São Paulo bans public advertising
Now why on Earth have I not heard about this before?? Here I am, reading my girlfriend’s Adbusters Magazines, cooking up dumb ideas on how to pay for $1.000.000 worth of street advertising, just to fill it with either empty spaces or ads for a healthier living, then this comes along. And it sneaked past me totally unnoticed.
São Paulo has banned public advertising from the beginning of this year. That’s it. No more advertising in the public space. As told by Campfire Media:
The law doesn’t stop at billboards, either. Provisions also ban all other forms of publicity in public spaces, including handling out fliers, ads on busses and taxis, even banners pulled by airplanes and ads on blimps are all outlawed.
My oh my. I can’t even imagine how that would feel like. A city, populated with 11 million human beings, and no ads. As this article from International Herald Tribune (which also is quoted in the aforementioned article which also links to this Flickr set) states, this has caused an uproar from the advertising industry, and frankly, I can’t really foresee how this will affect jobs, sales etc. Time will tell. But let’s face it; the future of advertising lies on the Internet anyway - provided everyone gets access to it of course. Which again might seem a tad hard to realise in São Paulo somewhere in the near future, I know. But looking at it from this perspective, why not get rid of all public nuisances and bring back the beauty of murals, good graffiti and aesthetic architecture?
A promising prospect, I think. Remind me to visit São Paulo one day…
On this day...
... in 2005: Going by the numbers?
Apr 20th 2007
Very interesting indeed. São Paulo is on my have-to-visit list for other reasons though. The city may very well be the most multi-ethnic city in the world:
- 5,000,000 inhabitants are direct or indirect descendants of Italians. There is a building named Edifício Itália (Italy Building), in honor of the Italians.
- 1,000,000+ are direct or indirect descendants of Japanese. São Paulo has the largest number of Japanese outside Japan.
- There are 3 mio. Portuguese descendants, 2 mio. Spanish, 1.5 mio. African, 1 mio. Germans etc. etc. etc.
(All according to Wikipedia which also claims that the greater city area houses 19.7 million inhabitants)
What a treat! What a melting pot! It must be truly awesome to experience such diversity in a single city. And banning advertising only makes it even more compelling. The city’s Latin motto is Non ducor, duco, which translates as “I am not led, I lead”. They seem to take that rather seriously.