Car-Mounted Ads Take a New Direction: Data Collection

VIA: Citylab

Atop most New York City taxis are advertising screens—flashing LEDs hawking Lion King tickets and beer and McDonald’s. Along with the vehicles’ yellow hue, the rooftop ads once set traditional cabs apart from the Ubers and Lyfts with whom they share city streets. Rather than waste all that monetizable airspace, though, a venture-backed startup called Firefly started installing portable advertising billboards on the roofs of ride-hailing vehicles in five major cities across the country. More [HERE]

How Advertising Conquered Urban Space

VIA: CityLab

“I’m still flying at four thousand feet when I see it, that scarcely perceptible glow, as though the moon had rushed ahead of schedule. Paris is rising over the edge of the earth.” More [HERE]

A Mess on the Sidewalk

When traditional outdoor ads were replaced with screens I bemoaned the upgrade as a more insidious distraction that was simply harder to ignore as our brains trained our eyes on thier movement. When LinkNYC went in on the streets of NYC, I thought that it would be another opportunity for more distraction but that at least it would come with a touchpad and free phone calls. What has become clear in the first years of LINK's deployment is that is has no interest in traditional advertising whatsoever. Made up of #artonlink and "fun facts" about NYC, the majority of content displayed is a benign sedative obscuring the less obvious data collection practices being employed. No longer is the material of persuasion a physical image designed to cause some affect, but rather the collection of your data which can be used to more subtlety influence who you are and what you want. We are entering a fantastically dystopian era where the tools of persuasion go "underground" and we are all left wondering why we want a Coke so bad even though we haven't seen the curly font on a bright red background for years. 

VIA: The Baffler

WHEN SIDEWALK LABS, a “smart cities” start-up launched by Google, made its Toronto debut in October 2017, a torrent of global adulation followed. Over the next few weeks, Sidewalk choreographed events featuring luminaries such as former Google chairman Eric Schmidt and Sidewalk founder and CEO Dan Doctoroff. There was even a cameo appearance from Canada’s hipster prime minister Justin Trudeau, whose Liberal government is investing heavily to attract innovation-driven companies to Canada. More [HERE]

Designing a More Inclusive City

Strategies for exclusion are not so dissimilar to strategies for inclusion. Everywhere you look the built environment is whispering what it wants from you, how to behave and how to feel. This isn't good or bad but like all things should be conscientious and favor all over the few. 

VIA: NY TIMES

In the 1990s, San Francisco removed all of the benches from Civic Center Plaza. In 2001, all remaining seating in nearby United Nations Plaza was removed in the middle of the night. Over the years, public seating has been removed from virtually the entire city. While this anti-homelessness strategy has given way a little with the emergence of the city’s many parklets, it’s still in full effect. More [HERE]

The Cost of Paying Attention

I have always said, if not slightly in jest, that advertisers should pay for the space they take up in my mind. More specifically outdoor advertisers, as thier messages are forced into my brain without my consent and therefor occupy a special subsection of crap that fills my thoughts. If I hum a pudding jingle that I saw on TV, it is my own fault for letting that message creep into my mind in exchange for a little sitcom induced brain shutdown. If I cant seem to get the image of a 4 story overly sexed Justin Bieber out of my mind, I have only Calvin Klien and Outfront Media to blame for that intrusion. 

It is with that thought that I post this NY Times article by Mathew B. Crawford. His argument, which is stated eloquently but isnt particularly new, is that we should treat our visual landscape like any other resource. We protect our air and water for the common good and the visual landscape that we share in public should be treated similarly so that the rampant abuse of that space does not cause negative economic or health issues for the population at large. I couldn't agree more. Mathew focuses his attention on an airport, which provides some nice examples of how our visual landscape is a worthwhile resource by juxtaposing the general airport with the paid lounges. If the wealthy are willing to pay for silence, or a lack of intrusion into thier visual landscape, it must have some worth.

Airports though, are both public and private spaces and while I couldnt agree more that they should be treated similarly to our shared city streets when it comes to visual pollution, actual public space has a more profound reason to remain commercial free. When we allow advertising to purchase the facades of our buildings, occupy our urban infrastructure, and generally access any and all of our shared environment, we lose something more than the valuable resource of silence. What we loose is access to our city and our literal ability to shape the environment we live in by visual interaction and cultural production.

"The street is a cultural space, one of the essential functions of which is to promote public interaction by facilitating self-expression. That’s a function that a space can have more or less, and it’s one that a space can lose."

If we allow advertising and commercial messaging to monetize the surface of our city, we loose access to those surfaces and with that our ability to define the cultural landscape in which we exist. To me this might be the most tragic loss due to public advertising but it surely isnt the only loss. Demanding an ad free public space is our right as citizens and of paramount importance as we continually define the objectives of our cities and the society that we want them to create. 

VIA: The NY Times

A FEW years ago, in a supermarket, I swiped my bank card to pay for groceries. I watched the little screen, waiting for its prompts. During the intervals between swiping my card, confirming the amount and entering my PIN, I was shown advertisements. Clearly some genius had realized that a person in this situation is a captive audience. More [HERE]