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If the P-I is to be believed - and a good six out of ten times they are - we are in the midst of an illegal advertising blitz. The paper has an article today on a particularly grotesque form of urban pollution: unauthorized advertising appearing on the sides of buildings. In previous years the city would hear of maybe two a year, but so far in 2006 the city has received twelve complaints.
Before we get into it, and not to pick on this person they apparently grabbed off the street for comment in the article, but... Ok, specifically to pick on this person; here's a quote:
"But I'm a little disappointed that they ruin the integrity of the building, and it seems like everywhere you go, you're surrounded by advertising. You can't even go to a baseball game and sit in the bleachers without looking at advertising."
Where the hell did they get this person? The bleacher seats of Doubleday Field circa 1939? Wandering around in the corn at the Field of Dreams? The absolute last place on green Earth that you can reasonably expect to not have to look at advertising is in the bleachers at a baseball game. A few years back they tried to put Spiderman ads on the damn bases! Seattlest wouldn't be at all surprised if the next foul ball that hit us in the neck left a Safeco logo embossed in our skin. (Unless we're at Wrigley, and even there the owners would have the Cubbies walking around in NASCAR getups faster than they can tear apart the L.A. Times, if they thought they could get away with it.)
Now, we know that Clear Channel owns about seventy percent of every surface that a Seattleite looks at over the course of a day, and we think that's bullshit. No one should have a monopoly on the right to thrust public advertising into our faces (actually it shouldn't be for sale at all, but here we are). And there are probably a bunch of little guys who just can't afford the prices that Clear Channel charges and don't they have a right to advertise? Seattlest, for example, plans to throw up a giant stencil on your apartment building any night now, right across your windows, but the illegal advertisements mentioned in the P-I article don't really fall into the "little guy" category. Yellow Tail wine was named. Earthlink was named. Starbucks was named. It's all blamed on a bunch of start-up advertising companies that flaunt the rules, and that doesn't seem too far fetched, but our poor little eyeballs are under assault here and a lot of people have worked hard to keep places like Westlake Center from looking like Times Square or every European city center. Let's not let allow a bunch of rogue apartment managers hoping to supplement their income mess our visual landscape up any further. And let's take down some of that Clear Channel crap while we're at it.
There is a guy at Aurora and Bridge Way in Wallingford that's been pissing us off for some time. He's got a banner for something draped across the balcony of one of the top units and it looks gross and must be in violation of something. We'll try to get a picture on our next trip past it.
Image courtesy of Seth Gaines.
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To see where we're headed, take a look at Tokyo train station advertisements.
Yeah, baseball stadiums are a bad example. You can go back a century and see billboards across the entire outfield fence. If anything it was worse then: big, garish signs for everything from cigarettes to banks to booze. Check out
this photo, from 1939.