In 2006, Gilberto Kassab, mayor of São Paulo, Brazil, passed the
"Clean City Law." Citing growing concerns about rampant pollution in his
city, Kassab decided enough was enough. But this was no ordinary piece
of pollution legislation. Rather than going after car emissions or
litterbugs, Kassab went after the billboards. Yes, you read that right:
Kassab wanted to crack down on "visual pollution."
Saying that
visual pollution was as burdensome as air and noise pollution, Kassab
banned every billboard, poster, and bus ad in São Paulo with the Clean
City Law. Even business signage had to go. Within months, city
authorities had removed tens of thousands of ads both big and small—much
to the dismay of business owners, who said the ban would surely ruin
them.
Five years later, have all the businesses in São Paulo gone
under? Hardly. In fact, most citizens and some advertising entities
report being quite pleased with the now billboard-less city. A survey
this year found that a 70 percent of residents say the Clean City Law
has been "beneficial." "São Paulo’s a very vertical city," Vinicius
Galvao, a journalist, said in an interview
with NPR. "That makes it very frenetic. You couldn’t even realize the
architecture of the old buildings, because they were just covered with
billboards and logos and propaganda. And there was no criteria."
Where businesses are concerned, it turns out some advertisers are
actually thankful for the ban, as it's forced them to reevaluate and
improve. "Companies had to find their own ways to promote products and
brands on the streets," Lalai Luna, co-founder of ad agency Remix, told the Financial Times
last year. "São Paulo started having a lot more guerilla marketing
[unconventional strategies, such as public stunts and viral campaigns]
and it gave a lot of power to online and social media campaigns as a new
way to interact with people."
Anna Freitag, the marketing
manager for Hewlett-Packard Brazil, said her company had never
considered how inefficient billboards and the like were until they were
illegal. "A billboard is media on the road," she told the FT.
"In rational purchases it means less effectiveness... as people are
involved in so many things that it makes it difficult to execute the
call to action."
If you're thinking São Paulo's ad ban isn't
replicable in your city because it's some South American backwater,
think again. São Paulo is the largest metropolis in the Southern
Hemisphere, and, with about 12 million residents, the 7th-most-populous
city in the world.
Big cities don't need to plaster ads everywhere to
exist—though you'd never know it looking at Times Square—and even if
they did, Kassab and his supporters haven't banned all advertising. All
they've asked is for companies to stop cramming commercials down
people's throats while simultaneously ruining their city's beauty.
Estimates say some Americans now look at upwards of 4,000 ads per day. When is enough enough?
Photos courtesy of Tony de Marco
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