When It Changed

*When It Changed ...* is a three-part blog post written by David Reinfurt and Eric Li and edited by Meg Miller for Are.na around billboard legislation in Vermont, Web 2.0, and ambient software.

Please read it here: 
https://www.are.na/blog/when-it-changed-part-1
https://www.are.na/blog/when-it-changed-part-2
https://www.are.na/blog/when-it-changed-part-3

It was 2018, just before the end of summer, and I was in Post Mills, Vermont, paging through old copies of Vermont Life magazine. My wife’s mother and father, longtime state residents, have saved copies of the magazine from the last 50 years or so. It’s published quarterly, each issue taking advantage of Vermont’s four crisply rendered seasons. A story might detail the comings and goings in the town of Corinth around a furniture maker’s workshop at the start of fall, or the raising, in early spring, of a round barn in Bradford. Each story is particular, and somehow each is also generic. More [HERE]

You See Pepsi, I See Coke: New Tricks for Product Placement

VIA: The NY Times

First came product placement. In exchange for a payment, whether in cash, supplies or services, a TV show or a film would prominently display a brand-name product.

Then there was virtual product placement. Products or logos would be inserted into a show during the editing, thanks to computer-generated imagery.

Now, with the rise of Netflix and other streaming platforms, the practice of working brands into shows and films is likely to get more sophisticated. In the near future, according to marketing executives who have had discussions with streaming companies, the products that appear onscreen may depend on who is watching.
More [HERE]

Just a Quarter of New York’s Wi-Fi Kiosks Are Up. Guess Where.

I am not surprised.

VIA: The NY Times

When New York City announced in 2014 that a private company would replace pay phones with thousands of kiosks offering free Wi-Fi, Mayor Bill de Blasio called it “a critical step toward a more equal, open, and connected city.” More [HERE]

‘THEY LIVE / YOU WILL’

My colleague Bill Posters wrote an incredibly important essay outlining the main points of interest for the anti advertising, pro civic media movement. Please read it!

His writing shows us that while the out of home advertising industry acted as the fuel for neoliberal capitalism and helped sustain the post war growth of American consumerism, we have entered a new epoch that makes the incantations of billboards and bus shelters look quaint in comparison. Dataism and the rise of behavioral data collection, because of its accuracy and pervasiveness, threatens more than the sanctity of our shared public public spaces, but will likely influence fundamental aspects of our collective social behavior in ways that will drastically alter society as we evolve into the future. It's fucking scary. What happens when the data exhaust you produce is so granular that Spotify can accurately predict when you are in a bad mood? And what then when Spotify realizes that your consumption drops in those moments of aggression and actively makes decisions to prevent that behavior from diminishing your capacity as a consumer? Now extend that type of influence over all networks and all devices and you see a human being pushed and pulled in ways that it cannot see, and cannot control, all to increase ones predictability as consumer, and you start to see how over a few hundred years the nature of society is fundamentally changed as people become more and more tuned by the needs of those in control of the data we collectively produce. Like a meteor on a collision course with earth, you don't change a society by blowing it up, you send out a small satellite to slowly push the course of its direction over many years and watch as the final destination finds itself far of course. In one case we all sign in relief, in the other we loose our free will to the corporate entities that control the data of our lives. 

Nada, played by Roddy Piper, picks up a pair of black-rimmed glasses and puts them on, but these are no ordinary glasses, these glasses are X-Ray specs. Immediately they détourne all forms of corporate propaganda that he casts his gaze at—the billboard advertisements, magazines, and television programmes all change. All are subverted to reveal an alternative truth (in essence), making the invisible visible, revealing in the process the hidden infrastructures, architectures and power relationships that exist between corporate and state level actors—in the case of They Live aliens, and their subjects—citizens of the US. Everyone is asleep, Nada is awake.
More [HERE]

FaceApp Shows We Care About Privacy but Don’t Understand It

I have been posting a lot of articles on data privacy because it related directly to my interest in outdoor advertising and the influence industry as a whole. While advertising and OOH advertising more specifically tried to greet you where you were in an effort to capture your attention and influence the trajectory of your thoughts, your digital data exhaust is being used to predict in more accurate ways than you can imagine, your emotional and psychological profile at any given moment in an effort to serve that influence to you on a device you have already given your undivided attention. The goal, like advertising is not mind control, but the subtle nudge of outcomes. Don't demand a society that bows to consumer culture and finds itself so deep in the forest of capitalism that we cannot see our way out, but rather slowly push us there over generations by making each moment of each individuals life more likely to involve a consumer interaction. With enough data, this doesn't become a hypothetical but an inevitable outcome of a society that has allowed our daily lives to be subtly influenced by the needs of capital over the needs of our society. 

VIA: NY Times

FaceApp, a mobile face-editing application, has all the necessary components for a viral privacy scandal: a catchy concept, celebrity users, a mysterious company and a stampede of public interest.

Here’s the rundown of FaceApp’s 15 minutes of fame: A viral app lets us see what we might look like as a wrinkle-laden 75-year-old. Users click “yes” on the terms of service without looking, and start snapping and uploading pictures. More [HERE]

In Stores, Secret Surveillance Tracks Your Every Move

VIA: The New York Times

Imagine you are shopping in your favorite grocery store. As you approach the dairy aisle, you are sent a push notification in your phone: “10 percent off your favorite yogurt! Click here to redeem your coupon.” You considered buying yogurt on your last trip to the store, but you decided against it. How did your phone know? More [HERE]

Proposed State Law Could Put LED Billboard Boat Company Under Water

VIA: Gothamist

The as-yet-unsinkable LED billboard barge that appeared off the coast of Manhattan last year—since earning near universal condemnation from waterfront-loving New Yorkers—may soon find itself the target of a statewide ban. More [HERE]

THESE DIGITAL BILLBOARDS ARE DESIGNED TO COMBAT COMMUTERS' ANXIETY

VIA: Ad Age

There's more awareness than ever these days of stress and mental anxiety--but could outdoor media help to fight it? 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]

GOOGLE’S SIDEWALK LABS PLANS TO PACKAGE AND SELL LOCATION DATA ON MILLIONS OF CELLPHONES

As an anti-advertising activist I am becoming more and more aware that the quaint methods once employed by the attention industry are becoming obsolete. In NYC the phonebooth infrastructure, once a ubiquitous form of street furniture across the five boroughs, is rapidly being replaced by digital WiFi stations. While these digital structures do have screens on either side that show advertisements intermittently between more benign content like PSA's, "public art" and fun facts about the city we live in, they are a trojan horse. If the objective of advertising is to influence your behavior, the old method of putting a picture in front of you is costly, cumbersome and largely ineffective when weighed against the capabilities made available through the tracking of our bodily motions and online behaviors. Surveillance capitalism is quickly replacing the old forms of influence with new far more insidious methods unknown and unseen to most of us. As I grapple what that means for my practice as an artist I will continue to report on new ideas and methods being developed to influence our behavior that fall outside of the typical advertising in public space dilemma.

VIA: The Intercept

MOST OF THE data collected by urban planners is messy, complex, and difficult to represent. It looks nothing like the smooth graphs and clean charts of city life in urban simulator games like “SimCity.” A new initiative from Sidewalk Labs, the city-building subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, has set out to change that. More [HERE]

NYC Kiosks Invite Artists to Pay Nearly $1,000 to Show Their Work

Another Pay to Play Opportunity for Art in Public Spaces. RJ Rushmore of AiAP writes for Hyperallergic about the New MVOV campaign on LINK NYC.

RJ does as a great job calling out MVOV and the absurdity of paying a gatekeeper to use our shared public spaces. Often the inclusion of art into the commercial space that we call public space is an opportunity for some commercial enterprise and this example is not different. Usually art and artists are used to give respectability to public space land grabs by consumerist ideologies but this example is just straight profiteering. You want to see your work in public space? Do like the rest of us and pay up.

LinkNYC, the “communications network” of digital advertising displays disguised as WiFi hotspots on New York City streets, has gotten into the artwashing game. Artists are being asked to pay to play in what is marketed as an open call for art in public space. More [HERE]

Two Related Articles About Advertising and Choice

Two recent articles in the NY Times caught my attention through their relationship to one another. The first was "Places Where Smartphones Tracked People’s Movements," [HERE] and the second was "Digital Data Gives Billboard Owners More Reason to ‘Love a Good Traffic Jam’." [HERE]  Each suggest how tracking and recognition will go hand in hand to deliver targeted content that is powerful enough to bend choice in ways I don't think we have seen before. 

The goal of advertising is to present you with an idea that you will act upon. Often this is the consumption of a good or service. Persuasion is the ultimate goal and over the years repetition has been the most effective tool in the advertisers repertoire of tricks. Early on advertisers increased their chances of reaching target audiences by inserting messages at regular intervals on many advertising platforms at once, including TV, Outdoor, Print and Radio. As audiences grew, so did the advertisers ability to segment them through Nielsen ratings, focus groups, and social research. If the original idea was to present the message as often as possible, It was quickly updated with a caveat to target the vulnerable. Repeat as many times as possible, but do so to those most susceptible to your charms. For a long time everyone understood the predatory nature of advertising and accepted the fate of being distracted at regular intervals during most social events. It was a price we were wiling to pay for whatever gesture was made in return. TV programming, radio shows, print articles, subway systems, all paid for through our attention to the incantations speckled throughout. For many it has been entirely overwhelming and yet the haphazard way in which advertising content stills seems to seep into our lives has allowed us to see its idiosyncrasy and critique its end game. I have been able to outsmart the system because it revealed itself with each clumsy campaign that I was uninterested in and which revealed the production and consumption cycle in all its uselessness. I took the indignation I felt at these moments of clarity and carried them with me into my other consumer interactions. I was skeptical. The problem I see with new recognition and targeting technologies is that the messages will become so well targeted that I wont have the opportunity to peer behind the curtain. That each message will be so well attuned to my actual desires that I will begin to loose the line between what is actually me and what is the me that the machine has built for me. A few years of cross pollination between my actual personality and the very close replica of my personalty that machines are now capable of building, and my choices stop being my choices alone but some amalgamation. Its a scary and yet somewhat utopian prospect when you really get down to it, and one I'd like to think more about in 2019.

Floating Billboard Barges are the New Reality for LES Waterfront

VIA: Bowery Boogie

With the gold rush of the Lower East Side waterfront comes the vultures. Several readers have noticed the recent influx of billboard barges floating across the East River. As this area continues to gentrify, and with the prospect of three new large-scale luxury developments looming, those eyeballs are obviously evermore valuable to advertisers. More [HERE]

Piccadilly Circus billboard uses recognition technology to deliver targeted adverts

We already knew this was happening but a reminder is always a good idea.

VIA: Dezeen

A new digital billboard in London's Piccadilly Circus uses recognition technology to display targeted advertisements based on the make of passing cars, and the gender and age of pedestrians. More [HERE]

Smart cities are boring. Give us responsive cities.

It is Tuesday morning in Brussels and I am starting the install of my show at Harlan Levey Projects today. Before I get going on that I read an interesting article sent to me and written by the CTO of a large outdoor advertising and digital infrastructure firm. I have been pitching them a very public use of the infrastructure that he created in the hopes of creating a truly democratic open platform on an outdoor advertising network. I know, I know. Working with the enemy. In some ways yes, and in some ways trying out new ideas that would create the language needed to demand an ad free space that would be required of an open public visual environment. I'll keep you posted and be open with my endeavors cause honesty is the best policy and I am a sucker for criticism, be it my own, or someone else's.

My work has increasingly begun to happen in the digital space, or at least the thinking I am forced to do as digital advertising and the ramifications of digital infrastructure make thier way through the outdoor advertising world. Beyond hacking a digital kiosk, how does one deal with this new infrastructure as an activist? Is there some aspect of digital infrastructure that might provide the kinds of opportunities I seek to replace outdoor advertising? Can digital infrastructure be a shared civic resource in a way that the old billboard could not? I think so, although getting the companies who own these public infrastructures to share them as if they were truly public is a big ask, there are opportunities to do just that around the corner. My interest is ultimately in breaking the stranglehold on public space communication that advertising has tightened over the years so that a renewed democratic civic discourse can take its place and there is something uniquely democratic about a digital screen that can alternate content and provide larger populations with a voice where traditional print media could not.

VIA: Tech Crunch

As an urban technologist, I’m often asked to give an example of a compelling smart city application that real people are using. But to be honest, there really isn’t too much to point to – yet. Cities may be getting smarter, but they haven’t noticeably changed from a user perspective. More [HERE]

NYC subway to get thousands of digital ad screens

Looks like the inevitable is happening and the moving image will become a more integral part of your daily commute.

VIA: NY Times
More [HERE]

The Ad Feels a Bit Like Oscar Bait, but It’s Trying to Sell You an iPhone

This isnt outdoor advertising related but I take interest in how advertising is morphing as it becomes more common for people the bemoan its attention grabbing and manipulative ways. Here the answer seems to be companies trying to make advertising that is more engaging and less repugnant to viewers. What this strategy does not address is the underlying fact that we dont want to be manipulated and this masking of the methods of manipulation only shines the turd, but does nothing to get rid of its foul stench.

VIA: The NY Times

Carrie Brownstein, the actress known for the series “Portlandia,” wrote and directed a short film last fall that pokes fun at the exaggerated comments people post under pictures of celebrities on social media, showing what would happen if reverential remarks like “Mom” or “marry me” played out in the real world. More [HERE]

Chase Had Ads on 400,000 Sites. Then on Just 5,000. Same Results.

Carpet bombing is not always the most effective way to hit your target. In advertising it seems to be the same. we must wrestle with the fact that we are as a species less decision makers than creatures of habit and curb the influences which we wish to avoid. Advertising could do us all a service by backing off its ever agressive stance and targeting us with greater accuracy, potentially with our consent. We do need to know things about the world of commerce, I think we would just all rather not be choking on the messages and in control of our attentional focus. 

VIA: NY Times

As of a few weeks ago, advertisements for JPMorgan Chase were appearing on about 400,000 websites a month. It is the sort of eye-popping number that has become the norm these days for big companies that use automated tools to reach consumers online. More [HERE]

May All Your Time Be Screen Time!

AugmentAd Reality from Richard Harris on Vimeo.
Visit the website [Here]

Aiming to Disrupt Ads in New York City, Artworks Instead Blend In

My criticism of this project was announced by my questioning of the curators at a recent panel at the New School in NYC. Basically I was concerned that this type of project, while attempting to disrupt the ad cycle that so clearly has a strangle hold on our collective attention in public space, only further institutionalizes the infrastructure through which we receive this bombardment into the fabric of our city. What is passed off as critique is actually a deeply disturbing acceptance of our inability to imagine alternative visions of society through art. As if a colorful non-commercial image thrown into an onslaught of commercial media could somehow challenge the medium itself and help us to breath new life into a system that is normalizing consumptive behaviors that are at the heart of social and environmental issues we all face. 

VIA: Hyperallergic

The idea behind Commercial Break — an exhibition produced by Public Art Fund (PAF) of 23 artists’ versions of visual “interruptions within the advertising cycles” on some of New York City’s most public screens — seems like a good one. The artist list is appealingly international, including Cory Arcangel, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Martine Syms, Hayal Pozanti, Cécile B. Evans, Tabor Robak, and Mary Reid Kelley. The project looks to inject an aesthetic time-out into the onslaught of commercial images meant to sell us new and improved versions of ourselves. It’s important that the work is being shown in public, because certainly more than languages, professions, or nationalities, New Yorkers share a familiarity with the discourse of advertising. It is merciless in its attempt to convince viewers of their own lack and of their need to buy their way out of the hole. More [HERE]