http://weburbanist.com/2010/03/06/clean-city-sao-paulo-scrubbed-of-outdoor-ads/
http://digg.com/travel_places/World_s_Fourth_Largest_City_is_Completely_Billboard_Free
The socialists’ dream: where nobody can know where to buy or sell things, and where bureaucrats determine the best use of other people’s property.
Who knew it would turn into an ugly gray mass when no one had an incentive to pay for paint?
Actually advertising is considered a form of pollution. It’s rather exceptional for any public body to have the courage to get rid of it.
Yes, Sao Paolo is ugly, but it was always ugly. Now it’s ugly and clean.
For clarification:
Are you a libertarian or Austrian economics adherent?
Why do you think that advertising is pollution?
Do you really think that the ‘public body’ all agreed to get rid of advertising? If it was then why didn’t individuals just take down their own ads? Why did it take a mayor if they all agreed in the first place?
I am an Austrian economist.
For the same reason that rivers don’t get unpolluted by the free will of the polluters. It requires property to responsibilize individuals towards pollution. As long as a mayor is the owner a public property, he is required to protect this property from polluters.
Billboards are public property in Sao Paulo? So then you aren’t against advertising boards on private property?
Saw this post and had to sign up just to reply.
We discussed this in my Marketing class last semester. Interesting that a Marketing professor was in favor of a government banning a form of advertising, considering it is part of his field of study.
Anyway, I brought up the fact that this is something that should be determined by the market. I said this is one man deciding what is best for everyone, and also putting hundreds or thousands of people out of work that were in the billboard advertising industry for no reason other than he thought the city would look nicer.
My professor disagreed and went on to explain that this happens all the time. He compared this situation to the automobile replacing the horse and wagon. I responded that these were not even remotely similar situations; the automobile was an advance in technology that was accepted as a better form of transportation by the free market.
I then went on to give him an example that was a bit more accurate. I said, what if a government official decided that Marketing would be better taught by corporations, and that all Marketing professors were out of the job, and there was nothing they could do about it. That was about the end of the discussion.
Note that advertising in movie theatres or on television wasn’t banned. Only advertising on public property.
Big picture of pichação in Brazil here (a building covered in what we would call graffiti). The practice is really common and some artists have been featured in US magazines recently.
I also came across this story.
I am just pointing this out because the advertising ban is probably a response to the big graffiti movement there. The pictures in that article don’t seem to paint an accurate picture of the scene there.
You must mean private property which is visible from “public” areas.
and I am the queen of England
I don’t see that distinction in the article or the video. However, let’s assume you are correct, you wouldn’t be against a private property owner putting up ads on his/her building?
That is the first thing that popped into my head after seeing this article. People should take up Graffiti on their property. What a great business that would be. Hire an artist to spray paint the ad. That would be great stuff.
It is not on his property. The proof is that if the property were to be walled in, the ad would be worthless and the “property owner” would not receive a cent from the advertiser.
What do you mean ‘it is not on his property’? If I put an ad on the front of my business…then what is the issue?
“Walling in” an ad would be a property crime. Have you not heard of easement rights?
It is on a public way that does not belong to you.
However if you put an ad inside your business, then that is on your property.
What do you mean ‘it is on a public way’? It is hanging from the building.
Exactly.
So wait, because the public can see it, that means it public property?
Let me pose it to you this way.
Should you have the right to walk around nude in your garden because it is nominally on your property?
