A City without Advertising?
Posted August 16, 2007 by John Menick
© Copyright Tony de Marco
Out of context, the photo is not very remarkable: all we see is a billboard, bare between ad campaigns, impatiently awaiting some new four-color apparel. Every city or cross-country trip offers an empty billboard like this one. The billboard could so easily be part of any landscape that we may even risk labeling it “universal.” But put into a new context — Tony de Marco’s “São Paulo No Logo” Flickr photoset — and the picture is something else entirely. It becomes one example of dozens depicting São Paulo’s recent citywide advertising ban, something that, outside of the remaining communist countries, is far from universal. In fact, the photograph’s context is so unthinkable that it borders the fictitious.
The ban is really only five or six months old, even though the city’s conservative mayor Gilberto Kassab initiated it last September. Contrary to stereotype, Kassab, a conservative trying to become a centrist, saw advertising as many leftists do: as “visual pollution.” (Actually, as Pansouth reports in his excellent and informative video on Current.tv, the initiative was a remnant of a former socialist mayor.) It’s hard to know what really motivated Kassab, but the popularity of the law seems to be its own best selling point. According to the International Herald Tribune, only one city councilman voted against the bill, and that one holdout was a former adman.
In the meantime, São Paulo is in a transitional state, with no ads but many billboards, and during this interim the city has become unexpectedly more photogenic, transforming itself into a kind of hugely scaled urban curiosity. With these blank squares, unused chassis, and half-familiar logotype traces, there is something almost apocalyptic about Tony de Marco’s photographs. Subliminally morbid, the city is now, as the one Brazilian designer remarked, a “billboard cemetery.”
But what about other forms of public expression such as political advertisements, public art, and service announcements? Somehow the city’s assurances that these forms of speech are still protected ring untrue. They certainly can’t find their ways onto public billboards. Adbusters mentions that pamphleteering is also banned, but it fails to note whether this includes political pamphlets. None of the articles answers very basic questions about the law, such as is banning a pamphlet from a clothing chain the same as banning a similar pamphlet from a clothing charity? And who does this policing? Would every ambiguous instance see its day in court, thus creating a backlog of judicial cases of an unmanageable scope?
In his somewhat dated but still mostly relevant, Culture, Inc, Herbert Schiller mentions how since the 1950s, the Supreme Court increasingly understood corporate advertising in the United States as being constitutionally protected speech. Despite being a book written against the “corporatization of culture” Shiller admits that the Supreme Court did not always side with big business along the way, and, in fact, many of the laws protecting corporate speech were championed by civil rights and consumerist groups that also saw their work threatened by laws banning ads.
If there is a reason why this law will not last, it is to be found in the mayor’s own statements. Kassab has contradictorily stated in the above-mentioned Current.tv video that he is not against advertising at all. What he is against is the illegal ads that constituted the majority of advertising in São Paulo. He considers such activity to be equivalent to tax evasion. It appears that a total ban reduces the city to zero, and slowly, over the next few years, the city can build up tax-revenue generating “official” billboards. A few years after that it’s probably back to business as usual.
The law is indiscriminate about what kinds of speech are banned in public, but it is even more naïve concerning what could be advertising. Without billboards, companies can move to other forms of viral and guerrilla marketing, and according to Adbusters, they already have. Stripped of the usual forms of communication, Citibank has begun painting São Paulo walls with its trademark blue fade, hence creating the most paradoxical reversal of all: by outlawing big media, big media have reinvented themselves as a kind of oppositional subculture, not unlike avant-garde artists in the Soviet Union, or anti-corporate activists in the states. For as much as it might hurt to say, the only thing the laws seem to have accomplished is to turn multinational corporations into the new cultural underground.
