French cities trying to ban public adverts
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
???
The state DMV neither writes nor enforces laws.
> I enjoy living here
Yea its a given that its nice to live where people earn more and live in expensive homes :D
I see that maybe image ads are of the peacock feather type. 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 most companies want - everyone is happy with getting a little short-term advantage at the expense of everyone else and their own future).
Some argue all advertising should be banned. If that were to occur, the search burden would shift to consumers. We'd subscribe to curators like the Consumer Report or Wirecutter, storekeepers, et cetera and let them do the searching on our behalf.
This article considers something weaker. No public advertising. No billboards. Direct mail, storefront displays, in-store advertising, et cetera are still permitted.
Direct mail is the worst form of advertising, from a personal perspective and from an environmental perspective. You're littering directly onto others, and forcing them to deal with trash you created in the vain hope that some of them decide to act on that trash.
It all ought to be marked "Return To Sender" and placed back into the mail stream, so the original sender has to deal with disposal. Forcing entities to internalize negative externalities is the only way to stop them from creating those externalities to begin with.
But it does help take in the views, a lot more so than, say, the highways of Florida.
Billboards are banned in downtown Chicago, so big companies rent storefronts in tourist areas and put in stores that are not supposed to make money, just to be billboards for their brand.
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.
Half the adverts are basically essays to keep people interested when they can't use their phone.
i.e. For about 10p on a bus ticket or 20-30 on a tube ticket it could just be gone.
I made a post just recently about this - unfortunately public transport is lowest common denominator so this can't happen.
I’ll be back on Saturday and can’t wait for the peace, calm and beauty.
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 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.
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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.
I don't see any need or moral justification for push advertising, i.e. showing advertising to people who are not looking for a certain service or product. Fine to have directories for services and products that people are actively looking for and thus choose to actively view. Not fine to push advertising on people who are not actively looking for any such services and products. I would very happily support a ban on advertising in all public spaces.
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.
Coca-Cola tastes great!
Coca-Cola gives you an extra pep in your step!
Coca-Cola will rot you teeth!
These are all true statements (the first one is subjective, I'll admit), but I suspect that many believe the effect of plain test listing of facts would only allow the third statement.
> Pictures only allowed for demonstrative purposes.
Wouldn't a photo of someone drinking a Coke and enjoying it be allowed under this rule?
An advertisement is a communication designed to manipulate its recipient. Whether it's "true" or not is neither here nor there. In fact, a lot of advertisements are complete non-sequiturs, because those kinds of statements are less likely to make the listeners/viewers think critically about the statements.
I want to neuter advertising more than anything, but I can't think of any kind of "rule" we could establish that would make public mind hacking illegal.
While all of those coca cola ads are "true", they would be limited in scope to places that coca cola owns. So no bus stations or taxi toppers or whatever, unless they buy a fleet of taxis.
- Ads would be implicitly banned.
- Coca Cola couldn't bypass this rule by buying a taxi fleet because they aren't a taxi company.
- Newspapers could still operate even though journalists get paid for speech.
It could also help against other problems, depending on how narrow the purpose of a company has to be:
- ISPs have no incentive to violate net neutrality by privileging their own value added services (streaming etc) because their ISPs not streaming providers.
- If you subscribe to a folder that syncs you know that it will remain a folder that syncs. The behind it won't pivot to something you neither want not need, bloating the software till it bursts.
- Similarly: No incredible journeys anymore. Products don't get discontinued because they get in the way of $CORPORATION's plans.
- Chosing services because they aren't owned by Facebook actually works.
- Open protocols would be a thing again if we decouple clients and services. Edge case: Someone initially has to develop a client, a server and the protocol.
The idea is that by separating concerns, we enable customers to decide where their money goes and to freely chose between goods and services without getting artificially locked into any corporation's ecosystem.
1) No depictions of people
2) Advertising only inside stores
Consensus and some common sense and case by case judgement ought to be enough to decide whether ad placement is appropriate.
This is highly misleading as it will not under normal use. It is acidic just like orange juice. The rest of your phrases, while subjective, work under normal use.
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 energizing to some extent)
- has Foobar taste (Foobar because I'm not sure if there's anything common with similar taste, so perhaps it's not even worth mentioning)
- it's intended to energize, refresh, help digest meals
"Will do X for you" statements are usually not true when taken at face value, and they're already manipulative. Statements of fact, lists of features, and descriptions of intended application is what I'd like to see instead.
At this point, you need a federal bureaucracy policing practically all retail commercial speech.
If they say Coca-Cola is refreshing, and I found it's not, courts now say it is reasonable to assume that the statement is subjective. If the reasonability test is changed they will no longer be able to advertise opinions.
Then John B. Watson and the study of behaviorism came along in the early 20th century. Persuasion techniques were systematically identified and studied, and with the advent of mass media (TV, radio, internet), the cognitive shortcuts meant for neighbors and friends (tribe members) to persuade each other became flaws to abuse on a massive scale for profit and political power.
I think it's well recognized by anyone who is interested in this stuff that persuasion techniques are an abuse of human psychology. Cialdini's books are perhaps the most famous. Everyone merely tells themselves, "other people are doing it, and their products or ideas are worse, so we have to."
Public advertising is company sponsored graffiti; http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/litter-on-a-stick/
It's actually so distinct that as a nerd I just don't feel 'home' in France, architecturally, culturally, compared to most comparable countries/cities on any continent. France feels somewhat stuck in time, which you may not be able to tell looking at all the smartphones and 1Gb fiber, but could glimpse at by talking with enough locals: they just don't like / trust / see value in high-tech in general, more like a threat / disturbance / forced upon them). Again, this is the feeling, the mindset, not 'reality' or 'objective truth' (the French are the same as everyone else in this regard, obviously; I'm talking about perceptions here, like the fact that the French are the most pessimistic on Earth despite their incredible relative wealth (less than 1% of the world's population for 3.25% GDP) and quality of life (GINI, whatever).
It's great that Paris and the French exists for those who'd rather live in a more 'vintage' environment (this can be said for a lot of European small/mid cities btw), but subjectively, France is everything but high-tech or 'nerdy' compared to Germany, UK, USA, Japan (probably topping it all), Korea, basically the world's top 10-15-20 countries (GDP per capita). Even Switzerland, which is very old-school in a lot of ways, feels more "21st century" than France in day-to-day living.
(minor nitpick: should be "la pub")
How about in a free magazine which advertises all such events? Or a website that does similar? Also listings of "What's On" in more general media.
In Lausanne specifically, those billboards are also works of art in their own right so I do enjoy them.
The poorer areas are subjected to architectural punishment, food as unhealthy as it is cheap, lack of investment and services, and pollution of all varieties. I see the "Cloud Minders" from the original Star Trek.
Despite large public outcry, etc.
Definitely some money changed hands to bribe the gov people involved to make it happen. Can't see any other excuse for it.
Anyone who has taken the NYC Subway understands this sentiment. The only way to avoid them is to completely close your eyes and wish you were somewhere else.
Amusingly enough, the JC Decaux trucks are entirely festooned with Australian flags, which is a totally conventional for a 100% French company to use as visual elements and not deceptive at all.
Further reading on the 1st Amendment and advertising: http://www.lawpublish.com/amend1.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Hudson_Gas_%26_Electri...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard#Laws_limiting_billbo...
[2]: https://vnrc.org/community-planning-toolbox/tools/billboard-...
Advertisements on public property can absolutely be banned and, possibly with an ordnance, I believe you could heavily restrict advertising on private property.
The government can't shut you up when expressing protected speech, but it doesn't have to help you talk, nor does it have to make people listen to you.
1) Spying ads absolutely are more than speech: the information flow is bidirectional, and the 1st amendment isn't a right to listen.
2) It could be argued that the state cannot sell advertisements without privileging one message over another; currently "non-political ad" rules already contested, and they are even more of laughing stock beyond that once one considers that all commerce and economic activity is political. Only laws that limit the amount of messaging rather than the content are truly unbiased.
3) For private ads, while the owner of the building owns the surface where the ad is, I don't think it is fair to say they own the sight lines to the building. The problem with ADs is they can literally leave you nowhere to look when you are moving in public spaces the advertiser definitely doesn't own. I think a comparison could be made with EM spectrum law. Just because you own the antenna doesn't mean you can broadcast whatever you like. Electric adds that have their own lighting are certainly broadcasters. And if passive things like giant RFIDs are regulated, We could probably get non-illuminated ads also to be regulated.
So assuming all the above gets through the courts, we can do nothing about urinal ads in private establishments, but we can clean up public spaces completely, or at least limit them to non-illuminated ads. At that point, I hope the remaining indoor ads would be far more annoying in relative terms, and that would create some helpful economic pressure for the owner to tamp them down.
In my opinion, the solution is to clearly define a discrete set of spaces for ads and make sure everyone is able to compete on equal footing. It's not like these companies want to shell out more money for ads - they simply have to in order to compete.
EDIT: Also the US needs to adopt Britain's ban on election ads outside of the election month. We waste a phenomenal amount of time and money on election ads that provide zero real benefit to the US.
I want ads banned.
They provide nothing of value and exist only to sway people into buying your product - a lot of advertising isn't overtly malicious but it all exists dependent on an assumption that being told to buy a product is a more valuable use of a time than whatever else you're doing.
I suspect that being constantly bombarded with advertising has ill health effects by making it harder to find peace of mind and de-stress yourself, but that's just a gut feeling.
> I want ads banned.
> They provide nothing of value and exist only to sway people into buying your product - a lot of advertising isn't overtly malicious but it all exists dependent on an assumption that being told to buy a product is a more valuable use of a time than whatever else you're doing.
I'm a prolific adblocker, but I disagree with you here. I think if things were kept at a reasonable balance, advertising would be a net positive.
There have been several times where I've tried new restaurants because of ads. Sometimes I'll go searching to buy a specific thing, and realize that it doesn't yet exist in the market. Then a few months or years later, I'll see an advertisement for that thing, and I'm always very appreciative.
That's not to mention that if ads were banned tomorrow, the established brands would have decades of advantage built up against newcomers, becoming a self-reinforcing monopoly that I'd imagine would last decades after the last person to have seen an ad dies.
And don't forget, making something illegal doesn't mean it goes away. Look at how often people accuse accounts on social media of astroturfing. Do you think that astroturfing will become more or less common after a ban on advertising? At least with ads legal I can evaluate them as ads. I can't tell which glowing reviews are legitimate and which are planted, and if you think you can I'd put money against you.
> I suspect that being constantly bombarded with advertising has ill health effects by making it harder to find peace of mind and de-stress yourself, but that's just a gut feeling.
I definitely agree with you on that. The current state of ads is nothing less than an assault on people's cognitive abilities and mental health. Something needs to give here.
A ban on advertising means the company can no longer tell the employee that their job is to astroturf, or fire them for not astroturfing, because that would be a admission that the company was engaging in advertising.
I do. Yes all ads. Yes literally all.
Yes, it's sometimes hard to tell whether something is a advertisement or not; it's also sometimes hard tell whether something is fraud or not, but I don't hear anyone claiming we shouldn't ban fraud.
In fact, I would go even further and enforce plain packaging and standardized reusable containers.
We waste far too many resources on completely redundant products and specialized branded packaging.
I do. I'm OK with magazine-type ads I suppose, since that's a format where advertisers can provide information to the consumer who may or may not choose to study it. If I am soliciting information about products or services through whatever medium, fair enough. Likewise I don't especially mind watching trailers when I go to the movies, since it's reasonable to think that I would be willing to consider spending money to watch other movies in the future.
But most ads are about hijacking my attention, which I greatly resent.
I have yet to find a more rabid opponent to out-of-home advertising (in general) and billboards (in particular), and she will explain why it is evil at the drop of the proverbial hat...
As an amateur artist she will start with visual pollution and then veer into psychological damage... /grin
The anti-ad groups here would be happy for the public ads to disappear but it would be a real shame if the affordable bike share went with it.
FWIW there is a real debate about who got the better side of the deal between the city and the ad company, but the Velov scheme is great. :)
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.
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 saturation and it costs more than it makes you.
Meanwhile the little guy needs it more because they're unknown, i.e. their baseline is further from the point of saturation so they have a higher cost/benefit ratio. If nobody advertises then people keep buying from the incumbent because they don't know of any alternatives.
The biggest problem with advertising isn't big vs. little, it's that it's a signaling war. If Coke spends a dollar and Pepsi doesn't, Pepsi loses $2 in sales. But if they both spend a dollar then they've each burned a dollar only to both stay where they started.
What would really help is to have some industry of trustworthy third parties whose job it is to tell you what to buy, but nobody has ever really cracked it, because the buyers don't want to pay for it and the sellers only want to pay if it will influence the results.
Those may be quite different things.
Ads can be disruptive, but they are also frequently deceptive and simplistic, not to mention distracting. I loathe the industry with a white-hot passion.
Tesla broke into the automotive market - one of the most resistant markets to new entries - without doing any advertising. (Tesla does do marketing but it doesn't do advertising).
Genuinely new and innovative products and services generate their own buzz. They don't need to advertise. Meanwhile the old dominant suppliers often run advertising campaigns that pretend that their new product offering is revolutionary or innovative when it's nearly always just a gimmick or some old product that's been 'futured' up.
http://brandalism.ch/take-action/ http://www.billboardliberation.com/ArtAndScience-BLF.pdf http://www.billboardliberation.com/
I hope germany learns from france, this is great news and very inspiring
What's different about the internet that has some countries trying digital services taxes rather than digital ad bans?
The growth of the influencer model, advertorials/newsvertising, and individual personality as brand experience means that even if all public ads were banned, brands would just be paying thousands of micro-influencers for IRL mentions, tracked silently through the mic on your phone.
When you take the influencer thing to it's logical conclusion (everyone is a brand ambassador) then it becomes real murky real quick about what's an ad and what's just a person's opinion.
Perhaps if the largest phone operating system vendor didn't have a financial incentive to weaken privacy, this would not be a problem.
So word of mouth? The already known highest quality way to gain new customers: friends of existing customers.
All you gotta do is have a product good enough to be recommended. And maybe a nice built-in viral loop or twenty.