As widely reported a few months ago, the Brazilian city of Sao Paolo passed a law banning all outdoor advertising. The law came into effect earlier this year, and the last few months have seen all of the ads dismantled and taken down. Now Tony de Marco, a local flickr user, has put together a cool photoset documenting the strangely barren adscape. It's kind of haunting, like an advertising zombie movie.
Is the ban progress? Or does it remove some of the character of the city? I'm not sure.
It's clear our industry has gone a bit mental sticking ads on every surface we can find. And we could use a few wake-up calls. But the answer is surely not an outright ban - it never is, regardless of whether we're talking books, films, or what have you. Hopefully instead the industry will smarten up and realize that finding ever newer and bigger ways to interrupt people isn't the answer. Being interesting and useful is. And with any luck, the interesting and useful stuff will be proven more effective, and the interruptive stuff will continue its decline in effectiveness, eventually reduced to a quaint historical relic.
Via boing boing (thanks Alona!)
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