There are passive printed ones. Ugly, but often tolerable and often useful.
Then there are those active ones. Blinking lights, bright to the point of light pollution. I hate those things and they are everywhere now too with more sprouting up all the time.
Count me in for the latter. I'll gladly continue to tolerate the former to get some relief from the active ugly everywhere...
My guess is that he more means that they have become entrenched in everyday life and that somehow that will make them harder to get rid of. It's always been this way ...
Consider what it would actually mean to ban billboards. If they were on government-owned land near a highway, placed at the pleasure of the city or state, then sure, they can (and should) decide to retract that permission; no issue there. On the other hand, if they're on private land, then this suggests that a local government can ban you from posting a sign on your own property that's visible to others. Where does that stop, and on what basis could it occur at all?
Within cities, I've seen signs posted on the sides of buildings, presumably with the full permission of the building owner, because the building happened to provide a convenient space visible to a fair bit of roadway. In residential areas, I've seen people post large signs on the sides or roofs of their houses, easily visible to the road. And that leaves aside the numerous small picket or A-frame signs placed in non-highway areas, again on private property: houses for sale, garage sales, lost pets, etc.
As much as I hate advertising, how exactly would you reconcile such a ban with the first amendment in the US?
That's a horrible precedent. Most noncommercial advertising is popitical advertising, which is funded by the special interests who will commercially profit from the advertised politicians.
It makes sense. Advertising is inefficient, wasting people's time and attention for the gain of the advertiser.
Advertisements have long been used as a form of micropayment, to fund first TV shows and now websites, where a monetary payment would be infeasible.
There is no such reason to allow advertising in public property (private property is more complicated, but generally the outward appearance of buildings is considered a public good, and highly regulated). The person viewing the building or billboard is not a party to a transaction, so there is no reason to charge that person a hidden fee for viewing that space. In a way it is the ultimate hidden tax.
Billboards are illegal in four states: Alaska, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont. I would love to form a SuperPAC to work on outlawing them in the other 46 states.
Not all forms of expression are considered free speech under the protection of the First Amendment. Political speech is the most protected (i.e. "Vote for Bob") and commercial speech, particularly advertising, is some of the least protected.
That is one nice thing about living around DC, there are no billboards around the highways around here. You don't notice it until you go to other states. Then it becomes obvious and it looks jarring -- "Hey, what is this crap everywhere? How can people tolerate this!?"
Kind of the same effect if you are used to watching Netflix and then at a relative's house and you see cable TV with commercials every 15 minutes. They probably don't even notice it, but to me it feels strange and annoying to have to put up with it.
You're not the only one I've heard this from. Do you mind if I ask what kind of sites you're getting this from? I can't tolerate TV or radio ads. I've never used any ad blockers on the web, and I don't find much objectionable advertising other than clickbait link farms.
I for years don't bothered with web ads, but sites got increasingly slow, sometimes some sites would time out after exchanging 10mb of data with ad servers, when the site itself had 300kb or something like that.
So I installed ad blocking to get rid of this issue...
The difference is DRASTIC, not only in performance (it feels like it felt when I switched from dial-up to DSL) but there are no more blinking and flashing stuff anymore, the browser crashes much less (because of badly coded flash ads) and some sites are much better to see the content (example: one of the most popular brazillian newspaper, Folha.com has some flash banner ads that when you mouseover they expand and cover the entire page, the problem it is really easy to unintentionally mouse over them, and then to get rid of them again is really obnoxious)
I've recently taking to switching off Javascript for just this reason. The Chrome extension "Quick Javascript Switcher" does it on a site-by-site basis. No more interstitials, cookie-warning crap, etc.
I'm using RequestPolicy for this. If a site doesn't load completely, just enable a couple of required sources, and you're done. It's an extra step sure, but usually needs to be done just once per site.
Yeah, I've been doing the same. It's not difficult to switch JS on for an individual site if it's something I actually want to use. For most sites, however, killing JS just makes life easier.
It's kind of like a noise you don't notice until it stops.
I don't mind ads when viewing sites on desktop - except for tracking, which I block unconditionally, and autoplay videos - but I can't stand mobile ads.
There's the battery life/bandwith problem, they take up precious screen space, especially popovers and sticky banners, but my real problem is that mobile is a much more personal, close up experience. I don't want things shouting in my face when I'm trying to read.
Publishers need to make money, but the cost of mobile advertising is too high.
If like many Washingtonians you never leave NW, sure. But there are plenty of billboards in NE and SE. There are definitely billboards when you get a little ways out on 66, also on 50E towards Annapolis. 95 in VA is non-stop billboards, I forget if 395 has them. The one I'm not certain about is the beltway ... but pretty sure I've seen billboards on the beltway in parts of MD. There are (were?) also what amount to billboards along H St in NW. So I have to disagree, and encourage you to explore the area more.
Never had visited DC I googled "billboards in DC" and got plenty of results. A billboard in support of Chelsea Manning, companies selling billboard space and companies selling mobile billboard space as well. Nothing to indicate there was a lack of billboards there.
Yeah I am mainly in NW and Northern VA. Billboards are not illegal, but they are just regulated better. I was mainly comparing with Pensilvania, Ohio and a few Midwest states I drive through sometimes.
Agreed, there are very few billboards in northern Virginia; I think Fairfax and Arlington Counties have stringent requirements for them, if not outright bans.
When I lived in Sacramento, on the Cap City Freeway there was a highly visible, gaudy billboard advertising liposuction, fat belly and all. I always wondered about that one ... there's no way the funds from renting that space justified the terrible light it cast on Sacramento for visitors passing through, and there must be other bidders. Also it's not as though this is the norm, I can't think of any similarly awful billboards in the Sacramento area, and the Cap City Freeway itself has few billboards.
At 7th and H NW there are three giant electronic billboards that play sound, not to mention the array of billboards plastered all over the Verizon center.
I mentioned those, but you're right that they're inconsistent with what I said about people not leaving NW. 2006-ish I think there was a big debate on if they'd be allowed ... they've always seemed like a special case, being part of the arena itself. In any case, billboards are few and far between in NW.
the bad ones are the super bright LED ones that, when suddenly changing to the next advertisement, make me think there's a cop behind me when it's humid [always] at night [half the time]
That's amazing, I live in MD near DC and I never thought about this until now. I frequently drive the Beltway and I-95 north to Baltimore and I can't think of any billboards off the top of my head. On the other hand, back in Arkansas (where I'm from) there are quite a few billboards on interstates, usually clustered near exits.
I think it says something about the region, about what is important there. A lot are neutral, but some are ridiculous -- liposuction, jesus saves, abortion will take you to hell, matress discounters, private investigator services for when your loved one is cheating on you, snake petting zoo next exit. One can argue, yeah it is free market, if you own the land next to the freeway, you can do whatever. But another argument is it make the whole area look bad.
There was a giant LCD billboard outside my window in Baltimore. Though it was quite some distance away, at night it shone into my window like a nighttime Sun. Destroyed the otherwise lovely view of Baltimore Penn Station, not to mention required pulling the blinds to be able to sleep.
There aren't many LCD billboards here (Dublin, Ireland). The few that I've seen are reasonably small and generally used for stuff like how many parking spaces are free in the city centre.
But I despise the things, especially if they change what they're displaying (ie movement or flicker). The number of of times that they switched from dark to blindingly-bright almost causing an accident is shocking. I'm surprised that nobody has been seriously injured because of this (that I know of).
A ban is pretty harsh, how about taxing them heavily enough that they almost disappear? $1MM/billboard/year might be about right.
The reason people are asking for a ban of billboards is that they impose heavy externalities: they're distracting, ugly, et cetera. Capture those externalities rather than ban them.
what about a tax of incometimenumber * k ? (Oh wait, what does it mean to talk about a company or collective's income? What if you pay someone else to pay for the billboard? ok nevermind this is probably a terrible idea.)
I'd replace billboards with graffiti in Portland any day. I can't stand that billboards are plastered all over the place, but one streak of paint on a building left unscrubbed will result in the person owning that building getting fines from the city. I miss the feel of an real urban environment and having real graffiti on walls and over passes.
I always thought that instituting a similar policy as was done at Five Points in Long Island City in Queens in New York City (a curator who allowed talentedt artists to contiually refresh the walls of an abandoned warehouse with beautiful pieces of art and graffiti) would be awesome for the subways here in NYC.
They're just silver boxes with a tiny US flag as it stands now. They're pretty clean which is nice, they feature advertising although unless a company like Pepsi or Google buys the entire train's advertising and remakes their outsides as well it's generally not particularly intrusive (and to be fair, I found the Fanta train kind of neat).
I'd like to see more art in general although in neighborhoods like Bushwick there is generally a fair amount, and if you keep your eyes peeled there's still quite a fair amount of illicit street art as well. I'm all for it and think there should be a concerted effort to provide and encourage those who'd like to try with places to practice and eventually when they're very good rotating spots around the city.
In a city of 8.5 million in the five boroughs alone how could we not make use of our artists more effectively?
For reference, I did not mean unregulated graffiti but, as I mentioned, more along the regulated nature of Five Points NYC which looked like this before it was pointed over a few months ago. [0]
I never said one is better than the other. Although I'd prefer shitty 'tags' with content that may be relevant to someone in 0.0001% of the cases over a shitty squiggle on the wall.
I assumed he was being sarcastic and trying to imply that banning advertising will suddenly make us all communists.
A more serious and relevant example would be São Paulo. They completely banned outdoor advertising and the world didn't fall apart. Seems like they new relaxed the ban enough to allow art.
I was just thinking about this today. My proposal was to replace them with behavioral nudges[0]. Things like "Traveling the speed limit saves X lives and gets you home faster[1]." Basically, they'd be gentle ways of making people more conscious and aware of the road and themselves.
But of course, who gets to pick what the billboards say? And I'm sure nobody would go for it if it were slogans from the State Dept. of Nudges...
Sounds like the BRO (Border Roads Organisation) signs you can see in the Indian Himalayas. These are some of the scariest (and most dangerous) roads in the world, so it's a special sort of relief whenever you come across their subtle life-saving jokes:
The humorous "be careful or you could die" poems are also a feature of some bike events I've done, like the Marin Century. They particularly urge people not to descend mountainous curves faster than they can keep control. Which I guess is exactly what BRO is doing with its signs.
(My assumption being that English is a 2nd language for you...) If you're referring to the "Mr. Late" and "late Mr.", it's a play on words. "Mr." being a male title in English, and the dead are sometimes referred to as "the late Mr. Smith" (why is a lifelong mystery to me). So it's better to be the guy that's late ("Mr. Late") rather than speed down a dangerous road and be dead ("the late Mr. Smith").
Anti-speeding PSA billboards are actually a thing on motorways in most(?) of Europe. Not so much in cities but most people speeding in cities are either driving at much lower speeds or criminally negligent (e.g. illegal street racing) in the first place.
I can't really imagine Tokyo without the billboards. It's too wrapped up in the aesthetic for me. (Not that I think that should override the preferences of whatever people in tokyo want to do.)
Yes... I find the "global movement" label sort of annoying, because it's very much a local issue.
Some places suffer from excessive advertising, other places are energized by it, and the actual contents, presentation, placement, and other details, all of which are intimately tied in with the local culture, matter a great deal as well.
A city like Tokyo would be very, very, different without outdoor advertising, and it's not at all clear that it would be better...
> Some places suffer from excessive advertising, other places are energized by it, and the actual contents, presentation, placement, and other details, all of which are intimately tied in with the local culture, matter a great deal as well.
São Paulo was very much like that. Billboards were all over, some were captivating and cool and there were even innovative moving billboards people talked about. Small businesses got creative with theirs and changed their façades in ways that were immediately recognizable. Brazilians are very connected to advertising, so much so that it seeps its way into popular lexicon and shape colloquial language.
Yet, no one misses them now. No one has asked for them to come back. No one will.
Ads are much less an intrinsic cultural phenomenon than you think. We think they matter to culture simply because they exist, but their absence has no important effect on it.
> Ads are much less an intrinsic cultural phenomenon than you think. We think they matter to culture simply because they exist, but their absence has no important effect on it.
The thing is, though, every culture, every city, is different, and you just don't know what the effect will be until you've done it. Maybe Tokyo and other Asian cities would turn out to be the same as São Paulo, but ... maybe they wouldn't.
Because of this, and because it would be a major change, it's not something you want to do unless there's a lot of local support for it; it's something that needs to be locally driven.
Maybe in São Paulo, there was such support, and in the end things worked out, which is great.
But if nobody actually cares, it would be pretty silly to do it simply because of a "global movement."
I do often see PSA's from, say, the Ad Council, on billboards. I don't really think these should go away, even perhaps if it means living with the obnoxiousness of commercial billboards.
I want billboards. Possibly more than now. However, like in Sao Paulo and France in the article, I would like to have them show arts, culture, interesting information. Not car ads.
I suspect there are more people who sell and use web-ads than billboard ads here.
In fact, I'm bet a few people are wondering when they can all be replaced with giant QR codes, so they can automatically be replaced by something a little more "targeted".
What is better, billboards and a bike scheme, or no billboards? We shouldn't ignore that there are real tradeoffs at stake here (even if they don't involve bikes).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vélib%27
I don't understand. I'm sure there are tradeoffs (as with all things) but what do the bikes have to do with it? Was the Véli program funded by billboards?
In fact, we even get a quantification of the potential 'value' of the billboards (to the advertisers, at least) :
JCDecaux paid the scheme's start-up costs, totalling about $140 million, and employs around 285 people full-time to operate the system and repair the bikes on a ten-year contract. The city receives all revenue from the programme, as well as a fee of about $4.3 million a year. In return, JCDecaux receives exclusive control over 1,628 city-owned billboards; the city receives about half of that advertising space at no charge for public-interest advertising
I grew up in Davis, CA, right dab in the middle of the Central Valley in CA. From a purely visual standpoint, billboard ads along those freeways were far more ugly to me. The ugliness of billboard advertising in cities can at least be mitigated by the visual "white noise" around it, whereas billboards in farmland stick out like a sore thumb.
My city doesn't allow billboards in town. Billboards on the highways are also banned in my half of the county. I really appreciate it. Less visually assaulting and you can appreciate the natural and built beauty better.
I block all ads on my devices, don't watch tv live, etc but I do like outdoor advertising. It's different. All the loathing here is a little surprising.
From guerilla stickers on the bus and posters on construction site fences to entire buildings wrapped, complete with props (like a car hanging from the side) it makes cities look alive. LED signs, especially the larger ones capable of showing graphics, and (my personal favourite) proper, old-school neons make cities look like cities. Billboards cover unfinished structures or designs from architects who should have never been licensed.
Maybe it's all the crappy communist architecture here but even places that evolved more naturally generally gain. Sure, there are some old towns, picturesque villages and so on but that is nowhere near the majority of the space inhabited by people.
In my city, I've only ever seen billboards mounted directly on building walls (there's probably some local law involved but I have no idea what), which means that they're usually covering up a big, drab windowless expanse of brick or concrete. I rather like the result compared to the alternative.
A blank wall is not the only alternative, that space could be used for public art which is much preferable to a visual designed specifically for corporate promulgation.
Depends on the public art: globally, much of that is government propagandizing its subject population (subtly or not) in a way which is no better -- and potentially much worse -- than typical corporate advertising.
Polarized sunglasses sometimes cut out advertisements displayed on screens. http://imgur.com/doze8mP Maybe we can legally enforce all large public ads to be polarized so that those who wish to not see them can put on a pair of glasses.
Sao Paulo banned outdoor advertising a few years ago and most people there thought it was an improvement. Sorry for linking to Buzzfeed but this is the only link I could find with good before-and-after shots: http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/sao-paulo-the-city-with-no-ou...
I don't care about the presence of visual advertising, nor do I think cities would be nicer if it was all replaced with reproductions of Renaissance painting. It's not that I think I'm unaffected by advertising, it's just that I don't think my quality of life is affected by it in the least.
But I do care about (actual) environmental pollution, poor economic opportunities in the inner city, overly militaristic and authoritarian policing, mass government surveillance, and the deteriorating public transit infrastructure.
I can't imagine Tokyo or Taipei without large billboards and other signage draping over whole buildings.
As others have said, I neither miss them nor dislike them. The one thing I will say is that some do cover over otherwise useful windows --which since covered by advertising become useless and wonder how the inhabitants deal with diminished sunlight --but on the other hand you have places like France where you are (were?) taxed on window count on your flat and so people would board them up, so as not to count as "windows".
Hearing that somewhere there's a tax on how many windows a housing has, I was confused and immediately rushed to search more about this weirdness.
Don't know about correctness, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax says France got this until 1926, so it must be somewhat before the age of modern omnipresent advertising.
I lived with a family there over a summer, not sure if they were just telling me stories or not, but my impression from their story is they boarded up some of their windows to avoid taxes. Maybe it was an excuse, i don't know. A nice tale they liked to tell a foreigner.
Interesting. Reminds me of Montreal's external stairs[]; oddly I still haven't found a historically backed (citations, research) account of why it has them.
Billboard i'm mixed on but I like ads on the subways and was disappointed that some subways don't have them. I've found out about all kinds of events and other things going on from ads on Tokyo subways. And I mean inside the trains, not just in the stations.
197 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadThen there are those active ones. Blinking lights, bright to the point of light pollution. I hate those things and they are everywhere now too with more sprouting up all the time.
Count me in for the latter. I'll gladly continue to tolerate the former to get some relief from the active ugly everywhere...
Advertisers never asked before barging obnoxiously into our collective consciousness. We don't need to pre-emptively make concessions.
At a minimum it takes $20 worth of paint and an hour to make a passive billboard less obnoxious. This objection is silly.
My guess is that he more means that they have become entrenched in everyday life and that somehow that will make them harder to get rid of. It's always been this way ...
Can't say the same for the active ones
Within cities, I've seen signs posted on the sides of buildings, presumably with the full permission of the building owner, because the building happened to provide a convenient space visible to a fair bit of roadway. In residential areas, I've seen people post large signs on the sides or roofs of their houses, easily visible to the road. And that leaves aside the numerous small picket or A-frame signs placed in non-highway areas, again on private property: houses for sale, garage sales, lost pets, etc.
As much as I hate advertising, how exactly would you reconcile such a ban with the first amendment in the US?
This is a solved problem; SCOTUS has already ruled on various aspects of this[1].
[1] http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/billboards
There are many times, places and manners available to speak, other than billboards.
This article has a nice explanation about that: http://nsglc.olemiss.edu/SandBar/SandBar5/5.2advertising.htm
Advertisements have long been used as a form of micropayment, to fund first TV shows and now websites, where a monetary payment would be infeasible.
There is no such reason to allow advertising in public property (private property is more complicated, but generally the outward appearance of buildings is considered a public good, and highly regulated). The person viewing the building or billboard is not a party to a transaction, so there is no reason to charge that person a hidden fee for viewing that space. In a way it is the ultimate hidden tax.
First U.S. decides to let nearly 6,000 drug offenders out of federal prison early. [1]
Then I hear CNN (!) was apparently talking about the rise of city-states. [2]
And now this about cities considering or already actively banning billboard ads??
So much sanity and good news in a short time period makes me almost suspicious.
[1] https://news.vice.com/article/the-us-is-going-to-let-nearly-...
[2] https://twitter.com/digitsu/status/653221388249993216
Kind of the same effect if you are used to watching Netflix and then at a relative's house and you see cable TV with commercials every 15 minutes. They probably don't even notice it, but to me it feels strange and annoying to have to put up with it.
After over six months of completely ad-free internet use it came as quite a shock as to how intrusive and distracting mobile advertising actually is.
Once I had it set up again, the relief was palpable, like finally being alone after being shouted at by a roomful of idiots.
So I installed ad blocking to get rid of this issue...
The difference is DRASTIC, not only in performance (it feels like it felt when I switched from dial-up to DSL) but there are no more blinking and flashing stuff anymore, the browser crashes much less (because of badly coded flash ads) and some sites are much better to see the content (example: one of the most popular brazillian newspaper, Folha.com has some flash banner ads that when you mouseover they expand and cover the entire page, the problem it is really easy to unintentionally mouse over them, and then to get rid of them again is really obnoxious)
I've recently taking to switching off Javascript for just this reason. The Chrome extension "Quick Javascript Switcher" does it on a site-by-site basis. No more interstitials, cookie-warning crap, etc.
I don't mind ads when viewing sites on desktop - except for tracking, which I block unconditionally, and autoplay videos - but I can't stand mobile ads.
There's the battery life/bandwith problem, they take up precious screen space, especially popovers and sticky banners, but my real problem is that mobile is a much more personal, close up experience. I don't want things shouting in my face when I'm trying to read.
Publishers need to make money, but the cost of mobile advertising is too high.
When I lived in Sacramento, on the Cap City Freeway there was a highly visible, gaudy billboard advertising liposuction, fat belly and all. I always wondered about that one ... there's no way the funds from renting that space justified the terrible light it cast on Sacramento for visitors passing through, and there must be other bidders. Also it's not as though this is the norm, I can't think of any similarly awful billboards in the Sacramento area, and the Cap City Freeway itself has few billboards.
At 7th and H NW there are three giant electronic billboards that play sound, not to mention the array of billboards plastered all over the Verizon center.
still if they don't require hacking down a trees I have no problem with people using their property this way
But I despise the things, especially if they change what they're displaying (ie movement or flicker). The number of of times that they switched from dark to blindingly-bright almost causing an accident is shocking. I'm surprised that nobody has been seriously injured because of this (that I know of).
The reason people are asking for a ban of billboards is that they impose heavy externalities: they're distracting, ugly, et cetera. Capture those externalities rather than ban them.
Non-commercial speech is much better served by a human standing by the side of the road holding a placard.
I'd replace billboards with graffiti in Portland any day. I can't stand that billboards are plastered all over the place, but one streak of paint on a building left unscrubbed will result in the person owning that building getting fines from the city. I miss the feel of an real urban environment and having real graffiti on walls and over passes.
They're just silver boxes with a tiny US flag as it stands now. They're pretty clean which is nice, they feature advertising although unless a company like Pepsi or Google buys the entire train's advertising and remakes their outsides as well it's generally not particularly intrusive (and to be fair, I found the Fanta train kind of neat).
I'd like to see more art in general although in neighborhoods like Bushwick there is generally a fair amount, and if you keep your eyes peeled there's still quite a fair amount of illicit street art as well. I'm all for it and think there should be a concerted effort to provide and encourage those who'd like to try with places to practice and eventually when they're very good rotating spots around the city.
In a city of 8.5 million in the five boroughs alone how could we not make use of our artists more effectively?
I suspect the ridership would prefer them blank.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_in_New_York_City#Cl...
http://iyftc1oqf704bytwz45ub151.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-c...
http://www.theworldisnotflat.com/files/includes/images/112-2... (at least this one is mildly colorful)
Similar things are scratched on subway windows. It's hard not to wish them gone.
edit: here's an example of an nyc subway car from the 70s https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City...
[0] - http://inhabitat.com/nyc/wp-content/blogs.dir/2/files/2012/0...
"Tags can contain subtle and sometimes cryptic messages, and may incorporate the artist's crew initials or other letters."[1]
Just because you and I don't get it, doesn't mean it's content free.
I'm not defending tagging, I'm just decrying most advertising as being equally bad, or worse.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti#Tagging
A more serious and relevant example would be São Paulo. They completely banned outdoor advertising and the world didn't fall apart. Seems like they new relaxed the ban enough to allow art.
http://www.fastcocreate.com/1681353/advertising-comes-back-t...
But of course, who gets to pick what the billboards say? And I'm sure nobody would go for it if it were slogans from the State Dept. of Nudges...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_(book)
[1] Real data of course. Citations needed.
https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=bro+signs
The humorous "be careful or you could die" poems are also a feature of some bike events I've done, like the Marin Century. They particularly urge people not to descend mountainous curves faster than they can keep control. Which I guess is exactly what BRO is doing with its signs.
Tangent: Mozilla just changed the name of its new brotli feature tag, because the "BRO" abbreviation was deemed sexist.
Some places suffer from excessive advertising, other places are energized by it, and the actual contents, presentation, placement, and other details, all of which are intimately tied in with the local culture, matter a great deal as well.
A city like Tokyo would be very, very, different without outdoor advertising, and it's not at all clear that it would be better...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/snogglethorpe/9503120600
São Paulo was very much like that. Billboards were all over, some were captivating and cool and there were even innovative moving billboards people talked about. Small businesses got creative with theirs and changed their façades in ways that were immediately recognizable. Brazilians are very connected to advertising, so much so that it seeps its way into popular lexicon and shape colloquial language.
Yet, no one misses them now. No one has asked for them to come back. No one will.
Ads are much less an intrinsic cultural phenomenon than you think. We think they matter to culture simply because they exist, but their absence has no important effect on it.
The thing is, though, every culture, every city, is different, and you just don't know what the effect will be until you've done it. Maybe Tokyo and other Asian cities would turn out to be the same as São Paulo, but ... maybe they wouldn't.
Because of this, and because it would be a major change, it's not something you want to do unless there's a lot of local support for it; it's something that needs to be locally driven.
Maybe in São Paulo, there was such support, and in the end things worked out, which is great.
But if nobody actually cares, it would be pretty silly to do it simply because of a "global movement."
In fact, I'm bet a few people are wondering when they can all be replaced with giant QR codes, so they can automatically be replaced by something a little more "targeted".
In fact, we even get a quantification of the potential 'value' of the billboards (to the advertisers, at least) :
JCDecaux paid the scheme's start-up costs, totalling about $140 million, and employs around 285 people full-time to operate the system and repair the bikes on a ten-year contract. The city receives all revenue from the programme, as well as a fee of about $4.3 million a year. In return, JCDecaux receives exclusive control over 1,628 city-owned billboards; the city receives about half of that advertising space at no charge for public-interest advertising
From guerilla stickers on the bus and posters on construction site fences to entire buildings wrapped, complete with props (like a car hanging from the side) it makes cities look alive. LED signs, especially the larger ones capable of showing graphics, and (my personal favourite) proper, old-school neons make cities look like cities. Billboards cover unfinished structures or designs from architects who should have never been licensed.
Maybe it's all the crappy communist architecture here but even places that evolved more naturally generally gain. Sure, there are some old towns, picturesque villages and so on but that is nowhere near the majority of the space inhabited by people.
But I do care about (actual) environmental pollution, poor economic opportunities in the inner city, overly militaristic and authoritarian policing, mass government surveillance, and the deteriorating public transit infrastructure.
As others have said, I neither miss them nor dislike them. The one thing I will say is that some do cover over otherwise useful windows --which since covered by advertising become useless and wonder how the inhabitants deal with diminished sunlight --but on the other hand you have places like France where you are (were?) taxed on window count on your flat and so people would board them up, so as not to count as "windows".
Don't know about correctness, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax says France got this until 1926, so it must be somewhat before the age of modern omnipresent advertising.
[] e.g. https://chicagomontreal.wordpress.com/2007/05/19/les-escalie...