decision to ban all outdoor advertising all the way up to the goodyear blimp for some time. Searching the decision I found this interview with a Paolista reporter about that says some really compelling things about what happened after the billboards came down.

BOB GARFIELD: On January 1st, 2007, a funny thing happened in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The city of approximately eleven million people, South America's largest, awoke to find a ban on public advertising. Every billboard, every neon sign, every bus kiosk ad and even the Goodyear blimp were suddenly illegal.
The ban on what the mayor calls "visual pollution" was the culmination of a long battle between the city's politicians and the advertising industry, which had blanketed Brazil's economic capital with all manner of billboards, both legal and illegal. Within months, the city has gone from a Blade Runner-like vision of the future to a reclaimed past.
Vinicius Galvao is reporter for Folha de Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest newspaper, and he joins us now. Vinicius, welcome to the show.
VINICIUS GALVAO: Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. It's my pleasure.
BOB GARFIELD: I've seen photos of the city, and it's amazing to see this sprawling metropolis completely devoid of signage, completely devoid of logos and bright lights and so forth. What did Sao Paulo look like up until the ban took place.
VINICIUS GALVAO: Sao Paulo's a very vertical city. That makes it very frenetic. You couldn't even realize the architecture of the old buildings, because all the buildings, all the houses were just covered with billboards and logos and propaganda. And there was no criteria.
And now it's amazing. They uncovered a lot of problems the city had that we never realized. For example, there are some favelas, which are the shantytowns. I wrote a big story in my newspaper today that in a lot of parts of the city we never realized there was a big shantytown. People were shocked because they never saw that before, just because there were a lot of billboards covering the area.
BOB GARFIELD: No writer could have [LAUGHING] come up with a more vivid metaphor. What else has been discovered as the scales have fallen off of the city's eyes?
VINICIUS GALVAO: Sao Paulo's just like New York. It's a very international city. We have the Japanese neighborhood, we have the Korean neighborhood, we have the Italian neighborhood and in the Korean neighborhood, they have a lot of small manufacturers, these Korean businessmen. They hire illegal labor from Bolivian immigrants.
And there was a lot of billboards in front of these manufacturers' shops. And when they uncovered, we could see through the window a lot of Bolivian people like sleeping and working at the same place. They earn money, just enough for food. So it's a lot of social problem that was uncovered where the city was shocked at this news.
BOB GARFIELD: I want to ask you about the cultural life of the city, because, like them or not, billboards and logos and bright lights create some of the vibrancy that a city has to offer. Isn't it weird walking through the streets with all of those images just absent?
VINICIUS GALVAO: No. It's weird, because you get lost, so you don't have any references any more. That's what I realized as a citizen. My reference was a big Panasonic billboard. But now my reference is art deco building that was covered through this Panasonic. So you start getting new references in the city. The city's got now new language, a new identity.
BOB GARFIELD: Well, cleaning up the city's all well and good, but how do businesses announce to the public that they're open for business?
VINICIUS GALVAO: That was the first response the shop owners found for this law, because the law bans billboards and also even the windows should be clean. Big banks, like Citibank, and big stores, like Dolce and Gabbana, they started painting themselves with very strong colors, like yellow, red, deep blue, and creating like visual patterns to associate the brand to that pattern or to that color.
For example, Citibank's color is blue. They're painting the building in very strong blue so people can see that from far away and they can make an association with that deep blue and Citibank.
BOB GARFIELD: Now, the city has said, having undertaken this effort, it will eventually create zones where some outdoor advertising will be permitted. Do you expect Sao Paulo eventually to just revert to its previous clutter?
VINICIUS GALVAO: Not to revert to previous clutter, but I think like very specific zones, I think they're going to isolate the electronic billboards in those areas, in the financial center. I don't think they should put those in residential areas as we had before.
BOB GARFIELD: Now, the advertising industry is obviously not happy about this. They're complaining that they're deprived of free speech and that it's costing them jobs and revenue. But is there anyone else in Sao Paulo who's unhappy about this? Tell me about the public at large. What's their view?
VINICIUS GALVAO: It's amazing, because people on the streets are strongly supporting that. The owner of the buildings, even if they have to renovate a building, they're strongly supporting that. It's a massive campaign to improve the city. The advertisers, they complain, but they’re agreeing with the ban. What they say is that we should have created criteria for that to organize the chaos.
BOB GARFIELD: Vinicius, thank you very much for joining us.
VINICIUS GALVAO: Thank you so much.
BOB GARFIELD: Vinicius Galvao is a reporter for Folha de Sao Paulo.

Understanding Illegal Wall Signs

noreply@blogger.com (JordanSeiler) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 01:20:00 +0000

Just found this on the illegalsigns.ca website. This site is an amazing resource for understanding how we can fight the progress of the public advertising industry.

There are about 200 3rd party vinyl wall signs in downtown Toronto – and about 175 of them are illegal. Most of the recent illegal sign development has occurred with vinyl wall signs. Understanding how this is happening requires an appreciation of the difference between a fascia sign and a mural sign, as the Toronto Signs By-Law defines them. You see, most illegal vinyl signs actually have 3rd party sign permits – mural permits, permits for hand-painted signs. Why? Because murals are not subject to Separation of Signs - our most important sign control by-law.

The By-Law defines a mural like this: “A sign painted directly on the face of a wall.” A fascia, on the other hand, is defined as: “A sign mounted wholly against the wall of a building.”

A painted mural sign is difficult and very expensive to execute – it requires days of work by a highly skilled (and licensed) sign painter. An advertising-quality mural typically costs upwards of $25,000 to execute and can take weeks, depending on the weather - a major part of that cost is the vacancy cost of not having an ad on the wall during the painting process. Murals also require a sidewalk occupation permit if they face a street. Profitably operating a 3rd party mural sign is impossible except in very high traffic locations that vandals can’t reach, especially if the sign is non-illuminated. For these reasons, Non-Illuminated Mural signs are not heavily restricted in the Signs By-Law - they are restricted by their intrinsic nature.

Fascia signs, on the other hand, which include computer-printed vinyl signs affixed to the side of buildings, are very cheap to execute for advertising companies. For this reason, fascia signs are heavily restricted in the Signs By-Law.

What’s happening is straightforward: advertising companies are obtaining permits for non-illuminated mural signs, which they can obtain for pretty much any wall, and then illegally erecting vinyl fascia signs because they can’t profitably operate hand painted murals on those sites. What has helped the industry most is Municipal Licensing and Standards, which is supposed to enforce the Signs By-Law, but doesn’t know the difference between a fascia sign and a mural; and the Buildings Department, which is supposed to promptly inspect newly constructed signs, but has allowed mural permits to go un-inspected for years.

With the City now taking action against illegal fascias, pursuant to our complaints, the industry’s lobbyist is making a desperate push to post-facto legalize the industry’s fascia sign sites – this would have the effect of legalizing the majority of illegal wall signs in Toronto. The Planning Department will oppose this scheme if they can stop laughing at it.

Let’s take a closer look at how the Signs By-Law treats fascias vs. murals. A 3rd party Fascia is not permitted within 60M of other non-mural 3rd party signs – this restriction does not apply to non-illuminated murals. This is the exact wording of the Separation of Signs By-Law:

No person shall erect or display or cause to be erected or displayed a fascia, ground, roof, pedestal or illuminated mural sign used for the purposes of third party advertising unless it is separated by a minimum radius of sixty (60) metres from any other such sign used for the purposes of third party advertising.

The following table illustrates the stark difference in the way the Signs By-Law treats non-illuminated murals and fascias:

Attribute Restriction on Non-Illuminated Murals Restriction on Fascias
Within 60M of another 3rd party sign No restriction Totally Restricted per 297-10F(1)
Within 300M of another sign over 70 M2 No restriction Totally Restricted per 297-10F(2)
Size Max: 100 M2 per 297-10D(11)(a) Max: 25 M2 per 297-10D(5)(g)
Out of the 175 illegal fascia signs in Toronto, about 100 of them are operating under non-illuminated mural permits. The rest have no permits or 1st party permits, mainly because they are erected in a location where even a 3rd party non-illuminated mural is restricted – like on a historical building or a on a wall facing a street.

Remember Murad? Murad Communications used to run painted advertising signs all over downtown, but they couldn’t cut it anymore. It simply became unprofitable to operate painted signs due to the vast increase in advertising square footage in Toronto – driven by our Planning Department which seriously botched the Signs By-Law from day 1. The Murads were all operating under non-illuminated permits, which means Murad couldn’t legally reach evening rush hour for half the year.

And then Murad, which had its share of enemies in the outdoor advertising industry, was hit by devastating paint bombings which destroyed scores of its ads, interrupted advertising campaigns, and made operating painted signs intolerable for mission critical campaigns.

Computer printed vinyl technology was developed in one of those industry-academic collaborations by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Financed by a consortium of billboard companies, MIT scientists worked with MetroMedia Technologies for the specific goal of creating robotically produced outdoor graphics. MetroMedia (whose TV stations created the FOX network) introduced the technology to the billboard industry in 1987. By August 1993, when the cost of printing vinyl was still no less than the cost of manually painting a sign, Murad’s Michael Chesney was quoted as saying: “Sooner or later it won’t make sense for a guy to manually paint a billboard and get the nose wrong when you can get it right through a computer, cheaper.” Except you can’t get it right through a computer, cheaper, legally. At least not in the good ‘ole City of Toronto. And that’s pretty much the only thing the Planning Department ever got right about our Signs By-Law.

Of course, operating outside the law never bothered Murad much; even before Murad used illegal vinyl it was illegally illuminating more than half its billboards.

As a technology-intensive good, the cost of computer printed vinyl decreased rapidly. So, as Mr. Chesney predicted, Murad started to use illegal vinyl in lieu of paint, fired its muralists, and, in 1997, perhaps because he saw the writing on the wall, Mr. Chesney sold his company for US$5.5 Million to Mediacom/CBS who, in turn, sold 14 Murad sites to Titan a few years ago - a smart move on CBS’s part, a move that allowed CBS to capture a portion of the economic value from running illegal fascia on those 14 sites without actually running illegal fascia themselves. But not that smart… because CBS is still left with 16 illegal vinyl fascia signs in Toronto, all of which are soon to be history.

Astral Media, Megaposter and Abcon are also operating illegal fascia signs on these old Murad sites because they, too, can’t turn a profit while complying with their non-illuminated mural permits.

When the Signs By-Law is enforced against illegal fascias operating under non-illuminated mural permits, advertising will disappear from most of these old Murad sites as well as the 50-odd illegal fascia sites recently developed under non-illuminated mural permits. There are a few mural sites which have attributes required for profitable mural operation: ambient illumination, great demographic targeting, high visibility, difficult to vandalize - but those sites are few and far between.

Nobody anywhere in the world is investing a dime in technology to make painting signs cheaper - globally, painted signs are being legally displaced by cheaper and cheaper computer printed vinyl. The technology for computer printed vinyl has now reached developing countries. The City of Toronto is the only place in the world that we know of that puts significantly fewer restrictions on painted signs, the only City we know of where displacing a painted sign with vinyl is illegal. A company that invests in technology to make painted signs cheaper would be investing in an autarky - you can’t propagate that technology anywhere in the world outside the boundaries of the Former City of Toronto. That’s why billboards on mural permits are headed to the dustbin of history: because you can’t legally operate vinyl and the relative globally-benchmarked productivity of the painter’s labour doesn’t make economic sense anymore. Globalization killed them. Murad’s signs, which do little more than promote transnational brand hegemonies, have been hoisted on their own petard.

By the time IllegalSigns.ca is done, large format vinyl fascia signs will be finished in Toronto, and so will the local sub-industry that has developed around them.

And then the people of Toronto will once again see walls they haven’t seen in years.

UPDATE: Titan Outdoor has sued the City of Toronto over enforcements of fascia signs on mural permits.

Folgers Coffee ad

noreply@blogger.com (JordanSeiler) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 08:00:00 +0000

This is yet another way in which public advertising inserts itself into our daily lives and will continue to do so, finding more clever ways to gain our attentions. This I might add is a guerilla campaign and is just as illegal as street art graffiti and all other forms of urban scrawl.

Stained Glass-PosterChild

noreply@blogger.com (JordanSeiler) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 08:00:00 +0000

This is some truly far out shit by PosterChild who is a toronto based public artist collaborating with Jason Eppink and Steve Lambert of the Anti Advertising Agency. Not only does the work look stunning but the messages are clear, re-appropriation of public advertising structures only leads to good things. www.bladediary.com

Mantis in London

noreply@blogger.com (JordanSeiler) — Thu, 29 May 2008 00:59:00 +0000

Mantis is a street artist I've come across that does a fair amount of work over public advertising structures. The work seems to often deal directly with the content of the advertisement as a sort of culture jamming exercise. The project shown is the only one I know of that seems to have erased the entire advertisement for another image. Regardless Mantis obviously sees the public advertising frame as an extension of his or her own messaging system and for that I am very excited. www.themantisproject.co.uk

Paris-why not?

noreply@blogger.com (JordanSeiler) — Sun, 25 May 2008 08:00:00 +0000

I visited Paris in May this year and whenever I travel I watch public advertising pretty closely, though not with the intention of doing any work. Its a flaw and I know it but thats the way it is. Given that, I could not resist the temptation when I realized that mere magnets held the plastic covers over a large portion of street level small billboards in the downtown area. I stole a few posters and grabbed some supplies from a local arts and crafts store and made a series of these on a public ping pong table. Why not?

Bus Shelter similarities-Paris/New York

noreply@blogger.com (JordanSeiler) — Thu, 22 May 2008 08:00:00 +0000

The image on the left is from a NYC bus shelter ad and the one on the right is from a Parisian bus shelter ad. Its interesting to note how global ad culture really is evolving as one. Despite the differences in products and possibly advertising companies, the tactics are relatively similar. Advertising spans all cultures as the dissemination industry no capitalist nation can do without and is thus more or less a global product.

The Van Wagner story

noreply@blogger.com (JordanSeiler) — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 08:00:00 +0000

This is an article about one of the largest New York based public advertising companies, Van Wagner written by non other than the owner of Van Wagner himself. It started as a real mom and pop business and I think thats worth noting. The way public advertising has grown in the last few decades says a lot about the way in which public space has changed and has been commodified. A business like this can and will only grow in an environment that is conducive to re-appropriation of public resources for private gain, and New York City has obviously been very friendly to this idea.

Richard Schaps sold his outdoor-advertising company, Van Wagner, for $170 million. On Tuesday, he passed out millions of dollars to his people--and then started another outdoor-advertising company called Van Wagner.

By: Richard Schaps
Published October 2007
As told to Stephanie Clifford

It makes sense that Richard Schaps's first job was as a New York City cabbie. The Brooklyn-born Schaps has the grand tales, Runyonesque patois, and rough accent that mark him as from the streets of New York (rather, "Nuh Yawhk"). Today, from Schaps's office high above those streets, he doesn't see the buildings and landmarks that make up his native city; he sees spaces for advertisements. In 1971 he quit driving a taxi and started running a billboard company, first called Ward and then Van Wagner. Since then he's lured advertisers back to a grimy Times Square and put up ads in locales from L.A. to London. He can even look to the sky and see his company's ads, in skywriting. Schaps, 59, actually sold Van Wagner in 1997, but he started another business the next day--also called Van Wagner. The second incarnation earned $250 million last year.

My family was a manufacturer of men's suits here in New York. My grandfather was an immigrant, a tailor, and opened a shop. I always thought I would go into that business, but I knew very early that it wasn't a great industry to be in. And I started driving a taxicab, looking for other opportunities, in 1970.

I had a third cousin who was 19 years older than me. He'd bought a small billboard company called Van Wagner five years earlier. So you go to the guy that owns the building, and you give him x amount of dollars for permission to put up a sign, and you charge y. I could do that, sounds like a good idea to me. So I borrowed $25,000 from my father and bought a business called Ward. I owned 50 percent; I gave my cousin and his brothers the other half of the business for free because they were going to teach me the business. I was so successful that in two or three years I ended up buying out the brothers, and we merged Ward and Van Wagner.

At first we had one billboard; everything else was a painted wall that I would get $60 a month for. Then I drove around a lot and found locations. I put up my first billboard on the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. In 1971, I was selling it for $2,500 a month. Now it makes maybe $25,000 a month. Great.

The trick in the outdoor advertising business is to find the zoning and regulations where you can build a sign. We found things like at Herald Square--that's where Macy's is, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and so forth--there was a whole building in one zone where you couldn't put a sign up at all. But we found a corner that was in a different zone, put a sign up, and sold it for almost a million dollars a year.

In 1979, it was terrible in Times Square. There was a gentleman named Douglas Leigh--he made the Camel sign with the famous smoke rings--who had 14 signs in Times Square. By the late '70s, 12 of the 14 signs were vacant. He went to TDI, Gannett, ArtkraftStrauss, and nobody wanted to do it. I bought those 14 signs. The biggest user of outdoor advertising in America at that time was Philip Morris. They had the Marlboro Man all over the place. They said, "Are you crazy? We'd never buy in Times Square. It's got pimps and prostitutes." We said, "They don't smoke cigarettes?!" We could not get an American advertiser to buy Times Square.

I knew they were using neon signage all over Japan, and I went to companies there. In 1979, the average American had never heard of Toshiba (OTC:TOSBF), Aiwa, TDK (NYSE:TDK). Within three years they had. They were planting a flag, putting up a big neon sign in Times Square and saying, we're here, on U.S. soil. That's the way that outdoor advertising works. I'm not gonna tell you how soft Charmin is with outdoor advertising. It's brand building.

There were about 35 signs in Times Square in 1980. There are like 250 now. They're getting $2.5 million a year for a billboard. That's the most expensive real estate in the world. It's the world's largest living museum. It's the only place in the world you hear, "Honey, move over. I want to get the Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO)." They're taking pictures of advertising.

I sold that business 10 years ago, in 1997, to Outdoor Systems. I was very careful about my noncompete and made it site-specific, so I was able to build new, but what I sold them I couldn't go after for seven years. They never really expected me to be back in business. They figured, hey, give it to the guy, he'll go play golf. That was their mistake. They'd never seen me play golf.

I sold it for $170 million. I gave my top people millions of dollars. I even went back to people, secretaries, that had been with me for 15 or 20 years and retired, and gave them money. I didn't cure cancer--I mean, I put up billboards.

I had sold my business on, you know, Monday. Tuesday, I'm back in business with the name Van Wagner, the same address, the same telephone number. So people show up, and we don't have any billboards. We don't have anything to sell. In London I saw a space on Piccadilly Circus, and I said, "I'm gonna get that." The landlord said, "Who the hell is Van Wagner?" So I said, "Look, I'm gonna send over two roundtrip tickets on the Concorde. I want you to come to New York, and I want you to see what we've done in Times Square." They flew over, we walked to Times Square, and they said, okay, we'll take your half-million dollars a year. And we went out and sold the sign for a million three.

We recently bought an aerial advertising business. We have about 40 planes. The next biggest competitor probably has three. Our competitors are really Pete the pilot that's pulling a volleyball net with letters on it that say, "Margaritas: $2.99, Girls drink free." We installed GPS in all of them so we can prove to our advertisers where we're flying.

There will always be the fear of how ugly things will become. I got an ad on my coffee cup, I got an ad on the plastic bag that returns my dry cleaning, I got an ad on my Chinese food takeout container. That's pretty cute. But that's what it is, cute. Someone wanted to sell me a business with advertisements on the ski lift. I said no, I'm skiing, please. It doesn't belong there. There are certain places outdoor advertising doesn't belong.

We have all of our own crews. Our competitors hire an outside contractor. You would look at Van Wagner billboards and say, "Oh geez, these are beautiful." And you'd look at some of our competitors, and you'd see their shirttail hanging out. We display a beautiful piece of art, and we pay attention to the frame. Like when there's a safety rail at the bottom, when the lights come up, you've got this beautiful ad and there's a shadow. It would just kill me to see an ad that someone is paying $40,000 a month for and see shadows on it, so our safety rails are retractable.

When I sold the business and started again I said to people, "Let's make a billion-dollar business." "A billion-dollar what? Sales, marketing, capital?" I said, "A billion of anything, okay? Aim for a billion, and we'll worry about that next." Ten years ago I had no signs and now I'm up to 750 signs. We're doing hundreds of millions of dollars in sales when we started doing zero. The business is five times the size of the business we sold. My love is my business; building this is truly a love. Which is lucky for me; not a lot of people get the chance to do it twice.

As Billboards, Public Phones Always Work-NYTimes

noreply@blogger.com (JordanSeiler) — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 08:00:00 +0000

NYC phone kiosks alone generated more than $62 million dollars last year of which the city saw a mere $13.7 million. In a strange twist of fate as the rest of the country seems to be loosing its public phones, NYC seems to be holding onto them and when installing new ones making sure they are equiped for advertising. This article highlights the real reasons NY is holding onto its public phone kiosks despite the proposed reasons given by the advertising agencies and city government.

Looking to 'ad' Big Bucks-AMNY

noreply@blogger.com (JordanSeiler) — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 08:00:00 +0000

This article appeared in a August issue of AM New York in 2007. It highlights a test run by the MTA of the effectiveness of full inside subway car ad wraps. what is poignant about the article is the way the legitimacy of this kind of private public relationship is established is always through the budget and fiscal needs of the public institution. The MTA is portrayed as strapped for cash and in need of private ad revenue as an integral part of keeping the public company afloat. The only discussion of the psychic affect of this kind of daily interruption is painted through its aesthetics which are awash with soothing images and notions of transcendence. I bet it was overwhelming and aggressive.

Dime Novel Phonebooth Fill

noreply@blogger.com (JordanSeiler) — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 08:00:00 +0000

In this phonebooth fill I used pages of cheap books I bought at Strand. I glazed them with bowlers wax and stained a few red before I crumpled them up. Luckily for the test it did rain a day or two later and the pages did not absorb anything. I like the idea that you cant read the content inside the phonebooth yet you are aware that there is content. This is something I feel is reversed with advertising where you read the image but there is no content.

Newspaper Phonebooth fill

noreply@blogger.com (JordanSeiler) — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 08:00:00 +0000

This is a test I did for a project I was thinking of making a habit. I took a whole Sunday edition of the new york times and crumpled up each sheet into a ball. I then took the advertisement, plexi, and lighting equipment from the phonebooth and replaced it with the times. I was planning on doing 52 of these but it rained a few days after I did this and turned into a freaking mess.

Light Criticism-GRL

noreply@blogger.com (JordanSeiler) — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 09:00:00 +0000

The graffiti research lab made this project happen and we should all take note. Simple words sometimes are the best words.

Mining for Ad Dollars-AMNY

noreply@blogger.com (JordanSeiler) — Mon, 01 May 2006 08:00:00 +0000

This article appeared in AM New York, the daily subway paper. It talks about plans to wrap the inside of subway cars in full ads like pictured as well as other insidious methods to gain riders attention. Its pretty wild what kinds of tactics are being proposed to fully engage the viewer. I think there is a simple quote from the article which says a lot to this end. "Three strategies that have helped the MTA reap big bucks from advertisers. Num. 1 Station Domination."

Superpages.com subway ad

noreply@blogger.com (JordanSeiler) — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 08:00:00 +0000

These words are taken directly from an advertisement for superpages.com, which was seen on the NYC subway on 07-19-05. I was excited and appalled at how honestly it was worded and without a bit of remorse. I think it nicely sums up the reason this site exists and why the work this site exhibits is produced in the first place.

"Isn't it amazing how people will read anything posted on the subway? You, for instance are reading this. And even though you're quite skeptical of advertisement, you'll continue reading it. See, here you are still reading. Not because you find it particularly captivating, but just because it's here. And provides a momentary distraction from what you're supposed to be doing, avoiding eye contact, physical contact and, by all means, verbal contact with your fellow Subwayers. Or would that be Subwayites? Right about now you're probably asking yourself, 'Why am I still reading this?' Perhaps you're even pretending you're not reading it anymore. But you are, aren't you? You can't help yourself. It's here. You're here. And after all, this is the subway. By the way. We know a really good bookstore around here." superpages.com