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Monday, January 16, 2012

City Without Ads

Having worked in advertising (producing and directing TV commercials, doing print and radio), I've come to the opinion that the vast majority of it is mind poison.

I think this is especially the case with mass advertising. I'm not going to go into my reasoning, you can do that for yourself. Just watch your kids eyes glaze over at the site of the latest shiny piece of useless junk shown on the tube (then after you buy it, watch it sit in the corner unused because it's actually boring or broken because of its shoddy construction).

And you sit there thinking that you've grown out of that kind Pavlovian response, even as you salivate over some car ad.

What's to do? Well, six years ago one city decided to ban outdoor advertising citing visual pollution. In 2006, Gilberto Kassab, mayor of São Paulo, Brazil, passed the "Clean City Law." Did all the businesses go under? Hardly. Here's a link to the website The Center For A New American Dream describing what happened.

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