French Advertiser JCDecaux Begins U.S. Push With Chicago Billboards

VIA Business Week

In a public toilet outside Paris, Jean-François Decaux lays out his plans to conquer America. His company, JCDecaux, has become the world’s biggest outdoor advertiser by building posh potties and slick bus stops designed by the likes of Norman Foster and Philip Cox and plastering them with ads. While the French company operates in more than 1,800 cities across the globe, from Berlin to Bangkok, it has just 3 percent of the U.S. market. “We’ve had to create a new way in,” says Decaux, co-chief executive of the company his father founded. More [HERE]

No New Enemies - Interview

No New Enemies was kind enough to do a little interview with me when they invited me to join their fantastic network of contemporary artists. The interview focuses on the most recent Echo project in New York but delves into some of the larger PublicAdCampaign issues as well. If you are interested in the Echo work, I highly suggest checking out the interview at this [LINK]. NNE supports its artists by offering work for sale, which you can find in the web shop. Enjoy

New Mobstr Interactive Scribble Billboard -

VIA Vandalog:

This new Ad Takeover by Mobstr is a succinct explanation of why I want advertising to go the way of the dinosaur and open up our city spaces to the public and their need to communicate their own ideas in public space. A Fantastic piece. More [HERE]

More Proof that the Public Can Handle Curation of its Public Environment

Never has filed in the blank where Contest Promotions has relinquished control. Its a stark contrast and a favorable one for the public if you ask me. 

Ludo Billboard Takeover - Warbug6

Ludo consistently gets up perfectly achieved billboard hits every few months and I look forward to getting them in my inbox. He just sent over his most recent takeover in Paris titled Warbug6. Enjoy more of his work [HERE]

Spoiling Your Work With Brand Partnerships

Insa has done some great gif work in the past, turning murals into internet art that boggles the mind. Sadly he decided to ruin all of that by producing this ad for Kettle One vodka which will now be forever linked to his aesthetic in my mind. While this is obviously a personal opinion that many people wouldnt agree with, I find it hard to imagine why an artist who takes years to develop an aesthetic, an identity, brand, or style, would allow that said identity to be linked to a very specific commercial object.  I just cannot imagine that the compensation is worth the permanent association that your artwork becomes for so many people. Ahh fuck it lets hit the bar.

Office of Freedom from Advertising and Good Living - Ad Free in 2014!

Luna Park turned me on to the "Office of Freedom from Advertising and Good Living", a Berlin based community organization attempting to make several neighborhoods ad free by 2014. I share many of their concerns and am excited to see such a hands on and practical approach to carving out even a small area of ad free space in our cities. What they are doing could provide us all with an example of how individual communities can truly alter their shared visual environment and in doing so help promote a more active and engaged citizenry. Sounds like a place I would like to live.

Take a look at their website [HERE] for more information on their activities and goals. And on a complete side note, is it strange to anyone else that their action took place on april 25th, the date of the first NYSAT and what I am beginning to think might be a great international takeover day. hmmm...

When the Ads Cease to Exist, the Community Fills in the Blanks

PublicAdCampaign readers will know that one of my issues with outdoor advertising is that it monopolizes public space as it engulfs ever more territory in an effort to become the predominant message in our public environment. This quest for more and more real estate not only overwhelms our visual environment but places a high value on the walls of our city by monetizing each surface with a potential for ad revenue. The result is a lack of public usage of public space in what becomes a thoroughly commercial environment. 

The series of three images presented in this post serve as a nice example of what we might come to expect if we remove the ever present billboard image and think of how we might like to collectively curate the spaces that we share. (While I am obviously a fan of public murals, I would also like to say that it is my hope that we think of public curation in much broader terms than the mural and use our shared public walls to adress all forms of community needs, including the artistic.)

Illegal NPA street level billboard 2009

 Illegal billboard removal 01-12

Current image as of 05-17-13

Posterboy Work Found on L Line

Riding the L train a few nights ago I saw this Posterboy work through the train car window. I quickly jumped off the train to snap some pics of a rare but exciting find. Enjoy!

New Work by Jordan Seiler - The Echo Project

I am currently working on a series of street pieces coined the "Echo" series by my friend Kid Zoom. To make them, I play a short game of cat and mouse in a phonebooth, installing one image, photographing it, then reinstalling that photograph once the original work has been removed. I do this several times until the original installation has undergone several iterations and is too small to see in the photograph. 

As you may know, I try to make work that doesnt speak about the individual advertisements, but rather the structures or venues these advertisements come to us in. I want to draw attention to my actions without being too overt, allowing viewers to recognize a fundamental change in the type of imagery they are seeing in these phonebooths, in the hopes that they will make their own decisions about what types of imagery we should be surrounding ourselves with on a daily basis. 

To me the "echo" becomes a clear indicator that the advertisement has been removed, not once but a multiple of times depending on when they see it in the cycle. This repetition also speaks to my feelings of public ownership over what many consider private property plunked down on our shared public spaces. How this private ownership of public space and therefor shared mental space came to be is a question I think we should ask ourselves, and my continued retaking of a single booth shows my deeply held belief that the public environment should remain at the the publics disposal and without commercial intervention. 

 framed installation in studio