Worked out very well in clearing the city of advertisements or in improving the quality of life of its people because they see less public advertisement?
In Berlin the largest bill board provider (Wall GmbH) also builds public toilets. Thanks to them they are much more plentiful around parks. Forcing them to go out of business would take those with them.
São Paulo is ridden with crime, poverty and homelessness, the traffic is atrocious, the air is terrible, the public transport is built for a city 10% the size and the infrastructure is stuck in the '70s.
Didn't the city come close to running out of water? ... per ChatGPT: "The most notable crisis occurred between 2014 and 2016 when the Cantareira water system, one of the main sources of water for the metropolitan area, reached critically low levels."
Running low on water in São Paulo would be a huge disaster.
Could Berlin not buy the public toilets from the billboard provider and pay to operate them? Why are we relying on an advertising business for public toilets? They’re…public?
Because they're expensive and Berlin doesn't have money. They were also coin operated and thus frequently broken into and out of service because of that. They mostly have contactless pay now, which has disadvantages as well because its less accessible (especially for children and senior people).
Berlin has the disadvantage of historically being an enclave of Western Germany in the communist GDR, very hard/expensive to supply as a result and always at risk of the commies forcibly annexing it. No large (and thus: tax-paying) company wanted to set up its headquarters there for that reason, and additionally as it was an enclave there was no place for industry to set up production facilities.
Nowadays, Berlin has a shit ton of "startups" HQ'd there, but they pay barely any taxes compared to production industry heavyweights.
Berlin’s economy is unique for a major capital. Berlin is one of the weaker states economically in Germany. Mostly an effect of the division when most major industry left towards a place where the Soviet Army is not 5 minutes away and the city might be cut off from supplies at any moment. It’s been getting better but only recently the GDP per capita of Berlin rose above that of Germany overall.
This was radically different before World War 2. In 1938 Berlin made up 10% of GDP (and Germany was bigger back then). Major companies like Lufthansa and Deutsche Bank were headquartered in Berlin. It was the center of the new Electrical industry being home of both Siemens and AEG.
Berlin can afford to have free public toilets when significantly poorer cities can. And yes, not charging for use can actually reduce the overal operating cost more than what you would have gained from the fee.
Well, it could buy them. If they had money left to spend. But Berlin pays for a lot of public services already because it is operated by politicians who cater to the same public that favors removing bill boards. As a result e.g. they just bought all privately operated power plants for billions. They also heavily subsidize public transport tickets because it is popular. And they employ a large public staff in the city‘s administration but still cannot maintain a good quality of service despite all the billions spent (you wait weeks for appointments).
Berlin is a text book example of how turning everything into public goods and spending a lot of tax money is not necessarily in the interest of the citizens IMHO.
Germany actually has an extremely small public sector at 12.9% of all people in the workforce. Compare to neighboring countries like the Czech Republic (15.4%), Poland (23.6%) or Denmark (30.2%).
Are you saying that Berlin is an outlier in Germany, then? My perception (looking from outside) has always been that their public sector is just completely understaffed.
Not that I am saying your argument is wrong, but I'd be wary of comparing such vaguely defined stats across countries. What does and doesn't count as public sector is going to vary wildly and so will how much of publicly funded work is done by direct employees vs. contractors. Statistics can lie as easily as they can give you useful info.
Berlin has a work force of about 2.2 million people. 305k of those work for the public sector. That’s about 13.8% so above Germany’s average. However, it’s not only important how much people work for the government but also how much it pays them. And Berlin pays much better salaries than other eastern German states. 24 years ago salaries in Eastern Berlin were increased to match those payed to western Berlin employees (instead of meeting in between). So for many years the city payed waaay more than its surrounding German member state to its staff. This financial issue is amplified by the fact Berlin now has to pay much higher pensions on average for its retired personnel.
All of Berlin‘s district heating plants provide heat AND electricity. So the government owns a huge share of all electricity producers in this city now, too (about 60 % of the total production capacity).
Whether this constitutes a monopoly is beside the point. Berlin paid 1.4 billions is does not really have (after it sold it 20 years ago when it had even less money and could not sustain a profitable business operation) and which does not solve a problem we really have. And now it will need to invest even more money to future-proof this acquisition.
Places with billboard bans don't ban all ads, if the bathrooms aren't billboards they aren't banned. If the bathrooms are huge billboards next to parks then yeah, you'll have to find other bathrooms and that seems fine.
Exactly: here in Japan, public toilets are all over the place: train stations, public parks, or frequently just random places in the city, on the street. And they're free, of course.
The bathrooms in Japan are crazy to me. Depending on where you are the toilet might be the most luxurious experience your ass has ever had, or sometimes it's a literal hole in the ground and not even toilet paper is provided.
I've never had a problem finding a toilet there when I needed one, but I kept kleenex in my back pocket because I never knew what to expect.
I still prefer the holes in the ground to pay toilets.
You have to go to really rural places to find the squat toilets these days, or maybe some poorly-maintained park. All new bathrooms these days have western-style toilets.
One thing to watch out for, however, is that many bathrooms have no way to dry your hands, even in very nice bathrooms in fancy buildings, so you should bring a small towel with you. Some bathrooms don't even have soap, though this is pretty rare in my experience, but a lack of drying towels or hand dryers is somewhat common.
They generally throw it away in the place where they're opening it. Usually, you don't open stuff up until you get home, and I would hope you have a trash can there.
The big factor for foreigners is that people don't normally eat and drink while walking down the street; it's generally considered rude. If they stop and sit somewhere and eat or drink there, they keep their trash with them instead of throwing it on the ground like many other countries. If you're just getting stuff from a convenience store, you can usually throw stuff in the trash cans there.
Most stuff I've seen doesn't have an absurd amount of disposable packaging, but that is really common with the gift boxes of sweets that are commonly bought at stations and given as gifts. But these you don't normally eat in public.
You dispose of it where you bought it, or you don't open it until you get home, or you act like a good hiker who is out in the wilderness, and pack up your trash to bring home with you where you can properly dispose of it.
I always found it amazing that Japanese cities manage to stay so clean without public trash cans everywhere. It's a reminder that you have to solve the social and cultural problems first: if people think it's ok to throw trash on the ground, it doesn't matter how many public trash cans you have.
It's also useful to remember that the general lack of public trash bins isn't a long-standing part of Japanese culture: it only dates to the 1990s, when public trash bins were used for the infamous Sarin gas attack. After that, most bins in cities were removed. What's cultural is what happened later: the cities didn't turn into trash heaps, because people simply took their trash home or otherwise waited to find a suitable place to dispose of it.
Where "pay" is pretty much just a symbolic amount. Same reasoning why shopping carts often have a 1€ deposit. The price is close to zero but makes a big psychological difference to actually being zero.
Relatedly, offering stuff for free on ebay/craigslist/whatever turns up some incredibly entitled choosing beggars. Offering it for a token amount gives you very different results.
ahahah that's beautiful. So it's all good because they built public toilets? Like when big companies have programs for the disabled, that makes it all good all of a sudden, we forget all about the other stuff? Damn...
You are laughing. But the city of Berlin was not able to provide this service. Spending a day in the park or on the playground with kids and needing a rest room meant either hiding in a bush, going home early or to the next restaurant where you had to pay a fee, usually (bc they provided a rest room to hundreds of people daily).
Yet many other cities are able to provide free public toilets, including ones much much poorer than Berlin. Perhaps it's not really a matter of Berlin not being able to do it themselves.
And I'm sure the mega rich also donate a lot (in absolute terms). That doesn't mean the current levels of wealth inequality are good for society. The term for this is whitewashing bad behavior with good deeds.
No, ads and toilets are separate in Berlin since 2019 [1]. Wall won the contract for the new Toilettenvertrag [2] by the city. The city says now what and where to build. Before that, toilets were only built where it was profitable for a billboard. Now the city can make the toilets even free [3] and the toilets are ad-free.
Not with the attitude! An ad-scrubbing AR filter is certainly thinkable, though probably not actually practical as long as strapping goggles to your face in public is considered the preserve of terminal dorks.
However, if it did happen, the arms race to prevent ad evasion in real life would be interesting. Glass Earth, Inc. by Stephen Baxter is a good short read along the extension of those lines (though the image of a multibillion satellite communications monopoly using a vast fleet of, uh, 67 geosynchronous satellites hasn't dated well!)
Ironically there's an AI filter that's classified you as an ad, and is erasing you from our field of vision as we speak. HN's spam filter is... not a frontier AI, to put it politely. You can email the mods to get your new account whitelisted!
One cool thing I noticed about my polarized sunglasses is that they block most screens at public places. No ClearChannel ads for me while waiting for public transport!
I'm disappointed that nobody's tried to be properly contrary yet. How about this: adverts are a service. If they work properly, they provide information about new products that interest you. If you didn't want to know about the products, the advertisers didn't want to tell you, so really you have the same goals. The only problem is that billboards aren't targeted. Hence we need to replace billboards with more tracking, face recognition, mood recognition, AR glasses, brain implants, and enable people to be constantly surrounded by enjoyable adverts.
Bottom of my list of concerns, whereas at the top is being surveilled and psychologically manipulated on an individual or group level. I am very sensitive about it...
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
When you touch these ads, this will be vandalism and marketing company will dispatch security company on you. Everyone in the ad food chain feels very entitled to litter public space and to violate your attention.
I wonder what Banksy thinks of online advertising, which goes far beyond "taking the piss".
At its best, your personal data is harvested and traded behind your back to tailor ads specifically for your demographic—and increasingly for you personally—and deliver them when you're most vulnerable.
At its worst, it is all of the above, plus used by anyone who wants to influence how you think about political and social issues, ultimately corrupting democratic processes and destabilizing governments. It is the perfect medium for propaganda.
In either case it is the most insidious form of psychological manipulation we've ever invented. I hope that we eventually collectively sober up about the ways this is harming our societies, and heavily regulate, if not outright ban it. The advertising industry has gone far beyond just promoting a product, and it needs to stop.
I would hope all advertising (including online) isn't completely banned. It is useful at times for learning about products. But that's all it should really do: promote products (or services), and stop using psychological manipulation techniques and being such a cancer on society.
50+ years ago, the idea of advertisers harvesting your personal data and trading it behind your back to tailor ads for you was completely alien.
50+ years ago we were being marketed cigarettes as "Torches of Freedom", promoted by doctors and cartoon characters. We rightfully banned these practices in most of the world because of the product they were advertising, but the deception and manipulation have been an industry staple, pioneered by Edward Bernays a century ago. The internet is simply a new tool they can use to make their work more sophisticated than ever before.
It has also made a lot of people very rich, so I doubt that the advertising industry will accept devolving to a state before psychological manipulation became the norm, and sacrifice billions of dollars worth of revenue. Governments are unlikely to regulate it to that point either, given their symbiotic relationship.
This banning of billboards is a good step, but the real problems are online.
There's really no easy black-and-white answer to this problem I think. While advertising cigarettes with cartoon characters to get kids interested is obviously disgusting, or having doctors promote them, advertising has its place. Remember "Computer Shopper", the huge magazine back in the 80s/90s where the ads were really the main reason to buy it? Those ads were how people back then bought computer components, because there was no other way of learning what was for sale from where, and how much it cost. Of course, the internet (which Computer Shopper helped make popular and accessible) put the magazine out of business eventually, but before the internet revolutionized communications (including advertising), ads like those were essential if you wanted to find products that weren't available in your local retail stores, or were only available at inflated prices.
It'd be nice if there was some kind of advertising industry code of ethics, but I can't imagine how this would develop, since the people in today's ad industry are obviously a bunch of con artists and sociopaths who lack any ethical standards at all.
I think consent is key. With "Computer Shopper", we gave our consent by picking-up the magazine and reading it. With Google/Bing/etc, we give it by choosing their search. With streaming, we give it by logging-in and watching whatever garbage they have on offer. But with billboards, subway placards, radios and televisions running in public spaces, etc... there is no consent, so those are more like rape.
I disagree that ads bundled with other services imply consent. The EU got it right with the GDPR that consent is meaningless if it is not freely given, meaning not giving consent must have zero negative consequences. It is too easy to manipulate people to act against their own interest by just dangling a carrot in front of them.
I can learn about products I am interested in by enthusiasts of certain areas, comparison tests, searching the web, friends recommendations, entities that collect news of a specific area, Hackernews and other forums, conferences, events (physical or digital) that are just for companies presenting their products in a certain area.
So I don't need to have unasked ads shoved into my face to get to know products I "need" or desire.
Unlike billboards, a lot of people enjoy Banksy's "products", and consider them art. Also, they are much smaller and less obnoxious, not placed over a highway or on top of a large building.
For some wild reason it's basically only permitted for large companies to deface the public space like this. You go try putting some street art out there while the cops are watching, see what happens.
In addition to that by far most things people would want to put in public spaces isn't explicitly designed to upset you like ads are. Why do we allow companies to plaster public spaces with veiled insults?
Usually buildings have private property owners. They agree to putting a bill board on their wall or they don’t. Graffiti sprayers usually don’t ask for permission — and that’s where the difference comes from.
In Europe you don’t usually have huge bill board on buildings. Rather you have lots of advertising columns on the side walks (here in Berlin we call them „Litfaßsäule“ named after the local inventor Paul Litfaß in 1854). You could argue they being a nuisance for sure but before the internet and even before radio and tv it was an important place of public communication. Actually they were an improvement because prior to advertising columns advertisers were wildly plastering anything with posters.
> Usually buildings have private property owners. They agree to putting a bill board on their wall or they don’t.
And yet if I agree to have someone stand on my property shouting insults at passers-by I'll get a visit from the police soon enough. This issue isn't as black and white as you make it out to be. Just because the owner of the building the billboard is attached to agrees to have it there doesn't mean no one else is affected.
There's already limits to what you can put on a billboard. Banning billboards isn't some radical new category of thing. it's simply moving that threshold down to "you can put nothing on billboards"
Property ownership does not entitle you to do absolutely anything you want. We live in a society of common spaces, and we need not allow people to own property if they do not agree to our social contract.
"The social contract" is a very well defined and explored concept[0]. It's not a literal contract. Being intentionally obtuse about word definitions isn't going to convince anyone of anything.
I'm sure if you commit a crime the Judge will also let you go if you point out that technically you never agreed to the laws of the country you live in.
Sure it's perhaps not companies having special privilege, but I think it's equally awful to give "entities with lots of money" special privileges in the public space. Entities with lots of money are the minority, why should they get to dictate what public space looks like for the majority?
If it came to a honest vote on whether people would like billboards or no billboards I think the result is obvious.
It’s not lots of money. Regular people can afford billboards.
A vote of people liking billboards is completely independent of the “oh, the powerful corporations use them” pearl clutching. I would hate billboards if they were just dominated by individuals using them to promote religious and political ideologies.
The only reason their usage is dominated by businesses is because businesses generate returns off of advertising. They don’t have special privilege and they certainly aren’t out of reach of individuals, clubs, non-profits, etc.
Because other things in public don't manipulate me into thinking a certain way in order to take money from me. People that attempt to do that are labeled as grifters and scammers, and the legal system deals with them. Why should it be different for ads?
Banksy's answer to this would be so simple, I'm baffled you bothered asking.
You wouldn't attack another person for their clothes. Because it's on and belongs to a person.
Banksy wouldn't give a damned if you painted over his art. Because it's not on person and belongs to no person. Same as the ad space and the abandoned building he painted over.
He attacked those who legally contributed negatively to public spaces. No one's car is doing that, and if they were, kids would just scribble "Wash Me!" over it and you would be there clapping, oblivious to this conversation until pointed out.
> He attacked those who legally contributed negatively to public spaces. No one's car is doing that
Are you kidding? Cars are well known for their negative contributions to public spaces, in the forms of (1) exhaust, and (2) noise.
This is part of why I'm baffled that the solution to electric cars not constantly generating terrible noise pollution is to mandate that they all include and operate noisemakers.
I'm sure you can understand that, while incidental, the noise cars make is important for their use in public spaces not being even more of an unacceptable danger and that simply taking the noise away means the car should not be allowed on public roads. If you can make the electric car at least as safe as existing cars for everyone around it then go right ahead and propose it.
Yes, car noise is annoying but the alternative is much much worse. Not so for ads.
> Yes, car noise is annoying but the alternative is much much worse.
No, it isn't. When you solve a problem, the answer is not to panic and legislate that the problem must never be solved. If you have other problems, work on those.
We already have plenty of technology for dealing with roads that are dangerous. In general, we handle them by preventing pedestrians from using or crossing them, and providing over- or underpasses. This is superior in every way to adding noisemakers to cars. But it's not necessarily the best solution! It's just one that (a) we already have, and (b) is better than what you're calling a superior alternative.
The only reason anyone even considers noisemakers is that they're used to cars that make noise. But a history of doing something the wrong way is a terrible reason to avoid doing it the right way.
The alternative to noisemakers is to completely ban electric cars until there are alternatives to improve bystander safety to equivalent levels. In that scenario you will still have the same noise pollution from cars with real non-simulated miniature explosions so electric carse with noise makers are not worse in that respect. If we did not already have noisy cars then yes perhaps electric cars with noise makers would not be allowed but they would also not be allowed without them.
Because my street art, my clothes, my face, and my car aren't trying to psychologically manipulate you into opening your wallet, merely by the fact of their presence.
I would hope that you aren't arguing in such bad faith that you can't see that advertising is another thing entirely.
Yes? This is why we have or at least used to have obscenity laws. To prevent real-life equivalents of internet trolls from shitting up the public space.
Billboards tend to be used by larger companies. I wonder what they do with the newly freed up ad budget. I'm guessing it goes to online ads rather than a reduced ad spend.
They could contribute to society and humanity in general, and find something useful to do. That’s what we all have to do. Society should ask itself why they are exempt from such a duty.
They do contribute to society, and they do useful things. This is evidenced by the fact they are still in business and their customers still give them money.
Now granted they may not benefit -you- directly, they may even make -your- life worse, but -society- as a whole keeps them around.
Personally I'm not a smoker, so cigarette companies (to me) are a net loss. On the other hand enough people see them as a gain so I bow to societies vote.
Not just heroin dealers: contract killers also benefit society according to this logic. They're in business, their customers give them money for a service the customers think is valuable, etc. They may not benefit you directly, and may make your life worse (if you're their target), but bruce thinks they're fine since they do "useful" things and have paying customers!
Contract killing is not analogous to tobacco companies. Both big tobacco and heroin dealers base their business on the exploitation of addiction, and are a nett detractor of societal value in all ways except one: creating shareholder value.
Strangely enough, I do actually think there's a time and a place to kill, but that's not the norm for hired killers.
You're comparing legal to illegal. That's kinda moving the goal posts a bit.
By definition illegal things are things society as a whole have declared impermissible. By contrast cigarettes and advertising are legal, meaning that society has determined them to have value.
Not surprisingly illegal things still happen because there is still demand by some minority for that service. Society as s whole though has decided that the negative effect on others outweighs the positive effect on the few.
Hawaii also has a billboard ban. It was really jarring moving back to Illinois after getting used to not having them. It seems pretty clear that the negative impact of billboards far outweigh the benefits so I'm always hoping more places outlaw them.
Yes travelling can really create a sense of what you have, or lack.
Where I live there are very few billboards. I rarely see them. When I travel (especially to the US) it's very jarring. They are very visually polluting.
There is a ban on billboards in Marin County (on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco).
Legally speaking, billboards are only banned within 500 yards or some other distance from the highway with the most traffic (where billboards would be most valuable, namely, US 101) but actually there are no billboards anywhere in the county and this has been the case since the 1960s (according to an old newspaper article). My guess is that the community has some way to exert "informal" (not based on formal governmental processes) pressure on landlords. Real estate prices are very high here in part because it is a very attractive landscape with plenty of hills and greenery and bodies of water, so maybe most landlords perceive that billboards have the potential to depress prices and keep the occasional landlord who contemplates erecting billboards in line somehow.
Also as an exception to the general rule, bus shelters (structures owned and maintained by the city or the county to keep the rain and the sun off people waiting for a bus) near US 101 have ads on them (4' by 6' or so) and the buses themselves do, too, or at least they used to--it's been a few years since I noticed.
When I was a kid, I lived on lake which was connected to Lake Ontario.
One summer a job was across the our small lake, a 40 minute drive by car, but maybe 10 minutes by boat as the crow flies. Sure, I got wet during rain and wavy days, but clothes get dry, and it sure was convenient.
I often wondered, if the job was in SF itself, do people take boats to get to work? If so, why not? I presume docking costs? The place I worked had their own dock, so ... "sure, just tie up over there every day".
When I was a kid in Miami, I read about people commuting to work by jet ski. This was before they replaced the Rickenbacker Causeway drawbridge with the William Powell Bridge, and the commute from Key Biscayne into Miami could be delayed and backed up, as boats had the right-of-way.
I had a friend who lived in New Jersey in a water front property - he used to ride a jetski over to New York to stop for a drink at a bar in a marina. The issue was you had to pay marina fees to be allowed to dock there, so while it was fun it was actually a pretty pricey way to get to NY (and you'd be wearing damp clothes) - but he still thought it was a lot of fun.
He was OK but apparently the was a lot of boat theft in that area too.
There are people who live waaaaay out there and commute to their Silicon Valley job via a light airplane like a Cessna, quarterly, monthly, weekly, probably even daily. "Commutes, uh... find a way"
I knew one of those too. I consulted for a company across the street from the Palo Alto general aviation airport. The doc/pubs manager lived some place north of Sonoma. She would fly in, walk across the street, and go to work.
At another job, the project manager lived in WA but worked in Palo Alto. He flew (commercial) in early Monday, with a small apartment to live in during the week, then take off mid-afternoon Friday to be back in WA with his family for the weekend.
And resort/premium retirement areas like Aspen. I'd also argue that although jobs helped create a lot of the "elite" cities, once they were created, there's a fair bit to keep people in their orbit if not in the city proper even if employment opportunities become less of a consideration.
At least one billboard, along 101 at the highway cut between San Rafael and Larkspur, survived until the late 1970s or early 1980s, but was burned down in what has been described as the closest an act of arson has come to earning an award of commendation by the Marin County Board of Supervisors.
More recently, a "flower billboard" was created, and in 2010 removed, along US-101 in Novato:
I got stopped at a roadblock even before LED's, the highway patrol officer said "I wasn't sure you were going to stop, you nearly ran over [X] over there" and my reply was, "Your lights are so bright, and blue, and right here on the road, that I can't see a thing. I'm glad I didn't."
The benefits of billboards are a zero sum game, it's absurdly easy for the benefits of a ban to outweigh them.
Here in Germany regulation of outside ads has zero novelty value, it's so much a given that I don't know anything about the history of it. And it turns out the benefits of a ban are much bigger than just more pleasant views, because the ad spend does not simply disappear. Much of it gets channeled into event sponsoring, sports clubs and the like, in short things that actually improve life for all instead of just providing some more passive income for property owners. It's a total no-brainer if there ever was one.
This pretty much mirrors my experience: I live in Washington, and when I drive down the freeway, I see nothing but trees and mountains. When I go back to Minnesota to visit family, I'm bombarded with billboards -- often political or religious content. I don't miss that at all.
Various localities have similar bans. I'm aware of at least one with strict signage controls, shopping centers generally have an directory near the entrance(s) and that's about it other than the signage on the stores themselves.
Not entirely, but it impose some very important limits on any signs near highways, such as requiring them to be advertising something that's available from the same property under them.
That effectively blocks the most spammy and egregious forests of signs, because one can't just purchase a small rectangle of near-highway grass and start auctioning space above it to a large shifting pool of national bidders.
Don’t drive I-5 by Fife much, eh? Okay, you did say “usually”.
Redmond has an outright ban on billboards. That’s how I know where the Redmond/Kirkland border is (there’s a billboard on 124th St.) Now if they if they’d just follow King County on those fucking political signs. (King County says “not on public right-of-ways”, Redmond says “where ever you see a patch of grass”.)
It used to be true that near the FL/GA border you'd see billboards advertising "TOPLESS DANCERS" for 50 miles on either side of the fine establishment buying these billboards. The sheer number of them was almost a parody of billboards in a way.
One of the nice side effects of hosting the Olympics was the ban on new advertising billboards in the downtown core of Atlanta. There are a few old signs that were grandfathered in but it's close to impossible to get new billboards added. One of the nice side effects of having a tornado rip through downtown a decade later was that it destroyed some of the grandfathered in billboards which the city did not allow to be replaced despite crying from the billboard companies.
To prevent "ambush marketing", the IOC demands control over advertising in the area around the games. Given what a big deal it was for a city like Atlanta to get to host the games, this was one of the few times when the public was going to win despite the money and influence of the advertising industry. To its credit, Atlanta has mostly stuck by those Olympic era billboard laws. The biggest exception probably is the huge video board next to the Ernst & Young building but it replaced a much more modest video sign that had already been there.
Being a large city, Atlanta has the resources to fight court challenges against the well funded advertising industry. Several of the suburban and exurban communities I lived in had citizens and governments united in their hatred of billboards but they lacked the resources to prevent them as the billboard companies have lots of experience with bleeding local governments dry in court, sending a message to other local governments to not even bother trying to oppose them. Big cities however can do better... if they wish to.
Los Angeles, you have an opportunity in 2028. Will you take advantage of it like Atlanta did?
My old office was decorated with a picture of an art installation which was a house painted entirely white, even the palm trees. Someplace east LA. But in front there was a bus with a huge Marvel whatever advert pasted on the side passing by.
> He wormed his way over to the left-hand, high-speed lane and opened up. At the edge of the skyscraper district, where Wright Skyway angles sharply downward to ground level, Samms' attention was caught and held by something off to his right—a blue-white, whistling something that hurtled upward into the air. As it ascended it slowed down: its monotone shriek became lower and lower in pitch; its light went down through the spectrum toward the red. Finally it exploded, with an earth-shaking crash; but the lightning-like flash of the detonation, instead of vanishing almost instantaneously, settled itself upon a low-hanging artificial cloud and became a picture and four words—two bearded faces and "SMITH BROS. COUGH DROPS"!
> "Well, I'll be damned!" Samms spoke aloud, chagrined at having been compelled to listen to and to look at an advertisement. "I thought I had seen everything, but that is really new!"
I agree, but it's also pretty funny how so many of them have this tiny techie audience and 99% of the people driving past will just be like "wtf is that about, what are all those acronyms?"
Companies are still waiting for augmented reality to become a thing so that they can correct this problem and place ads on every available surface within your field of view no matter where you are.
That would require brain implants or implanted lenses or some such, and no one would ever leave that platform open enough to be constantly tracked, and constantly barraged by it. Who would do that to themselves?!
And really, for it to be all encompassing, you'd need everyone to have to use such systems, such as forcing everyone to have such devices to log in to services, or even order food, or pay for things, and no one would force people to have a device to even pay for things, or eat.. I.. um, oh right, smartphones.
(I firmly suspect that within 25 years not only will brain implants -> visual cortex happen, but that if you don't have one you won't be able to work effectively, you won't be able to identify yourself effectively, and you probably won't even be able to pay for things)
mcmcmc: Nowhere did the GP state that AR would be inescapable. Yes, I know. I stated it. See above?
My whole point revolves around the fact that I believe, just as with smartphones, that people will be severely hampered without said tech. That it will effectively be a requirement to have such tech. Statements such as "But you can just...", fail to realise just how much is dependent upon it. In many respects there are NO workarounds without a smartphone, there are jobs that require you to own one, there are tasks/things you do in life that absolutely require it, and if you don't have one?
Often you cannot find a work around, or the work around is literally a monumental task, thus people simply capitulate.
This is what brain implants and AR will be like in 25+ years.
Nowhere did the GP state that AR would be inescapable, just that ads would be inescapable in AR. I’d imagine high tech contact lenses would be a preferable approach to a seamless interface for most people who aren’t born with this stuff already at mass adoption.
Enough people that it eventually becomes unavoidable for the rest. See: all the other horrors of modern civilization that you cannot avoid without becoming a hermit.
One of the many reasons AR will probably never go anywhere. It has some pretty neat applications, but then a ton of horribly dystopic ways to monetize it. And greed all but guarantees that the latter will drown out the former. Kind of like what happened to VR where anti-competitive exclusivity deals, profit motivated pricing (as opposed to a loss leader market to drive adoption) and all this other sort of nonsense went a long way towards killing the ecosystem before it even got off the ground. It was a like bait and switch, but they forgot the bait.
Really? Seems like ad funded “free” tech products have been the most successful in gaining wide adoption. I’d argue the opportunity for greed in AR makes it more likely to go lots of places, although we may not like them in the long run.
My argument would be that we don't really know which tech products would be successful, because any attempt to create a better product is immediately crushed by a "free" ad supported alternative.
The ad model yields worse product and are actively killing off any attempt to improve, because the majority of people don't understand the downside of financing products using ads, rather than direct payment.
The ad funded model is only successful if you view the world solely in terms of profit. I think Windows is a good example, the product doesn't improve when Microsoft loads the install up with ads and telemetry, but it is more profitable, and therefor more successful, if you're a stockholder.
> There are far more clever and profitable ways to monetize MR than to shove ads in your face wherever you look.
There are, but the problem with ads (and surveillance) is, they're purely additive on the margin. Any of the clever and profitable thing you do to monetize MR, you can get a bit more money if you also put in ads. Then the competition puts more ads. Rinse repeat, eventually ads overwhelm the experience - but not before you make bank.
That's the cancerous nature of advertising. It metastasizes to every new medium, feeds on it, and ultimately consumes it.
Once the tech is worth it we'll have uBlock, Ad Nauseum, and eventually Vanced apps. I'll help friends and family, but sadly have learned my lesson about helping the general public utilize such things.
I don’t really watch sports, but whenever I catch sight of a football game on TV, I’m amazed at how colorful and vibrant on field ads are, almost as if they were computer graphic generated or something.
In soccer they actual are. the ads are injected to the sideboards beside the playing field, so that if you watch the same game on different channels, they have different ads depending on their avg viewers.
I watch a lot of football, I watched >90% of games at the Euros on UK TV, I've never seen a pitchside advert on TV that wasn't showing the same as what you would see if you were sat in the stadium.
I don't watch football, but in hockey they project digital ads onto the ice and parts of the plexiglass around the rink during the broadcasts that aren't there IRL. They are often vibrant and look out of place, it's quite possible that's what you were seeing.
They have on their websites some neat examples. For example Supponor literally replaces the ads in the live stream (see the hockey example on their front page).
Not sure if it's the same two companies, but you can find an impressive result video here:
I imagine it's just a matter of time. Sponsor block for removing sections of ads embedded in videos is already a thing. Making the blocking spatial instead of just temporal is not far removed.
You should checkout F1. they now have e-ink on the side of the cars and the ads are dynamic and catch your eye. I would be curious to find out if it's some exotic type of e-ink tech they use to keep it lightweight (as in .. as light as a decal or paint)
Do you have a link ? I was not aware of that, the only thing I can find is that McLaren ran some tests to replace in-cockpit ads with a small eink screen, but nothing on the side of the cars.
also to clarify, I just called it "e-ink" because I didn't know what it was, it just looked like e-ink based on how it seems to change (flicker and then transition to new image). I have no idea what it is :D
They are typically superimposed yes. It's extraordinarily easy with football, the field is essentially a premade green screen with completely standardized index points (the yard markers). What's funny is what happens when it starts snowing on the field, which is not rare with the NFL's schedule.
I want the opposite. Someone needs to make AR glasses that selectively look for ads and remove them in real time. I would pay $$$ for such a feature. It doesn't even seem impossible with current technology either. Image recognition has gotten really good.
it is very likely that this ban might be prevented by lobbying, as one of the main providers (even visible on the picture in the article) is, let's say "well connected" to our legislative
The city of Cracow in Poland banned billboards (and other visual advertising quite aggressively) about 2 years ago. Great outcomes. There are still some workarounds that companies do to put this s..t out in the public (e.g. covers of renovation works can contain up to 50% of advertising area, so we have renovations of just finished buildings only to put the covers with ads).
Now, when I visit another city when there's no such ban I cannot stand this visual garbage.
This should be banned everywhere.
A true classic. It looked extra cheesy when he advertised for Huawei.
The man is a sellout and it has a kind of charm, because he knows his place: He is a just football player on the verge of retirement and he wants to squeeze the juice for the last drop.
I remember his silhouette of size of entire building printed on scaffolding covering entire facade of a multi-storey building and advertising Huawei. Now Iga Świątek is slowly taking over, recently she popped out in payment terminal when I was trying to touch in the debit card. Get the fuck off, greedy girl. Please don't force me to watch you bloody face.
On my visits to Warsaw, I have always been struck by the translucent advertising entirely covering the sides of new-ish office buildings. Now I know how/why this is possible.
Example (hard to find because no-one takes photos of the ugly buildings in Warsaw):
It's corruption. On paper it's probably construction or renovation and there is some fraudulent deal between inspection department in city hall and marketing agency. Fuck you, Coca Cola.
Really? I thought the old area along the west bank of the Vistula was nice. I didn't see much of the rest of the city, but most cities are uninspiring outside of their central areas.
Nah Detroit has some beautiful architecture and really surprised me when I visited last year. Also being on a river and next to a lake is a nice feature. I've been to plenty of more depressing places in the US
Mostly any ex-steel based industry town in the rust belt except Detroit, only because it has been the focus of overt development to directly impact its image as a wasteland. Not sure what took its place.
In Bucharest in the last years the mayors fought back quite successfully against those all-covering billboards. However enjoy it while it lasts - we just had local elections and the old mafia got back in office, so I bet the billboards will be back very soon (and cables hanging off every pole and expensive concrete wastelands and and and).
There put scaffold up just to hang advertising?!? That is so incredibly expensive, how can it be worth it? I had recently some shutters installed at my home (second floor) and the most expensive part was the scaffold…
Moreover, if it's the _only_ advertising opportunity in the space, it's nominally higher value than it would be in a city with a large billboard presence.
And now only rich corporations have the money to show off their big signs.
Lots of smaller companies had to hide theirs, but ones like IKEA or MAKRO
did manage to evade it, and will probably continue to evade it happily. Also
some billboards are now empty, and are still covering up the tree line, because nobody wants to spend another cent giving the amount of money everyone had to pay up for this.
I've actually moved out from Cracow shortly after this legislation, not directly because of it, but this surely contributed to the decision. The direction Cracow is heading to is clear -- you will have nothing and you'll be happy.
Not sure why this is greyed out, every point is true.
There was even a situation a few weeks ago where a guy went to the office with an axe and attacked someone. The guy wasn't even a football hooligan I think.
I don't care about your political shenanigans pis/po/twojastara/whatever. Oligarchs do in Poland whatever they want while poor Polish idiots only think about buying another 25 sqm apartment and a newer German car.
40 of potatoes, duh.
The escapades of Wisła/Cracovia baboons are not normal. As long as anyone is randomly asked "which team do you support" the football is to be eliminated from the city.
> The escapades of Wisła/Cracovia baboons are not normal. As long as anyone is randomly asked "which team do you support" the football is to be eliminated from the city.
#2 was hostility to private car transport (neglection of road infrastructure, introduction of car-free zones will surely happen soon). Traffic jams are the default state of things, and it's a waste of life.
#3 is that it's a tourist city; a good place to visit, pay money and go home. Not a good place for me to live every day (I've lived there for 15 years, and if you're a happy citizen then good for you). Most of the people here are not from Cracow itself. Warsaw suffers from the same problem.
Polish society mentally is at the stage where car is the status symbol and part of their identity. Amplified by the fact that they're historically unable to construct their own car. Nobody is giving up their Mercedes/Volvo/BMW/Audi in a lease 1k EUR per month to walk around or drive bicycle around the city. Especially that employment regulations promote taking a lease for a car and having company's car is the ultimate benefit. Plus the obnoxious trend of huge SUVs and American-style pickups. People move out to the outskirts, buy more cars and bigger cars and then... they commute daily to the city.
As a non pole living in Poland I think you are being unfair. The car mentality is not new, nor is it evil by itself. On the contrary it is supported by the reality that inner-cities are unbearably expensive and people need to live in the suburbs just like in the US. It is no irony that the same phenomenae has similar consequences. It is not people who are bad or stupid, on the contrary.
In Wroclaw they added hundreds of KM of bike lanes....crisscrossing normal roads. I would like to take my children by bike to their kindergarten but I dont want me or them to die.
So indeed i take my car, which i regret not being a damn fat SUV because i cannot damn stand being shaken out of my bones anymore. The roads are the German coblestone type and they are not crap because of the potholes. That is already a taken, no. The whole roads have severe long period troughs and hills that together with the pot holes make the experience a nightmare. Sprinkle that with tramlines, activated or not and I am currently considering moving out. The trams and buses work well but politicians and well meaning people often forget you need the car for things like the supermarket? I have a family of several so i cannot just take the tram or by bike for groceries. Oh my, i need a car. The sin, we are all "patola"[1] :).
And this is not just in the city proper, the surroundings' roads are awful as well. I just damaged my rim and tire driving on a normal road 40Km/h while doing this gas guzzling hobby of taking my children to a local forest.
I am a bit upset writing this because all these people in power in Europe dont have traditional families and exist in their own heaven on earth where they are independent in a very pure state. When i was 20 or if I would be a single I would get it, but with a family, please take your silly ideals elsewhere(this is for the mayor Jacek Sutryk who is unironically a bachelor).
Portugal is a bit better in that the left leaning well-doers preach but people are too real to let things get ridiculous. The talking heads sometimes fantasize about bikes everywhere but then the cities are hilly and old so it is unfeasible to add bike lanes.
[1] Patola is a derrogative name from pathological [family]. It is used to insinuate you come from a dysfunctional, often alcoholic family. Very common insult in Poland which I am fascinated about. I wonder if this insult exists in other Slavic countries.
I don't understand how you ended up and why would you live in Wrocław. I ended up there one winter when the city was notoriously in media for having among the worst air in the country and evacuated after trial period. The ruling "elite" is an awful corrupted clique holding multiple public offices each, police regularly beats random people to death. Exclusively outsourcing and nearshoring jobs with miserable salaries, with established cliques in every workplace. The real estate prices skyrocketed yet thousands of "poor" Ukrainians and people from Causasus somehow can afford living there.
> On the contrary it is supported by the reality that inner-cities are unbearably expensive and people need to live in the suburbs just like in the US.
Noone is forcing people into suburbs (which are awful in itself) but people feel the need to have detached house with garden (as a status, just like car…)
> Noone is forcing people into suburbs (which are awful in itself) but people feel the need to have detached house with garden (as a status, just like car…)
Sure. How dare people not afford 1.2 million PLN( 304k$) so that 4 people (2 adults + 2 children) can live in a 80 sqm apartment[1].
The theme in these answers are very common, the majority of people wanting comfort are wasteful and vain. I guess back in the day of Gierek's(communist times) buildings were the right fit.
Yes, because thanks to dumb housing market becoming "investors eldorado" instead of doing more dense residential building that doesn't require creating "subursbs" and dumb urban sprawl.
You are aware that it's possible to create relative big departments in such scheme, right?
Yes and I recommend you Wrocław city museum for a showcase of beautifully thought out plans that never went anywhere even when Wrocław was Breslau. It is the reason I was touched by such a mundane topic that I would not otherwise be interested in.
One of the reasons such plans did not go ahead is that it required a state that can expropriate left and right and amounts of capital not available to localities, even in cities like Wrocław.
Those kind of grand plans only work if there is a national drive that imposes it, or most likely after a war. This is true in Poland Portugal or anywhere developed and desirable.
Introducing car free zones before public transit is good enough to replace cars is such a strange move.
A friend of mine lives in a car free zone but public transit stops at 23:00. He is just supposed to stay inside his home at night I guess. No parties for him.
That's what taxis/ubers are for. It's not economically viable in every City to have public transport running empty all night just for a few people who like to party yet live far away from the party scene.
It's not really economically viable to take a taxi to your night-shift warehouse job. That is around 70% of your daily wage going towards transportation.
How many people are doing nightshifts as part of the total employed population who mostly do day shifts?
Unfortunately the same economies of scale apply to them as well. You can't have city wide public transport run 24/7 because a very small amount of the workforce works during the night.
And night shifts tend to be set in order to overlap with public transport schedules (10pm-6am) so that's not such a big problem.
Technically everything is possible, you can even fly people to commute to the space station, the questions is why some places consider night routes to be economically viable and some not, but that doesn't change the fact that public transportation night routes are a loss maker for the company.
I guess it depends on how much the local government is willing to subsidize public transport, since otherwise daily price tickets will have to go up for all travelers to subsidize the few night travelers.
Here in Austria we also don't have night routes during the week in cities that are not Vienna even if some people still need to travel during the night, but the transport companies can't run at a loss, so it's either the state pays for it(via higher taxes for everyone) or the day travelers will pay more for it, there's no free lunch here, someone still needs to pay for the unprofitable night service which is a loss maker. How Santa Monia does it I don't know but it doesn't change the fact the night services are loss makers everywhere and public transportation in general is only profitable at massive scale often relying on public subsidies to stay afloat even in the US.
Also public transportation costs are not apples to apples comparable between countries. Maybe it works in the Santa Monica, since fuel is dirt cheap or maybe they subsidize a lot and maybe they can pay bus drivers peanuts or something I don't know, but here in Austria running public transport is very expensive (unions, pensions, strict work hours, great workers benefits, infrastructure, maintenance, running costs, etc), especially in cities other than Vienna, so the routes are pretty shit and night routes non existent in order to not loose money, so most people rely on private cars or taxis for commutes out of hours. Improving that would come at increased costs and ticket prices are already maxed out and so are taxes.
I was conducting 4 years ago a polling survey for a political party in Oslo nocking on doors and asking people opinion of recent or planned changes in the city. I was surprised how many car owners supported bans on parking on the streets and making bicycle lines instead. It decreased traffic jams.
Basically, people started to park in big parking garages with good connections to main roads. Surely it required more time to walk. But then one spends much less time finding a place to park. And traffic from/to small roads were a significant contribution to jams.
It's funny seeing the behavioral differences in communally oriented societies vs idiosyncratic societies. This kind of proposal would never work in USA or India, but I could see it work in Japan and Korea.
> #2 was hostility to private car transport (neglection of road infrastructure, introduction of car-free zones will surely happen soon). Traffic jams are the default state of things, and it's a waste of life.
So you want more cars and at the same you moan about traffic? o_O
If you claim that traffic jams are was of life then even more you should be anti-cars...
If you want to book a visit through NFZ and you can't, because there are too many people wanting in queue, do you want to eliminate people so the queues are smaller? No? But why? You should be anti-people so that the queues are smaller!
Man, Kraków is very car centric by any reasonable measure. There are huge multilane roads cutting through the city in all directions. There is zero enforcement on speed and pollution limits. It's very dangerous to move around if you're not inside a car.
Cars are just too space inefficient as inner city transportation. Traffic jams are the result of car centric choices incentivizing everyone to drive not the other way around.
It is sad to see the correct reply grayed out.
This kind of regulation is known to breed corruption & abuse, tilting the field heavily towards the highest spenders. Can only be enacted when ideology trumps well established knowledge & experience.
Zürich resident here. In this specific case the abuse is even pretty openly stated :(
> The Supreme Court’s ruling cements a decision to remove more than three-fourths of its once-standing 172 billboards from the town, keeping the remainder available for culture and sports ads.
By "culture and sports ads" they surely mean adverts by the government for its own subsidized services. Local government is a huge spender on billboard advertising around here, often for its own state run sports or events (invariably stuff that's popular with lefty civil service types like obscure dance performances).
Lately they also love to paint trains and trams in garish colors, in an open advert for diversity ideology:
Die Farben und Formen des neuen visuellen Auftritts widerspiegeln die Buntheit und Diversität des gesamten ZVV-Netzes.
... and they don't seem to have a problem either with all the posters that get glued everywhere advertising May Day, Feminists for Anarchism and so on.
The idea cantonal governments have a problem with "visual pollution" is kind of absurd, really. If that's actually the motivation then step one would be to stop buying billboard space with taxpayer money, stop flooding the city with rainbows, clean up all the pro-Gaza graffiti and go entirely without any of that for a few years. Once they've proven they have the discipline to clean up the sort of visual pollution they themselves tend to like, then they might have a moral leg to stand on for banning other forms of advertising.
I love the idea of acoustic and visual hygiene, fighting the acoustic and visual pollution. The flaw is in human nature and the attitude "but _we_ are allowed, _our_ case is different". If the enforcers will be local authorities, they will be unable to resist displaying out their message. If there is at least one CHF and one person in the promotion and marketing department, the idea will pop out. Hey look at the bright side, at least they didn't cover the tram's windows!
> Hey look at the bright side, at least they didn't cover the tram's windows!
They did though, if only partially. While the parts overlapping the windows are not 100% opaque, in my experience such ads do significantly worsen the viewing view from inside the vehicles.
You might not be recognizing them as state adverts, because Switzerland has the largest amount of government advertising of any place I've ever been. By far. If you can't see that you're either unfamiliar with other places or not recognizing the ads as coming from the state. Recall that the definition of the state also includes government-owned companies like SBB, ZVV, EWZ, ZKB. Adverts by any of these companies is an advert by the state. That's a generously narrow definition: it's not including advertising for parties or referendum positions, which saturate billboards any time there's an upcoming vote, nor advertising by state subsidized industries like farming.
Here are some examples.
Walk down to Bellevue. Start to walk along the lake to the China Garden. You will walk past some of the most prime advertising real estate in the city. There are several billboard signs in a row right at the top corner of the lake. Highest footfall of anywhere in the city outside of Bahnhofstrasse itself. When I did this yesterday every single ad was by government, for government. For example, one of them is currently advertising the government-run Native American Museum:
Walk down the lake and you'll encounter more such billboards, all showing government ads. In fact I don't think I've ever seen a non-state advert on any of these places.
Go to a Filmfluss event. It starts with 10 minutes of ads. On Saturday when I went to a showing with my wife, I counted and around half of the ads were by the state. Amongst others: multiple recruiting ads for the Stadtpolizei, ads for ZKB, multiple ads for EWZ, ads for state-funded cultural events etc.
Get on the train or tram. Look at the billboards inside the carriage. Many of them will be ads for the SBB's own services or offers, or recruiting ads for drivers (especially popular at the moment), or the Gemeinsam Vorwarts campaign. These are all state advertising.
If you see all this and really think it's very little then I don't know what to say. Go spend some time in other places of comparable size and pay close attention to how many ads are by the state or state owned companies. It will be lower.
GP has several examples of the government itself contributing to visual pollution. Including for purposes that don't match the interests of many citizens.
I don't thinkg this should mean that ads can't be banned but the government should absolutely be called out for planning to continue its own ads.
Except that vast majority of Zurich is covered by commercial ads and they're massively visually distracting in a way the "government ads" they're trying to call out aren't.
I really dislike ads and I use adblock & umatrix like crazy. But:
1) Ads in cities are not penis enlargement ads nor mortgage ads. They are about what services are in which location in the city,
2) It's not really about ads, but about advertising in general, meaning you don't even get to show off the logo of your company. If there's a building standing in Cracow, it can't have any logos on it. Unless the company is rich, then it may have their logos. Good thing that Cracow in general doesn't have any tall buildings (well, just one).
For me it's socialism at its finest. Forbid the poor, allow the rich. From ideological stance I prefer seeing ads, because I dislike socialism more than I dislike ads.
> 1) Ads in cities are not penis enlargement ads nor mortgage ads. They are about what services are in which location in the city,
Not the case anywhere I have been. Some will be for local businesses, most are for national or international behemoths. Pretty much the same as with ondline ads on so-called respectable sites.
When travelling through Poland then the contrast of visual pollution by billboards and other advertisements has been very big, between for example Estonia, Latvia, the nordic countries and Poland.
In Poland basically everything is covered in huge adveretisements, "Kantor" here and there, car repair shops, etc. On bus stops all the walls are covered in them and there is even something on top of it, facing the road.
Drinving there is tiring, the brain just gets tired from it.
>We think its part of slavic culture or something.
It isn't. It's the same, or worse, in Romania.
It's just rabid unregulated capitalism of the post communist countries, gone wild, where everything is about making as much money as possible any way you can, which means advertising everywhere so you can influence people to spend their money with you. Romania is now IRL what the internet looks like without ad block.
The ads for gambling and betting are the most nefarious, to the point it's becoming a societal issue.
I have no idea about them, a lot of people think they're fronts for money laundering. Alternatively, dunno... I guess gamblers are also addicts of sorts? Plus I imagine they drink, abuse their bodies so they need regular medication?
> Driving there is tiring, the brain just gets tired from it.
I moved away from Poland a decade ago, and each time I come back I get distracted like crazy as a passenger in a car. My brain doesn't know what's happening for the first hour until I realize what's up.
Literally every 50m there's a billboard on a road, billboard on someone's house, billboard on a fence. From big companies (telcos etc.) through all kinds of local businesses ("Selling X", "buying Y", "repairing Z").
Up here in Lithuania we used to make fun of your billboards 20 years ago. But now it's getting worse and worse here too. While you seem to have rebounded from the lowest point.
This is so wonderful. One instantly goes from feeling like a consumption robot to feeling human, just from looking at the pics. I wish this was everywhere.
> (e.g. covers of renovation works can contain up to 50% of advertising area, so we have renovations of just finished buildings only to put the covers with ads).
Actually finetuning the policies and regulations may provide the right incentive to both promote regular upkeep of buildings as well as funding them. Example: Ads over scaffold are only allowed every 5 years during renovations.
Mixed blessing of the coming AR (augmented reality) adscape is that virtual ads projected into our eyeballs will be cheaper and more targeted/effective than meatspace billboards.
AR “metaverse” stuff did not take off on the last hype cycle, and even Apple's VR headset does not sell. If AR is “coming,” it is coming rather slowly.
AR is "coming" in the same way smartphones were coming for years (decades?). Then iPhone happened and the rest is history. Technology needs to reach a level where it becomes obviously useful (for AR - low weight, cool form, not tiring,...)
Exactly I already pay for my fare and the government is already heavily subsidizing the transport company using my taxes but somehow I still need to pay with my attention? Fuck that.
I have always wondered how a world without marketing would look. I think marketing has a net negative effect. I also think that maybe you cannot eliminate all marketing but you can easily eliminate most of it just by controlling the spending of big companies, so it's possible. I have no ethical problems with eliminating it, as I consider it a form of manipulation and falsehood spreading, and anyway I don't consider companies have a right to free speech, or any real rights for that matter.
I kind of wonder how far you want to go with these sorts of things.
Would controlling things like this bleed into adjacent social controls, like how HOAs will prevent any house from looking too different? Or possibly take on other dimensions, like sponsored in-real-life product placement and word-of-mouth?
Regular people living their lives like to make arbitrary changes to their houses, which is why HOA rules are contentious.
Regular people aren’t paid to advertise as they go about their day. It’s not very comparable.
And I’ve never heard anyone suggest that word of mouth recommendations should be banned... That’s kind of an insane idea that isn’t even remotely possible.
> I have always wondered how a world without marketing would look.
We would all be standing there at the entrance of the supermarket exchanging awkward looks not knowing what to do until an old lady shows up and we grab a cart because she did. Then we follow her around the store pretending not to be looking, buying the same products. When everyone has paid and the old lady is long gone we have conversations about what to do with the things we've just purchased.
Oh man, I thought it was completely obvious what marketing is.
It takes effort to bridge the gap between users and manufacturers. We are used to the company doing the work and picking up the bill but the customer has as much need to figure out what solutions are available.
Having the company search the customer only barely works. It works but very poorly and only to some extend. The potential client feels bothered by the noise of endless offers and spends very little time on them. In stead of dangling your garden set in their face until one of them bites you can put it in a store next to the other garden sets.
Because pushing barely work products are limited to that what is instantly obvious.
Customers may also gather and inform themselves. They might willingly go to a conference and sit though lengthy presentations. In stead of screaming at you that I offer an email service a presentation is more about what sets it apart [say] its scripting interface.
If stores and conferences are still considered marketing the customer will have to put in more work to stay informed. They would tend more towards objective side by side comparison making the company more about the product than about marketing.
The pun of my joke was that customers are not stupid. They can find the breakfast cereal aisle and pick something entirely by themselves.
I thought it was obvious since the screaming contest is enormously frustrating. An overpriced mediocre product will allow for the largest budget which is most likely to win - so that is what you have to make? lame
A lot of marketing is not falsehood spreading. It’s literally just trying to get the word to potential customers that a thing exists that might be useful to them. Most b2b marketing is like that.
I agree that marketing where they have an attractive person just show something is manipulative though.
One of the sponsored results is for an electric skid steer that I didn’t know existed. This is genuinely useful to know for small jobs.
Another sponsored result is for a delivery rental service that can bring them anywhere. Also good to know for jobs where I don’t want to go to an equipment rental place in the city to haul it myself to a site 150 miles away.
A separate example is that lots of airports have 3rd party off airport parking that is cheaper. A billboard on the highway to the airport that says “off-site aport parking $20/day, $80/week with 24/7 shuttle service every 15 mins” is literally all just useful information about a way to save money using a third party at a convenience cost that you wouldn’t think to look into.
This is just so wide of the mark in my experience, especially B2B where the sales and marketing tactics are just, well, awful.
What I have observed is that almost without fail, I find out about really good, high quality products and services from friends and colleagues, through more general word of mouth, by reading reviews, and by research, not through ads.
In fact, it is so noticably true that what is being advertised to me is rarely what I want that I use advertising as a negative signal. If I recall seeing ads for something, I will consciously avoid buying it and that usually works out for the best.
So I conclude advertising is mostly important for duping people into buying things they don't really want or need, that are more than likely nothing special, and that society would benefit greatly from a ban on advertising.
So I'm curious. Suppose you're starting a new small business. You're selling a quality product but nobody knows about you. How do you propose they find out?
Well, when was the last time someone saw something like that advertised on billboards? Can’t remember ever seeing anything like it on a billboard outside SF which is a very weird special case
Your product can be listed somewhere, discovered, word of mouth... The thing is you cannot pay to promote it. I agree it would be a challenge to solve, maybe some kind of compromise could be achieved.
Partial answer: A lot of products people buy are not directly from the maker, but some store. So instead of marketing directly to consumers, the maker can just go and pitch to the store owner, who then carries the product. If there are enough stores out there (not a world full of Walmarts), then most makers will find many stores to carry their product. People go to the store, browse and buy.
> A lot of products people buy are not directly from the maker, but some store.
How does this account for high streets becoming ghost towns in the UK? It seems like running bricks & mortar stores in the UK isn't financially viable.
Wasn't especially my observation last time I was in London. But it's fair that a combination of online purchases and (maybe?) changing tastes/priorities have taken a hit on at least some categories of B&M retail overall.
I don't know about you but I'm still not finding out about them, they have to compete with more established businesses for ad space.
I have gotten precisely one piece of marketing communication that had a positive value in my entire life and it was from an online restaurant supplier. One. Solitary. Closer to forty than I am thirty.
I just don't think the value proposition that you're talking about actually exists.
If you're a new business and you're any good and you do effective marketing, in a couple years you're an established business. Then you see their ad and you say "well yeah but they're an established business." Now they are, but at one point they weren't. And at that point they weren't buying as much advertising because they didn't have as much money, but if they hadn't bought any they'd be gone instead of established.
I also kind of suspect that big companies buy a lot of advertising specifically to outbid their smaller competitors on the ad slots, because the ROI is much higher for the company that wouldn't have been the customer's default, so the bigger company isn't buying the slot to build awareness, they're buying it to keep their challenger from doing that. And then most of the ads you see are for big companies.
> If you're a new business and you're any good and you do effective marketing, in a couple years you're an established business.
This is massively burying the lede here. Doing 'effective marketing' costs a large amount of money. Where is this marketing budget going to come from with a fresh business that hasn't begun to sell products at scale yet?
>Doing 'effective marketing' costs a large amount of money.
Yes. It requires an investment. Setting up a website. Maybe going to and speaking at relevant events. Sending out press releases. Etc. If you're going to setup a business and just not tell anyone, you probably shouldn't bother. And, in general, telling people and promoting your business is marketing even if you don't classically advertise.
And I'm saying that their marketing has had a negative impact on my life, I don't want it, and if your case represented a true and effective strategy then at some point I would have been exposed to it. Sorry, that it would have happened more than once.
Why would you think it would have happened more than once to you? By definition small businesses are small. They might run ads and only find 100 more people who want their product. There could be a million small businesses doing this in the US and the average person might not experience it happening to them even once.
A product which needs help beyond its own merits to make a sale likely doesn't meet most people's definition of quality.
Genuinely fantastic products spread like wildfire on their own, without paid promotion.
I'd love to live in a world where there's no advertising and so therefore the only products available have to be genuinely fantastic.
I can't see a downside - just as many products will still be needed for just as many people, so it shouldn't affect the economy negatively.
What would happen is we would evolve faster and have more safety, reliability, productivity etc. The lack of useless junk polluting the planet would be yet another positive.
> A product which needs help beyond its own merits to make a sale likely doesn't meet most people's definition of quality.
How does the customer know anything about its merits if they've never heard of it?
> Genuinely fantastic products spread like wildfire on their own, without paid promotion.
What if it's not world changing product, it's just a new normal competitor in an existing market whose product is 2% better than average? Or is exactly average, but it costs slightly less? Don't we still want these things?
> I can't see a downside - just as many products will still be needed for just as many people, so it shouldn't affect the economy negatively.
An obvious downside is that it gives an even bigger advantage to incumbents with a known brand.
Not sure why you so desperately try to find some moral justification for advertising, having the skin in the game like many in HN?
Its literally manipulation of those who have money to spend them on product they otherwise wouldn't, has absolutely 0 relationship on quality on the product (in extreme cases it goes directly against it). Word of mouth, unbiased reviews (yes, they cost something to keep the interference away but save you tons of money and time down the line). Its 2024, we are more connected than we probably should be. Manipulation always = lies, it doesn't matter how you wrap them around. We all have moral compass (barring sociopaths/psychopaths et al), and we all have opinion on such behavior.
Sure its like nuclear armament, once one does it many feel they also need to do it. But its purely emotional business on both ends (customers and companies feeling the need to pay for ads), where literally the only person truly winning is the advertiser (something about selling shovels during gold rush). Mankind as it is only loses, I don't see any way its morally justifiable. Even having less services say online available for free ain't a losing proposition if you look at long term damage of advertising.
> Its literally manipulation of those who have money to spend them on product they otherwise wouldn't, has absolutely 0 relationship on quality on the product (in extreme cases it goes directly against it).
This is an extremely strong claim. Certainly you'd concede that some ads contain truthful information. Like there exists at least one ad that is true. So then how is it "manipulation" for someone to post that information in a public space?
We jumped from "billboards are ugly" to "ads are categorically evil," and based on some pretty strong assumptions.
> Word of mouth, unbiased reviews (yes, they cost something to keep the interference away but save you tons of money and time down the line).
Okay, so how do you get the first person to buy your product if advertising is illegal? The base case would seem to require it. Same goes for "independent reviews." How do you find the independent reviewer? And this is ignoring getting a critical mass of customers for word of mouth to even work.
> This is an extremely strong claim. Certainly you'd concede that some ads contain truthful information. Like there exists at least one ad that is true.
Conversely, I find this a weak claim. If most major uses of something are negative, one minor positive use does not trump the negative.
And even if a billboard is 100% factual, that does not necessarily means it’s a net positive to have constant visual pollution for something you may not even buy.
>How does the customer know anything about its merits if they've never heard of it?
They buy it and try it out. How do you think most things sell? It isn't advertising! When I go to the supermarket, I know they have food and home supplies. If you sell one of those things, get it on a shelf. My supermarket literally has tiny batch products from local cottage industry. If I need hardware, I know I can get it at lowes or Home Depot. I didn't need any advertising to know that a place that says "Hardware store" on the sign will sell hardware!
>What if it's not world changing product, it's just a new normal competitor in an existing market whose product is 2% better than average? Or is exactly average, but it costs slightly less? Don't we still want these things?
This will entirely occupy all conversation of most normal people. People LOVE to talk about their shit that is slightly better than the same shit you buy. People LOVE to tell friends and family and strangers about this product they bought that is just slightly different.
>An obvious downside is that it gives an even bigger advantage to incumbents with a known brand.
Which is why Coca-Cola still advertises right? Because advertising only helps those just getting started in selling a brand new product?
One caveat being, some high quality things really do get drowned out or conceptually polluted by loudly advertised crap. It's a tangly problem that's for sure
You won't have the money to buy such billboards anyways. Also it would be more efficient to do semi-targeted advertising by buying space in related places: magazines related to your product, sponsor spots in youtube videos, ads in specialty stores, etc. Start small by targeting an audience likely to be interested, not by mass-advertising in a spray-and-pray fashion.
Example: I found out about JLCPCB from sponsor segments on electronics youtube channels, when they started their offering. Granted this is not a small business (the company behind JLC is a behemoth), but it is a Chinese company unknown in the west, that only did B2B before. They advertised directly to audiences that might be interested.
> Also it would be more efficient to do semi-targeted advertising by buying space in related places: magazines related to your product, sponsor spots in youtube videos, ads in specialty stores, etc.
Those are all still marketing. Whether they're better than billboards depends on what the product is.
> You won't have the money to buy such billboards anyways.
Billboard space is available starting at on the order of $1000/month. This is well within the reach of a small business for a one month campaign and the dynamic billboards will even sell space on an interval of 15 minutes.
The fixed billboards in the most expensive cities are all Coca Cola and McDonalds because those cost the most and that's who can afford them, but the proposal is "ban all marketing" not "ban all marketing by multinational corporations".
Word of mouth, to start. If there's no marketing, consumers in general will understand that they need to seek out products that they want and need, and will eventually find your new product.
A side bonus is that this will eliminate a lot of useless garbage. Without advertising to manipulate people into buying things they didn't need and otherwise would not want, companies that sell junk will fail.
At any rate, finding customers within the constraints of the law (including a hypothetical advertising ban) is not society's problem, it's the company's problem.
If you have two customers and you need a thousand customers to cover your fixed costs, you're out of business before this has time to be effective.
> If there's no marketing, consumers in general will understand that they need to seek out products that they want and need, and will eventually find your new product.
What you're really implying is that somebody is going to set up a website or search engine for people to find products, and then marketing would be replaced entirely by SEO and payola.
> Without advertising to manipulate people into buying things they didn't need and otherwise would not want, companies that sell junk will fail.
The assumption here is that the companies selling junk aren't the incumbents. What mechanism is going to exist to help people identify what is and isn't junk that can't or doesn't exist already?
We already have those things. To the extent that people can use them to get the good product instead of the junk one, don't they already do it?
And, of course, we know that these things are often corrupted. One of the major problems is that people want this most for products that are expensive, but manufacturers only send free/pre-release test samples to reviewers they think will publish a favorable review.
To do it right you need the reviewer to not have this dependency on the manufacturer for access, so they need money to buy the product themselves. Which is what you get with Consumer Reports, but they (haha) aren't funded by advertising, and then people on a tight budget forego subscription and don't know what to buy.
That's really two different classes of products. You want to read a review before you buy a car, but by and large people actually do that already.
Low cost items don't need that because this isn't going to be the only sandwich or bottle of laundry detergent you buy this decade, so it's as easy to take a chance on it once and try it yourself as to read a review which may or may not be biased, and then if it sucks you don't buy it again.
Somehow you have to get your product in front of (and probably give it away) to the people doing the independent reviews and product testing. That's marketing.
There are probably some exceptions in well-defined markets with a limited number of products like automobiles but those are actually companies that, in general, spend a lot on marketing and advertising.
> If you have two customers and you need a thousand customers to cover your fixed costs, you're out of business before this has time to be effective.
The obvious answer is that you chose a risky business to go into.
There as a time when if you sold tiny hinges to mount stamps in a stamp collecting book there would be a Philatelist Monthly magazine or such that would be your target market where you can advertise.
>If you have two customers and you need a thousand customers to cover your fixed costs, you're out of business before this has time to be effective.
Spend your marketing budget on your fixed costs.
Also, is your product direct-to-consumer? Because if it isn't, there are established channels to sell it to distributes, and if it is, you're likely a big part of the problem (since marketing of direct-to-consumer products is not usually a tool to let people know about new quality products).
The only thing that would achieve is that a "word of mouth" businesses would pop up. People would sign up, product place stuff in regular talks about weather near the office coffee machine. You would visit your parents and they would told ask you to buy some stuff you don't need because they would get a cut. Would you prefer that? I surely wouldn't.
People have no idea how the world works, yet want to design laws and would like to force other people to act according to their preferences. It's so egocentric it's unbelievable.
The same way humanity has done for thousands of years? Word of mouth and reputation. This isn't a new problem, what's new is the ubiquitousness of advertising and the amount of money that gets pissed away on marketing.
So what ends up happening is that local businesses don't get any of the marketing opportunities which get bought out by big businesses with a large ad spend budget.
In a free market your product, if it is truly better than competitors, will sell more. Because consumers will research products based on merit, and consumers can tell somehow which product is higher quality, and they can do it instantly.
As you can see, we have never lived in a free market.
If it's not 1905, you put up a website and let people search for your product. Modern marketing doesn't seek to inform, after all. It doesn't work to make a product discoverable. Does Ford Motor Company really need to spend that $400 million annually? Would anyone soon forget the existence of the F150?
i like the trap laid here. "But NoMoreNicksLeft, you have to pay for search rankings!" ban that, too. Ban SEO. If i make a page that has my product offerings on it, it should compete on my copy, not SEO or how much i spent at google, bing, FB, etc. This is a solvable problem with specifically search technology, but also as a society we also have access to more people to ask for recommendations, to see other people talking about some new toy (or whatever) they bought.
As far as search engines go, the search provider can wholesale ban everyone who even accidentally games the system. Put your widget catalog on a web page, be honest about your products and/or services, and you should be fine. I will repeat that, because i think this is the part that gets marketing graduates in a tizzy - be honest about your products and/or services. If you gotta lie about what you offer or can do, then i really could not care less if your business survives; there's already enough dishonesty in our society.
edit to add: i actually logged in on my computer to reply to another comment you made (they should just buy a house closer to the job) which was very good.
How might one practically ban SEO? The moment a search engine uses information on a web page to determine relevance, the operator of the website can modify its presentation to bump up its rankings. There's plenty of room even within the strictest possible bounds of "being honest", and being the first result on the biggest search engine is valuable enough that you'll still get an underground SEO industry, legal or not.
Also, search providers know that users will get mad if they can't access popular websites, so there's no way they'll cut those websites off at a whim just for "accidental gaming", not unless they're compelled from above. And then you have the usual issues with corruptible officials deciding which companies are good and which are verboten.
From a legal standpoint, this seems far easier than banning advertising of any form. Which, if you'll remember, has (some) constitutional protections within the US. In contrast, it's a bit more difficult to claim such a thing about SEO. We regulate the activities of business all the time, and SEOing just doesn't seem expressive in the ways that "free speech" are.
From a practical standpoint, I do not have a clue. It seems as if this would just drive the worst of it overseas, where it is not possible to investigate or to prohibit effectively. I'll await the other guy's answer, maybe he has something more clever than I can come up with on a Friday at 5pm.
A world without marketing would still allow for products to be registered, reviewed, rated, and for people to talk about it. It would still allow you to have a website and a newsletter that people can opt into. The only restriction would be that you cannot pay for better visibility, reviews or references from influencers.
So the way I imagine it would work is that you would register your product into an official registry (free of charge). Then if I need something specific I can search the registry for what I need, and your product might pop up, with links to your website, your videos, as well as all reviews and ratings. There could be a subsidy system that makes unreviewed products cheaper. If your product is really awesome, the awesome reviews should, in principle, suffice to make your business thrive.
Of course, whatever the system in place is, there needs to be work done to make sure it cannot be cheated: if people can pay to prop up their product, they will. But it shouldn't be necessary to pay to make people aware of a product that could improve their lives. Surely it should be possible to set up some kind of discovery system.
> A world without marketing would still allow for products to be registered, reviewed, rated, and for people to talk about it. It would still allow you to have a website and a newsletter that people can opt into. The only restriction would be that you cannot pay for better visibility, reviews or references from influencers.
These are all forms of marketing, but not specifically advertising. I think what OP meant to say is "a world without advertising."
You know what, how about this: A corporation gets to spend let's say up to 5% of its total budget on advertising in the first two months of its existence, as long as it has a new product that is exclusive to the company and as long as the company is advertising exclusively for itself and for the new product, and as long as the corporation is financially and structurally independent from established corporations. Any loopholes that let Coca-Cola take advantage of this are systematically closed, the intent of the law is clearly communicated, and the FTC fines any established corporation trying to work around it.
This advertising is only legal to put in free versions of media that have paid ad-free versions, and to opt-in newsletters organized by product (so that people can pay to keep it out of their lives but if they're curious about innovations in a space or just want to know what's coming out they can get a slight discount for it).
This also gives an advantage to new companies, which is probably a good thing, though could of course be abused by a billionaire with fly-by-night companies, at which point we'd have to patch that loophole. Maybe with my favorite idea of "ownership disclosures", where the majority owner(s) of any given corporation has to be disclosed on product labels, so that you know if you're buying from Nestle or Unilever even if they want to obfuscate that fact.
How often have you discovered a quality product through advertising, rather than through reviews, personal recommendations, or just being present in a store? I have a hard time remembering even a single case.
I don't think so. For me the real test is whether or not someone is giving me a monetary incentive. The very act of having to pay someone to say something increases the probability of it being a lie
For me the real test is whether or not someone is trying to persuade other human beings towards a certain action. An action that is favourable for you.
This can be monetary of course. But this could also be ballot vote on election day. This could be a change in behaviour of people to drive less cars, but take the train instead. Or convince people that advertising should be banned for large corporates.
Marketing is the art and science of achieving behavioural changes to your benefit.
> For me the real test is whether or not someone is trying to persuade other human beings towards a certain action. An action that is favourable for you.
I think the test for me, at least for the kind of marketing/advertising that should be banned, is the passiveness of it.
If, while going through my day, I am interrupted by your billboard, banner ad, spam email, promotional app notification, street marketing person, etc. in an attempt to manipulate me into action, that is the thing that should be illegal.
If I walk into a shop and say "I'm looking for a camera", invite a business in to pitch for work, call somoene up for a quote, directly enter a query like "buy camera uk" into a search engine, etc. then I think that is ok. I have asked to be sold to, and I am mentally prepared for the fact of that happening (notwithstanding that certain techniques should maybe also not be allowed).
Yes, we are always trying to have some effects on other people's behavior, but I don't think most people would say it's marketing. And maybe most important, quantity is a quality on itself. So, me as an individual trying to persuade another individual is a total different game than a big corporation trying to persuade millions of people. To give a more clear cut example, me having a look on the street is very different to mass surveillance.
The difference is that people come to the comment section here to read opinions on the subject of the article. People don't go on a highway drive just to learn about what lawyers and and casinos are available. I'm sure you can also understand the difference between a catalogue listing on-topic producs and unprompted signage.
Karma will you get more status and increase the likelihood of posts being upvoted. There are many guides online how to rank on HN in order to market your startup.
HN comments have influenced my thinking and my subsequent actions quite heavily in the past years.
The line you’re drawing is super thin and only theoretical.
Well, if you try to run your own business of any type, you suddenly realize why there's need for marketing. Things don't sell themselves. Nobody beats a path to your door even with the best of mousetraps.
... because your competitiors are using ads to manipulate your potential customers into buying from them instead of you. Do you think people would just stop eating because restaurants/grocery stores were not allowed to advertise?
I would stop eating because I wouldn’t be able to sell my products and won’t have money to go to restaurants! Like most of the people who don’t work for employers (so they could outsource their marketing efforts to corporations), and have to market their efforts.
You are right that advertising employs other manipulative tactics besides just deception. The other tactics are just as bad and most ads are straight up deceptive.
Can we please ban advertising from society and into convenient little directory books where everything is categorized? If I want something, only *then* I [still most likely won't] want to see ads.
And for different topics too. Corporations need to understand that the only reason they are permitted to exist is to benefit the public. If they are a net negative there is no reason we cannot or should not get rid of them.
I don't like billboards much, so I'm fine with dropping them. Although this ban still allows sport advertisement, looks like sport brands will just start advertising every single match and gain exposition on the cheap.
And of course we all can prefer "cultural" advertisement to soft drinks, but
If the intent is to reduce visual pollution, why does the content of the advertisement matter?
On the way from office to home, there's a junction with a HUGE LCD display. At night, the screen is so bright it's very annoying.
It's like being in a dark room and putting your laptop display to max. In front of everyone stopping at the red light. Not sure who's the genius behind it, but I think the ad has opposite effect of people hating the product advertised there.
610 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 516 ms ] threadIn Berlin the largest bill board provider (Wall GmbH) also builds public toilets. Thanks to them they are much more plentiful around parks. Forcing them to go out of business would take those with them.
But I do enjoy the lack of billboards.
Running low on water in São Paulo would be a huge disaster.
There is legislation to grant permission to place some ads in exchange of, say public toilets to use your example.
But removed billboards from buildings or external area weren't taxed or had any positive result to society.
Thanks for sharing ground truth, despite it being exceptionally depressing.
Nowadays, Berlin has a shit ton of "startups" HQ'd there, but they pay barely any taxes compared to production industry heavyweights.
This was radically different before World War 2. In 1938 Berlin made up 10% of GDP (and Germany was bigger back then). Major companies like Lufthansa and Deutsche Bank were headquartered in Berlin. It was the center of the new Electrical industry being home of both Siemens and AEG.
Berlin is a text book example of how turning everything into public goods and spending a lot of tax money is not necessarily in the interest of the citizens IMHO.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_se...
Are you saying that Berlin is an outlier in Germany, then? My perception (looking from outside) has always been that their public sector is just completely understaffed.
No, Berlin brought only the previously privatized district heating (Fernwärme) back (https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2024/05/berlin-fernwae...). Because that is a monopoly and Berliners got ripped off by a private company.
Whether this constitutes a monopoly is beside the point. Berlin paid 1.4 billions is does not really have (after it sold it 20 years ago when it had even less money and could not sustain a profitable business operation) and which does not solve a problem we really have. And now it will need to invest even more money to future-proof this acquisition.
Europe is so backwards on their public toilet investments.
I've never had a problem finding a toilet there when I needed one, but I kept kleenex in my back pocket because I never knew what to expect.
I still prefer the holes in the ground to pay toilets.
One thing to watch out for, however, is that many bathrooms have no way to dry your hands, even in very nice bathrooms in fancy buildings, so you should bring a small towel with you. Some bathrooms don't even have soap, though this is pretty rare in my experience, but a lack of drying towels or hand dryers is somewhat common.
The big factor for foreigners is that people don't normally eat and drink while walking down the street; it's generally considered rude. If they stop and sit somewhere and eat or drink there, they keep their trash with them instead of throwing it on the ground like many other countries. If you're just getting stuff from a convenience store, you can usually throw stuff in the trash cans there.
Most stuff I've seen doesn't have an absurd amount of disposable packaging, but that is really common with the gift boxes of sweets that are commonly bought at stations and given as gifts. But these you don't normally eat in public.
I always found it amazing that Japanese cities manage to stay so clean without public trash cans everywhere. It's a reminder that you have to solve the social and cultural problems first: if people think it's ok to throw trash on the ground, it doesn't matter how many public trash cans you have.
Relatedly, offering stuff for free on ebay/craigslist/whatever turns up some incredibly entitled choosing beggars. Offering it for a token amount gives you very different results.
I see this public private partnership a win-win.
> the city of Berlin was not willing to
Fixed that for you.
Problem solved.
[1] https://taz.de/Toilettenvertrag-sorgt-fuer-Wirbel/!5431891/ [2] https://www.berlin.de/rbmskzl/aktuelles/pressemitteilungen/2... [3] https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2024/07/107-oeffentlic...
Amazing decision. Nobody misses them.
However, if it did happen, the arms race to prevent ad evasion in real life would be interesting. Glass Earth, Inc. by Stephen Baxter is a good short read along the extension of those lines (though the image of a multibillion satellite communications monopoly using a vast fleet of, uh, 67 geosynchronous satellites hasn't dated well!)
Bottom of my list of concerns, whereas at the top is being surveilled and psychologically manipulated on an individual or group level. I am very sensitive about it...
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
– Banksy
That’s also applies to corporate corruption and politics.
They've even sued TV networks and movie studios for digitally painting different ads over their actual ads in movies and broadcasts.
At its best, your personal data is harvested and traded behind your back to tailor ads specifically for your demographic—and increasingly for you personally—and deliver them when you're most vulnerable.
At its worst, it is all of the above, plus used by anyone who wants to influence how you think about political and social issues, ultimately corrupting democratic processes and destabilizing governments. It is the perfect medium for propaganda.
In either case it is the most insidious form of psychological manipulation we've ever invented. I hope that we eventually collectively sober up about the ways this is harming our societies, and heavily regulate, if not outright ban it. The advertising industry has gone far beyond just promoting a product, and it needs to stop.
50+ years ago, the idea of advertisers harvesting your personal data and trading it behind your back to tailor ads for you was completely alien.
It has also made a lot of people very rich, so I doubt that the advertising industry will accept devolving to a state before psychological manipulation became the norm, and sacrifice billions of dollars worth of revenue. Governments are unlikely to regulate it to that point either, given their symbiotic relationship.
This banning of billboards is a good step, but the real problems are online.
It'd be nice if there was some kind of advertising industry code of ethics, but I can't imagine how this would develop, since the people in today's ad industry are obviously a bunch of con artists and sociopaths who lack any ethical standards at all.
I can learn about products I am interested in by enthusiasts of certain areas, comparison tests, searching the web, friends recommendations, entities that collect news of a specific area, Hackernews and other forums, conferences, events (physical or digital) that are just for companies presenting their products in a certain area.
So I don't need to have unasked ads shoved into my face to get to know products I "need" or desire.
I don't see ads and I don't have FOMO.
These are forms of advertising too.
People who actually believe in the Banksy lie are unfortunate.
None of that has any relation to the irony of Banksy’s quote though.
Both might lie but it depends on which lie you like to believe as to which form of advertising you find better.
Why do I have to see your street art? Why do I have to see your clothes? Why do I have to see your face? Why do I have to see your car?
However, it's widely accepted that not wanting to see something doesn't justify vandalizing someone else's art/clothes/car/whatever.
Why should it be different for ads?
In addition to that by far most things people would want to put in public spaces isn't explicitly designed to upset you like ads are. Why do we allow companies to plaster public spaces with veiled insults?
Usually buildings have private property owners. They agree to putting a bill board on their wall or they don’t. Graffiti sprayers usually don’t ask for permission — and that’s where the difference comes from.
In Europe you don’t usually have huge bill board on buildings. Rather you have lots of advertising columns on the side walks (here in Berlin we call them „Litfaßsäule“ named after the local inventor Paul Litfaß in 1854). You could argue they being a nuisance for sure but before the internet and even before radio and tv it was an important place of public communication. Actually they were an improvement because prior to advertising columns advertisers were wildly plastering anything with posters.
And yet if I agree to have someone stand on my property shouting insults at passers-by I'll get a visit from the police soon enough. This issue isn't as black and white as you make it out to be. Just because the owner of the building the billboard is attached to agrees to have it there doesn't mean no one else is affected.
There's already limits to what you can put on a billboard. Banning billboards isn't some radical new category of thing. it's simply moving that threshold down to "you can put nothing on billboards"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract
If it came to a honest vote on whether people would like billboards or no billboards I think the result is obvious.
A vote of people liking billboards is completely independent of the “oh, the powerful corporations use them” pearl clutching. I would hate billboards if they were just dominated by individuals using them to promote religious and political ideologies.
The only reason their usage is dominated by businesses is because businesses generate returns off of advertising. They don’t have special privilege and they certainly aren’t out of reach of individuals, clubs, non-profits, etc.
Because other things in public don't manipulate me into thinking a certain way in order to take money from me. People that attempt to do that are labeled as grifters and scammers, and the legal system deals with them. Why should it be different for ads?
You wouldn't attack another person for their clothes. Because it's on and belongs to a person.
Banksy wouldn't give a damned if you painted over his art. Because it's not on person and belongs to no person. Same as the ad space and the abandoned building he painted over.
He attacked those who legally contributed negatively to public spaces. No one's car is doing that, and if they were, kids would just scribble "Wash Me!" over it and you would be there clapping, oblivious to this conversation until pointed out.
Are you kidding? Cars are well known for their negative contributions to public spaces, in the forms of (1) exhaust, and (2) noise.
This is part of why I'm baffled that the solution to electric cars not constantly generating terrible noise pollution is to mandate that they all include and operate noisemakers.
Yes, car noise is annoying but the alternative is much much worse. Not so for ads.
No, it isn't. When you solve a problem, the answer is not to panic and legislate that the problem must never be solved. If you have other problems, work on those.
We already have plenty of technology for dealing with roads that are dangerous. In general, we handle them by preventing pedestrians from using or crossing them, and providing over- or underpasses. This is superior in every way to adding noisemakers to cars. But it's not necessarily the best solution! It's just one that (a) we already have, and (b) is better than what you're calling a superior alternative.
The only reason anyone even considers noisemakers is that they're used to cars that make noise. But a history of doing something the wrong way is a terrible reason to avoid doing it the right way.
I would hope that you aren't arguing in such bad faith that you can't see that advertising is another thing entirely.
Actually, Sean Tejaratchi.
It's really unfortunate that the real credit is left out in practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Tejaratchi#Crap_Hound.
Now granted they may not benefit -you- directly, they may even make -your- life worse, but -society- as a whole keeps them around.
Personally I'm not a smoker, so cigarette companies (to me) are a net loss. On the other hand enough people see them as a gain so I bow to societies vote.
Strangely enough, I do actually think there's a time and a place to kill, but that's not the norm for hired killers.
By definition illegal things are things society as a whole have declared impermissible. By contrast cigarettes and advertising are legal, meaning that society has determined them to have value.
Not surprisingly illegal things still happen because there is still demand by some minority for that service. Society as s whole though has decided that the negative effect on others outweighs the positive effect on the few.
Where I live it's a spread between big companies, local events, startups and so on.
Where I live there are very few billboards. I rarely see them. When I travel (especially to the US) it's very jarring. They are very visually polluting.
Legally speaking, billboards are only banned within 500 yards or some other distance from the highway with the most traffic (where billboards would be most valuable, namely, US 101) but actually there are no billboards anywhere in the county and this has been the case since the 1960s (according to an old newspaper article). My guess is that the community has some way to exert "informal" (not based on formal governmental processes) pressure on landlords. Real estate prices are very high here in part because it is a very attractive landscape with plenty of hills and greenery and bodies of water, so maybe most landlords perceive that billboards have the potential to depress prices and keep the occasional landlord who contemplates erecting billboards in line somehow.
Also as an exception to the general rule, bus shelters (structures owned and maintained by the city or the county to keep the rain and the sun off people waiting for a bus) near US 101 have ads on them (4' by 6' or so) and the buses themselves do, too, or at least they used to--it's been a few years since I noticed.
I have a hard time accepting the "in part" even, and sort of align with "the only reason it's expensive is because of the closeness to SV".
But yes it is very nice. And yes billboards would make it less nice.
Large numbers of high paying jobs are necessary for high housing prices except in tax havens like Monaco.
One summer a job was across the our small lake, a 40 minute drive by car, but maybe 10 minutes by boat as the crow flies. Sure, I got wet during rain and wavy days, but clothes get dry, and it sure was convenient.
I often wondered, if the job was in SF itself, do people take boats to get to work? If so, why not? I presume docking costs? The place I worked had their own dock, so ... "sure, just tie up over there every day".
https://www.goldengate.org/ferry/schedules-maps/
https://www.blueandgoldfleet.com/sausalito/
I don't know of anyone using or having used a private boat to make the commute.
He was OK but apparently the was a lot of boat theft in that area too.
At another job, the project manager lived in WA but worked in Palo Alto. He flew (commercial) in early Monday, with a small apartment to live in during the week, then take off mid-afternoon Friday to be back in WA with his family for the weekend.
<https://marinmagazine.com/community/history/history-of-a-hig...>
At least one billboard, along 101 at the highway cut between San Rafael and Larkspur, survived until the late 1970s or early 1980s, but was burned down in what has been described as the closest an act of arson has come to earning an award of commendation by the Marin County Board of Supervisors.
More recently, a "flower billboard" was created, and in 2010 removed, along US-101 in Novato:
<https://www.marinij.com/2010/08/24/controversial-flower-bill...>
(That article also places the county-wide ban more recently, in the 1970s.)
They are incredibly obnoxious. I’m surprised if they don’t case car crashes.
Fucking blinding.
I got stopped at a roadblock even before LED's, the highway patrol officer said "I wasn't sure you were going to stop, you nearly ran over [X] over there" and my reply was, "Your lights are so bright, and blue, and right here on the road, that I can't see a thing. I'm glad I didn't."
Here in Germany regulation of outside ads has zero novelty value, it's so much a given that I don't know anything about the history of it. And it turns out the benefits of a ban are much bigger than just more pleasant views, because the ad spend does not simply disappear. Much of it gets channeled into event sponsoring, sports clubs and the like, in short things that actually improve life for all instead of just providing some more passive income for property owners. It's a total no-brainer if there ever was one.
I was shocked by the number of "One call, that's all" accident attorney billboards in LA and FL when I drove through them several years ago.
Not entirely, but it impose some very important limits on any signs near highways, such as requiring them to be advertising something that's available from the same property under them.
That effectively blocks the most spammy and egregious forests of signs, because one can't just purchase a small rectangle of near-highway grass and start auctioning space above it to a large shifting pool of national bidders.
https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=47.42.040
Don’t drive I-5 by Fife much, eh? Okay, you did say “usually”.
Redmond has an outright ban on billboards. That’s how I know where the Redmond/Kirkland border is (there’s a billboard on 124th St.) Now if they if they’d just follow King County on those fucking political signs. (King County says “not on public right-of-ways”, Redmond says “where ever you see a patch of grass”.)
To prevent "ambush marketing", the IOC demands control over advertising in the area around the games. Given what a big deal it was for a city like Atlanta to get to host the games, this was one of the few times when the public was going to win despite the money and influence of the advertising industry. To its credit, Atlanta has mostly stuck by those Olympic era billboard laws. The biggest exception probably is the huge video board next to the Ernst & Young building but it replaced a much more modest video sign that had already been there.
Being a large city, Atlanta has the resources to fight court challenges against the well funded advertising industry. Several of the suburban and exurban communities I lived in had citizens and governments united in their hatred of billboards but they lacked the resources to prevent them as the billboard companies have lots of experience with bleeding local governments dry in court, sending a message to other local governments to not even bother trying to oppose them. Big cities however can do better... if they wish to.
Los Angeles, you have an opportunity in 2028. Will you take advantage of it like Atlanta did?
> He wormed his way over to the left-hand, high-speed lane and opened up. At the edge of the skyscraper district, where Wright Skyway angles sharply downward to ground level, Samms' attention was caught and held by something off to his right—a blue-white, whistling something that hurtled upward into the air. As it ascended it slowed down: its monotone shriek became lower and lower in pitch; its light went down through the spectrum toward the red. Finally it exploded, with an earth-shaking crash; but the lightning-like flash of the detonation, instead of vanishing almost instantaneously, settled itself upon a low-hanging artificial cloud and became a picture and four words—two bearded faces and "SMITH BROS. COUGH DROPS"!
> "Well, I'll be damned!" Samms spoke aloud, chagrined at having been compelled to listen to and to look at an advertisement. "I thought I had seen everything, but that is really new!"
And really, for it to be all encompassing, you'd need everyone to have to use such systems, such as forcing everyone to have such devices to log in to services, or even order food, or pay for things, and no one would force people to have a device to even pay for things, or eat.. I.. um, oh right, smartphones.
(I firmly suspect that within 25 years not only will brain implants -> visual cortex happen, but that if you don't have one you won't be able to work effectively, you won't be able to identify yourself effectively, and you probably won't even be able to pay for things)
mcmcmc: Nowhere did the GP state that AR would be inescapable. Yes, I know. I stated it. See above?
My whole point revolves around the fact that I believe, just as with smartphones, that people will be severely hampered without said tech. That it will effectively be a requirement to have such tech. Statements such as "But you can just...", fail to realise just how much is dependent upon it. In many respects there are NO workarounds without a smartphone, there are jobs that require you to own one, there are tasks/things you do in life that absolutely require it, and if you don't have one?
Often you cannot find a work around, or the work around is literally a monumental task, thus people simply capitulate.
This is what brain implants and AR will be like in 25+ years.
Enough people that it eventually becomes unavoidable for the rest. See: all the other horrors of modern civilization that you cannot avoid without becoming a hermit.
The ad model yields worse product and are actively killing off any attempt to improve, because the majority of people don't understand the downside of financing products using ads, rather than direct payment.
The ad funded model is only successful if you view the world solely in terms of profit. I think Windows is a good example, the product doesn't improve when Microsoft loads the install up with ads and telemetry, but it is more profitable, and therefor more successful, if you're a stockholder.
There are far more clever and profitable ways to monetize MR than to shove ads in your face wherever you look.
I very much doubt a modern company would take an approach this dumb when they could likely make much more money doing something much more subtle.
There are, but the problem with ads (and surveillance) is, they're purely additive on the margin. Any of the clever and profitable thing you do to monetize MR, you can get a bit more money if you also put in ads. Then the competition puts more ads. Rinse repeat, eventually ads overwhelm the experience - but not before you make bank.
That's the cancerous nature of advertising. It metastasizes to every new medium, feeds on it, and ultimately consumes it.
Look, we have been through this cycle multiple times now. It's not hypothetical.
And not, ad-free experiences are not always available. Not even close to it - consider for start the subject of TFA: public spaces covered with ads.
I watch a lot of football, I watched >90% of games at the Euros on UK TV, I've never seen a pitchside advert on TV that wasn't showing the same as what you would see if you were sat in the stadium.
Edit: it was only on US, Chinese and German TV - https://invidis.com/news/2024/07/virtual-ads-wysiwyg-on-tv-a...
- https://www.uniqfeed.com/our-solutions/football/
- https://supponor.com/
They have on their websites some neat examples. For example Supponor literally replaces the ads in the live stream (see the hockey example on their front page).
Not sure if it's the same two companies, but you can find an impressive result video here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/blackmagicfuckery/comments/uf0re1/d...
The man is a sellout and it has a kind of charm, because he knows his place: He is a just football player on the verge of retirement and he wants to squeeze the juice for the last drop.
Example (hard to find because no-one takes photos of the ugly buildings in Warsaw):
https://www.businessinsider.in/thumb/msid-70660934,width-640...
Maybe Gary, Indiana? It's pretty crappy.
I've actually moved out from Cracow shortly after this legislation, not directly because of it, but this surely contributed to the decision. The direction Cracow is heading to is clear -- you will have nothing and you'll be happy.
There was even a situation a few weeks ago where a guy went to the office with an axe and attacked someone. The guy wasn't even a football hooligan I think.
https://www.wprost.pl/kraj/11746912/krakow-wtargnal-z-siekie...
Thank Koalicja Developerska and PiS for inflating property market... but meh "investors"
> Cheap outsourcing jobs where you're old reaching a mere 40?
40 of what?
> Aggressive football hooligans?
When? Kraków is quite safe, especially compared to other places in Europe..
40 of potatoes, duh.
The escapades of Wisła/Cracovia baboons are not normal. As long as anyone is randomly asked "which team do you support" the football is to be eliminated from the city.
Are you stuck in the '90s? Ffs...
#2 was hostility to private car transport (neglection of road infrastructure, introduction of car-free zones will surely happen soon). Traffic jams are the default state of things, and it's a waste of life.
#3 is that it's a tourist city; a good place to visit, pay money and go home. Not a good place for me to live every day (I've lived there for 15 years, and if you're a happy citizen then good for you). Most of the people here are not from Cracow itself. Warsaw suffers from the same problem.
And then moan about traffic jams.
In Wroclaw they added hundreds of KM of bike lanes....crisscrossing normal roads. I would like to take my children by bike to their kindergarten but I dont want me or them to die.
So indeed i take my car, which i regret not being a damn fat SUV because i cannot damn stand being shaken out of my bones anymore. The roads are the German coblestone type and they are not crap because of the potholes. That is already a taken, no. The whole roads have severe long period troughs and hills that together with the pot holes make the experience a nightmare. Sprinkle that with tramlines, activated or not and I am currently considering moving out. The trams and buses work well but politicians and well meaning people often forget you need the car for things like the supermarket? I have a family of several so i cannot just take the tram or by bike for groceries. Oh my, i need a car. The sin, we are all "patola"[1] :).
And this is not just in the city proper, the surroundings' roads are awful as well. I just damaged my rim and tire driving on a normal road 40Km/h while doing this gas guzzling hobby of taking my children to a local forest.
I am a bit upset writing this because all these people in power in Europe dont have traditional families and exist in their own heaven on earth where they are independent in a very pure state. When i was 20 or if I would be a single I would get it, but with a family, please take your silly ideals elsewhere(this is for the mayor Jacek Sutryk who is unironically a bachelor).
Portugal is a bit better in that the left leaning well-doers preach but people are too real to let things get ridiculous. The talking heads sometimes fantasize about bikes everywhere but then the cities are hilly and old so it is unfeasible to add bike lanes.
[1] Patola is a derrogative name from pathological [family]. It is used to insinuate you come from a dysfunctional, often alcoholic family. Very common insult in Poland which I am fascinated about. I wonder if this insult exists in other Slavic countries.
Noone is forcing people into suburbs (which are awful in itself) but people feel the need to have detached house with garden (as a status, just like car…)
Sure. How dare people not afford 1.2 million PLN( 304k$) so that 4 people (2 adults + 2 children) can live in a 80 sqm apartment[1].
The theme in these answers are very common, the majority of people wanting comfort are wasteful and vain. I guess back in the day of Gierek's(communist times) buildings were the right fit.
[1] https://rynekpierwotny.pl/wiadomosci-mieszkaniowe/raport-cen...
Yes, because thanks to dumb housing market becoming "investors eldorado" instead of doing more dense residential building that doesn't require creating "subursbs" and dumb urban sprawl.
You are aware that it's possible to create relative big departments in such scheme, right?
One of the reasons such plans did not go ahead is that it required a state that can expropriate left and right and amounts of capital not available to localities, even in cities like Wrocław.
Those kind of grand plans only work if there is a national drive that imposes it, or most likely after a war. This is true in Poland Portugal or anywhere developed and desirable.
A friend of mine lives in a car free zone but public transit stops at 23:00. He is just supposed to stay inside his home at night I guess. No parties for him.
Unfortunately the same economies of scale apply to them as well. You can't have city wide public transport run 24/7 because a very small amount of the workforce works during the night.
And night shifts tend to be set in order to overlap with public transport schedules (10pm-6am) so that's not such a big problem.
If it is possible in the US of all places, it should be possible in The Netherlands.
I guess it depends on how much the local government is willing to subsidize public transport, since otherwise daily price tickets will have to go up for all travelers to subsidize the few night travelers.
Here in Austria we also don't have night routes during the week in cities that are not Vienna even if some people still need to travel during the night, but the transport companies can't run at a loss, so it's either the state pays for it(via higher taxes for everyone) or the day travelers will pay more for it, there's no free lunch here, someone still needs to pay for the unprofitable night service which is a loss maker. How Santa Monia does it I don't know but it doesn't change the fact the night services are loss makers everywhere and public transportation in general is only profitable at massive scale often relying on public subsidies to stay afloat even in the US.
Also public transportation costs are not apples to apples comparable between countries. Maybe it works in the Santa Monica, since fuel is dirt cheap or maybe they subsidize a lot and maybe they can pay bus drivers peanuts or something I don't know, but here in Austria running public transport is very expensive (unions, pensions, strict work hours, great workers benefits, infrastructure, maintenance, running costs, etc), especially in cities other than Vienna, so the routes are pretty shit and night routes non existent in order to not loose money, so most people rely on private cars or taxis for commutes out of hours. Improving that would come at increased costs and ticket prices are already maxed out and so are taxes.
Basically, people started to park in big parking garages with good connections to main roads. Surely it required more time to walk. But then one spends much less time finding a place to park. And traffic from/to small roads were a significant contribution to jams.
So you want more cars and at the same you moan about traffic? o_O
If you claim that traffic jams are was of life then even more you should be anti-cars...
Cars are just too space inefficient as inner city transportation. Traffic jams are the result of car centric choices incentivizing everyone to drive not the other way around.
> The Supreme Court’s ruling cements a decision to remove more than three-fourths of its once-standing 172 billboards from the town, keeping the remainder available for culture and sports ads.
By "culture and sports ads" they surely mean adverts by the government for its own subsidized services. Local government is a huge spender on billboard advertising around here, often for its own state run sports or events (invariably stuff that's popular with lefty civil service types like obscure dance performances).
Lately they also love to paint trains and trams in garish colors, in an open advert for diversity ideology:
https://www.bahnonline.ch/27379/mit-dem-zvv-gemeinsam-vorwae...
Die Farben und Formen des neuen visuellen Auftritts widerspiegeln die Buntheit und Diversität des gesamten ZVV-Netzes.
... and they don't seem to have a problem either with all the posters that get glued everywhere advertising May Day, Feminists for Anarchism and so on.
The idea cantonal governments have a problem with "visual pollution" is kind of absurd, really. If that's actually the motivation then step one would be to stop buying billboard space with taxpayer money, stop flooding the city with rainbows, clean up all the pro-Gaza graffiti and go entirely without any of that for a few years. Once they've proven they have the discipline to clean up the sort of visual pollution they themselves tend to like, then they might have a moral leg to stand on for banning other forms of advertising.
They did though, if only partially. While the parts overlapping the windows are not 100% opaque, in my experience such ads do significantly worsen the viewing view from inside the vehicles.
We can't ban billboards on Bahnhofstrasse and rest of the city just because you've seen some graffiti supporting Palestine? What?
Of all the text the op wrote that is definitely a personal and unfair interpretation and not what he written.
His point is clear: If the goal is reducing visual pollution then a state advertisement is just as polluting as a commercial one.
Here are some examples.
Walk down to Bellevue. Start to walk along the lake to the China Garden. You will walk past some of the most prime advertising real estate in the city. There are several billboard signs in a row right at the top corner of the lake. Highest footfall of anywhere in the city outside of Bahnhofstrasse itself. When I did this yesterday every single ad was by government, for government. For example, one of them is currently advertising the government-run Native American Museum:
https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/kultur/de/index/institutionen/n...
Walk down the lake and you'll encounter more such billboards, all showing government ads. In fact I don't think I've ever seen a non-state advert on any of these places.
Go to a Filmfluss event. It starts with 10 minutes of ads. On Saturday when I went to a showing with my wife, I counted and around half of the ads were by the state. Amongst others: multiple recruiting ads for the Stadtpolizei, ads for ZKB, multiple ads for EWZ, ads for state-funded cultural events etc.
Get on the train or tram. Look at the billboards inside the carriage. Many of them will be ads for the SBB's own services or offers, or recruiting ads for drivers (especially popular at the moment), or the Gemeinsam Vorwarts campaign. These are all state advertising.
If you see all this and really think it's very little then I don't know what to say. Go spend some time in other places of comparable size and pay close attention to how many ads are by the state or state owned companies. It will be lower.
I don't thinkg this should mean that ads can't be banned but the government should absolutely be called out for planning to continue its own ads.
It just has no connection to reality.
I find it extremely hard to believe that someone would personally want to see more ads.
Do you believe physical advertisements represent that some sort of specific political system is in place?
1) Ads in cities are not penis enlargement ads nor mortgage ads. They are about what services are in which location in the city,
2) It's not really about ads, but about advertising in general, meaning you don't even get to show off the logo of your company. If there's a building standing in Cracow, it can't have any logos on it. Unless the company is rich, then it may have their logos. Good thing that Cracow in general doesn't have any tall buildings (well, just one).
For me it's socialism at its finest. Forbid the poor, allow the rich. From ideological stance I prefer seeing ads, because I dislike socialism more than I dislike ads.
Not the case anywhere I have been. Some will be for local businesses, most are for national or international behemoths. Pretty much the same as with ondline ads on so-called respectable sites.
In Poland basically everything is covered in huge adveretisements, "Kantor" here and there, car repair shops, etc. On bus stops all the walls are covered in them and there is even something on top of it, facing the road.
Drinving there is tiring, the brain just gets tired from it.
We think its part of slavic culture or something.
It isn't. It's the same, or worse, in Romania.
It's just rabid unregulated capitalism of the post communist countries, gone wild, where everything is about making as much money as possible any way you can, which means advertising everywhere so you can influence people to spend their money with you. Romania is now IRL what the internet looks like without ad block.
The ads for gambling and betting are the most nefarious, to the point it's becoming a societal issue.
To that point: https://imgur.com/UWqa8jX
https://x.com/choquei/status/1661450590474362887
I moved away from Poland a decade ago, and each time I come back I get distracted like crazy as a passenger in a car. My brain doesn't know what's happening for the first hour until I realize what's up.
Literally every 50m there's a billboard on a road, billboard on someone's house, billboard on a fence. From big companies (telcos etc.) through all kinds of local businesses ("Selling X", "buying Y", "repairing Z").
A relevant meme that is on point: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EvoPf6OWYAMC0Sd.jpg
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/11sbctl/krak%C3%B3w...
Actually finetuning the policies and regulations may provide the right incentive to both promote regular upkeep of buildings as well as funding them. Example: Ads over scaffold are only allowed every 5 years during renovations.
Totally agree. Particularly vexed by New York letting Sidewalk Labs put these billboards across our streets [1].
[1] https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/u...
They absolutely are.
https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/ridiculous-electron...
Would controlling things like this bleed into adjacent social controls, like how HOAs will prevent any house from looking too different? Or possibly take on other dimensions, like sponsored in-real-life product placement and word-of-mouth?
Regular people living their lives like to make arbitrary changes to their houses, which is why HOA rules are contentious.
Regular people aren’t paid to advertise as they go about their day. It’s not very comparable.
And I’ve never heard anyone suggest that word of mouth recommendations should be banned... That’s kind of an insane idea that isn’t even remotely possible.
We would all be standing there at the entrance of the supermarket exchanging awkward looks not knowing what to do until an old lady shows up and we grab a cart because she did. Then we follow her around the store pretending not to be looking, buying the same products. When everyone has paid and the old lady is long gone we have conversations about what to do with the things we've just purchased.
It takes effort to bridge the gap between users and manufacturers. We are used to the company doing the work and picking up the bill but the customer has as much need to figure out what solutions are available.
Having the company search the customer only barely works. It works but very poorly and only to some extend. The potential client feels bothered by the noise of endless offers and spends very little time on them. In stead of dangling your garden set in their face until one of them bites you can put it in a store next to the other garden sets.
Because pushing barely work products are limited to that what is instantly obvious.
Customers may also gather and inform themselves. They might willingly go to a conference and sit though lengthy presentations. In stead of screaming at you that I offer an email service a presentation is more about what sets it apart [say] its scripting interface.
If stores and conferences are still considered marketing the customer will have to put in more work to stay informed. They would tend more towards objective side by side comparison making the company more about the product than about marketing.
The pun of my joke was that customers are not stupid. They can find the breakfast cereal aisle and pick something entirely by themselves.
I thought it was obvious since the screaming contest is enormously frustrating. An overpriced mediocre product will allow for the largest budget which is most likely to win - so that is what you have to make? lame
I agree that marketing where they have an attractive person just show something is manipulative though.
One of the sponsored results is for an electric skid steer that I didn’t know existed. This is genuinely useful to know for small jobs.
Another sponsored result is for a delivery rental service that can bring them anywhere. Also good to know for jobs where I don’t want to go to an equipment rental place in the city to haul it myself to a site 150 miles away.
A separate example is that lots of airports have 3rd party off airport parking that is cheaper. A billboard on the highway to the airport that says “off-site aport parking $20/day, $80/week with 24/7 shuttle service every 15 mins” is literally all just useful information about a way to save money using a third party at a convenience cost that you wouldn’t think to look into.
Please consider that your worldview may be warped.
What I have observed is that almost without fail, I find out about really good, high quality products and services from friends and colleagues, through more general word of mouth, by reading reviews, and by research, not through ads.
In fact, it is so noticably true that what is being advertised to me is rarely what I want that I use advertising as a negative signal. If I recall seeing ads for something, I will consciously avoid buying it and that usually works out for the best.
So I conclude advertising is mostly important for duping people into buying things they don't really want or need, that are more than likely nothing special, and that society would benefit greatly from a ban on advertising.
How does this account for high streets becoming ghost towns in the UK? It seems like running bricks & mortar stores in the UK isn't financially viable.
I heard someone say Amazon did more damage to British town centres than Hitler's bombs.
I have gotten precisely one piece of marketing communication that had a positive value in my entire life and it was from an online restaurant supplier. One. Solitary. Closer to forty than I am thirty.
I just don't think the value proposition that you're talking about actually exists.
If you're a new business and you're any good and you do effective marketing, in a couple years you're an established business. Then you see their ad and you say "well yeah but they're an established business." Now they are, but at one point they weren't. And at that point they weren't buying as much advertising because they didn't have as much money, but if they hadn't bought any they'd be gone instead of established.
I also kind of suspect that big companies buy a lot of advertising specifically to outbid their smaller competitors on the ad slots, because the ROI is much higher for the company that wouldn't have been the customer's default, so the bigger company isn't buying the slot to build awareness, they're buying it to keep their challenger from doing that. And then most of the ads you see are for big companies.
But not all of them.
This is massively burying the lede here. Doing 'effective marketing' costs a large amount of money. Where is this marketing budget going to come from with a fresh business that hasn't begun to sell products at scale yet?
Yes. It requires an investment. Setting up a website. Maybe going to and speaking at relevant events. Sending out press releases. Etc. If you're going to setup a business and just not tell anyone, you probably shouldn't bother. And, in general, telling people and promoting your business is marketing even if you don't classically advertise.
Genuinely fantastic products spread like wildfire on their own, without paid promotion.
I'd love to live in a world where there's no advertising and so therefore the only products available have to be genuinely fantastic.
I can't see a downside - just as many products will still be needed for just as many people, so it shouldn't affect the economy negatively.
What would happen is we would evolve faster and have more safety, reliability, productivity etc. The lack of useless junk polluting the planet would be yet another positive.
Advertising is a net negative on human evolution.
How does the customer know anything about its merits if they've never heard of it?
> Genuinely fantastic products spread like wildfire on their own, without paid promotion.
What if it's not world changing product, it's just a new normal competitor in an existing market whose product is 2% better than average? Or is exactly average, but it costs slightly less? Don't we still want these things?
> I can't see a downside - just as many products will still be needed for just as many people, so it shouldn't affect the economy negatively.
An obvious downside is that it gives an even bigger advantage to incumbents with a known brand.
Its literally manipulation of those who have money to spend them on product they otherwise wouldn't, has absolutely 0 relationship on quality on the product (in extreme cases it goes directly against it). Word of mouth, unbiased reviews (yes, they cost something to keep the interference away but save you tons of money and time down the line). Its 2024, we are more connected than we probably should be. Manipulation always = lies, it doesn't matter how you wrap them around. We all have moral compass (barring sociopaths/psychopaths et al), and we all have opinion on such behavior.
Sure its like nuclear armament, once one does it many feel they also need to do it. But its purely emotional business on both ends (customers and companies feeling the need to pay for ads), where literally the only person truly winning is the advertiser (something about selling shovels during gold rush). Mankind as it is only loses, I don't see any way its morally justifiable. Even having less services say online available for free ain't a losing proposition if you look at long term damage of advertising.
This is an extremely strong claim. Certainly you'd concede that some ads contain truthful information. Like there exists at least one ad that is true. So then how is it "manipulation" for someone to post that information in a public space?
We jumped from "billboards are ugly" to "ads are categorically evil," and based on some pretty strong assumptions.
> Word of mouth, unbiased reviews (yes, they cost something to keep the interference away but save you tons of money and time down the line).
Okay, so how do you get the first person to buy your product if advertising is illegal? The base case would seem to require it. Same goes for "independent reviews." How do you find the independent reviewer? And this is ignoring getting a critical mass of customers for word of mouth to even work.
Conversely, I find this a weak claim. If most major uses of something are negative, one minor positive use does not trump the negative.
And even if a billboard is 100% factual, that does not necessarily means it’s a net positive to have constant visual pollution for something you may not even buy.
It’s manipulation of everyone, even those who don’t have the money to spend. They get into credit card debt instead.
They buy it and try it out. How do you think most things sell? It isn't advertising! When I go to the supermarket, I know they have food and home supplies. If you sell one of those things, get it on a shelf. My supermarket literally has tiny batch products from local cottage industry. If I need hardware, I know I can get it at lowes or Home Depot. I didn't need any advertising to know that a place that says "Hardware store" on the sign will sell hardware!
>What if it's not world changing product, it's just a new normal competitor in an existing market whose product is 2% better than average? Or is exactly average, but it costs slightly less? Don't we still want these things?
This will entirely occupy all conversation of most normal people. People LOVE to talk about their shit that is slightly better than the same shit you buy. People LOVE to tell friends and family and strangers about this product they bought that is just slightly different.
>An obvious downside is that it gives an even bigger advantage to incumbents with a known brand.
Which is why Coca-Cola still advertises right? Because advertising only helps those just getting started in selling a brand new product?
Example: I found out about JLCPCB from sponsor segments on electronics youtube channels, when they started their offering. Granted this is not a small business (the company behind JLC is a behemoth), but it is a Chinese company unknown in the west, that only did B2B before. They advertised directly to audiences that might be interested.
Those are all still marketing. Whether they're better than billboards depends on what the product is.
> You won't have the money to buy such billboards anyways.
Billboard space is available starting at on the order of $1000/month. This is well within the reach of a small business for a one month campaign and the dynamic billboards will even sell space on an interval of 15 minutes.
The fixed billboards in the most expensive cities are all Coca Cola and McDonalds because those cost the most and that's who can afford them, but the proposal is "ban all marketing" not "ban all marketing by multinational corporations".
The latter might be a good time though.
I see no problem with that at all. Somehow, as has been pointed out in this thread, Hawaiians, etc, seem to make do.
While that is the overall conversation, this specific subthread is rooted on a comment suggesting a world without marketing wholesale.
A side bonus is that this will eliminate a lot of useless garbage. Without advertising to manipulate people into buying things they didn't need and otherwise would not want, companies that sell junk will fail.
At any rate, finding customers within the constraints of the law (including a hypothetical advertising ban) is not society's problem, it's the company's problem.
If you have two customers and you need a thousand customers to cover your fixed costs, you're out of business before this has time to be effective.
> If there's no marketing, consumers in general will understand that they need to seek out products that they want and need, and will eventually find your new product.
What you're really implying is that somebody is going to set up a website or search engine for people to find products, and then marketing would be replaced entirely by SEO and payola.
> Without advertising to manipulate people into buying things they didn't need and otherwise would not want, companies that sell junk will fail.
The assumption here is that the companies selling junk aren't the incumbents. What mechanism is going to exist to help people identify what is and isn't junk that can't or doesn't exist already?
There's some element of magicking away the payola in this thought experiment.
And, of course, we know that these things are often corrupted. One of the major problems is that people want this most for products that are expensive, but manufacturers only send free/pre-release test samples to reviewers they think will publish a favorable review.
To do it right you need the reviewer to not have this dependency on the manufacturer for access, so they need money to buy the product themselves. Which is what you get with Consumer Reports, but they (haha) aren't funded by advertising, and then people on a tight budget forego subscription and don't know what to buy.
Because they are bombarded with effective psychological manipulation designed specifically to get them to buy buy buy without thinking.
Low cost items don't need that because this isn't going to be the only sandwich or bottle of laundry detergent you buy this decade, so it's as easy to take a chance on it once and try it yourself as to read a review which may or may not be biased, and then if it sucks you don't buy it again.
There are probably some exceptions in well-defined markets with a limited number of products like automobiles but those are actually companies that, in general, spend a lot on marketing and advertising.
The obvious answer is that you chose a risky business to go into.
There as a time when if you sold tiny hinges to mount stamps in a stamp collecting book there would be a Philatelist Monthly magazine or such that would be your target market where you can advertise.
You don't have a right to stay in business if the net effect of ccreating the conditions for you to do so is socially harmful.
Rapid hyper-growth of the sort preferred by VCs might not be so common in a world which banned advertising. I don't see that as an issue.
Spend your marketing budget on your fixed costs.
Also, is your product direct-to-consumer? Because if it isn't, there are established channels to sell it to distributes, and if it is, you're likely a big part of the problem (since marketing of direct-to-consumer products is not usually a tool to let people know about new quality products).
The only thing that would achieve is that a "word of mouth" businesses would pop up. People would sign up, product place stuff in regular talks about weather near the office coffee machine. You would visit your parents and they would told ask you to buy some stuff you don't need because they would get a cut. Would you prefer that? I surely wouldn't.
People have no idea how the world works, yet want to design laws and would like to force other people to act according to their preferences. It's so egocentric it's unbelievable.
So what ends up happening is that local businesses don't get any of the marketing opportunities which get bought out by big businesses with a large ad spend budget.
Obviously we need to stop companies from paying them off, but that's not impossible.
As you can see, we have never lived in a free market.
As far as search engines go, the search provider can wholesale ban everyone who even accidentally games the system. Put your widget catalog on a web page, be honest about your products and/or services, and you should be fine. I will repeat that, because i think this is the part that gets marketing graduates in a tizzy - be honest about your products and/or services. If you gotta lie about what you offer or can do, then i really could not care less if your business survives; there's already enough dishonesty in our society.
edit to add: i actually logged in on my computer to reply to another comment you made (they should just buy a house closer to the job) which was very good.
Also, search providers know that users will get mad if they can't access popular websites, so there's no way they'll cut those websites off at a whim just for "accidental gaming", not unless they're compelled from above. And then you have the usual issues with corruptible officials deciding which companies are good and which are verboten.
From a legal standpoint, this seems far easier than banning advertising of any form. Which, if you'll remember, has (some) constitutional protections within the US. In contrast, it's a bit more difficult to claim such a thing about SEO. We regulate the activities of business all the time, and SEOing just doesn't seem expressive in the ways that "free speech" are.
From a practical standpoint, I do not have a clue. It seems as if this would just drive the worst of it overseas, where it is not possible to investigate or to prohibit effectively. I'll await the other guy's answer, maybe he has something more clever than I can come up with on a Friday at 5pm.
So the way I imagine it would work is that you would register your product into an official registry (free of charge). Then if I need something specific I can search the registry for what I need, and your product might pop up, with links to your website, your videos, as well as all reviews and ratings. There could be a subsidy system that makes unreviewed products cheaper. If your product is really awesome, the awesome reviews should, in principle, suffice to make your business thrive.
Of course, whatever the system in place is, there needs to be work done to make sure it cannot be cheated: if people can pay to prop up their product, they will. But it shouldn't be necessary to pay to make people aware of a product that could improve their lives. Surely it should be possible to set up some kind of discovery system.
These are all forms of marketing, but not specifically advertising. I think what OP meant to say is "a world without advertising."
True, that's how I interpreted it.
This advertising is only legal to put in free versions of media that have paid ad-free versions, and to opt-in newsletters organized by product (so that people can pay to keep it out of their lives but if they're curious about innovations in a space or just want to know what's coming out they can get a slight discount for it).
This also gives an advantage to new companies, which is probably a good thing, though could of course be abused by a billionaire with fly-by-night companies, at which point we'd have to patch that loophole. Maybe with my favorite idea of "ownership disclosures", where the majority owner(s) of any given corporation has to be disclosed on product labels, so that you know if you're buying from Nestle or Unilever even if they want to obfuscate that fact.
Marketing for a certain idea, world view. Some may agree, others won’t.
That’s what we do as species. We talk, we collaborate, we argue, we market.
This can be monetary of course. But this could also be ballot vote on election day. This could be a change in behaviour of people to drive less cars, but take the train instead. Or convince people that advertising should be banned for large corporates.
Marketing is the art and science of achieving behavioural changes to your benefit.
Marketing is as much about selling a vision to a client as it is about moving the public.
There are plenty of pointless rebranding campaigns.
I think the test for me, at least for the kind of marketing/advertising that should be banned, is the passiveness of it.
If, while going through my day, I am interrupted by your billboard, banner ad, spam email, promotional app notification, street marketing person, etc. in an attempt to manipulate me into action, that is the thing that should be illegal.
If I walk into a shop and say "I'm looking for a camera", invite a business in to pitch for work, call somoene up for a quote, directly enter a query like "buy camera uk" into a search engine, etc. then I think that is ok. I have asked to be sold to, and I am mentally prepared for the fact of that happening (notwithstanding that certain techniques should maybe also not be allowed).
Quantity is of course relevant. But then again big corporations can do ANYTHING at a bigger scale than you and me.
Karma will you get more status and increase the likelihood of posts being upvoted. There are many guides online how to rank on HN in order to market your startup.
HN comments have influenced my thinking and my subsequent actions quite heavily in the past years.
The line you’re drawing is super thin and only theoretical.
Why am I acting so entitled about it?
I just am, and frankly you should be too! :^)
Seems about right - hopefully the same rationale can be employed in more and more cities.
And of course we all can prefer "cultural" advertisement to soft drinks, but If the intent is to reduce visual pollution, why does the content of the advertisement matter?
It's like being in a dark room and putting your laptop display to max. In front of everyone stopping at the red light. Not sure who's the genius behind it, but I think the ad has opposite effect of people hating the product advertised there.