Ads have a place in Canada’s vibrant cities, but Spacing‘s senior editor says not all of it belongs
Artist: Adam Cruft
Just because you love public space doesn’t necessarily mean you hate advertising. Case in point: Shawn Micallef, who has observed tons of good and bad advertising during his urban treks. (He’s taken his fair share of them as the author of Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto.) Co-founder of Murmur, a mobile phone experience that delivers stories to people about the place they’re standing in, Micallef is also excited about finding cool ways to get people engaged with their cities. Advertising plays a big role, he says, in reading the souls of those cities, and he appreciates brands that show they care about their visual identities.
The theme of TEDxToronto 2012 is “alchemy” and your talk will focus on the miraculous way lots of layers come together to make a city work. Where does advertising belong in the mix?
Good cities are commercial places, so certainly advertising is part of it. You go into a city and the stuff that gives you a sense of the place—apart from the odd historic plaque and street signs and public art—is the advertising on the stores and buildings… a city without any advertising would look kind of boring.
What type of advertising do you notice most while exploring the city? What works best?
The ideal is if advertising is directly linked to the establishment that it’s on. I [tend to notice] really well-done signage on a store where it doesn’t look like it’s mass produced, but is custom made. In Kensington Market the new Sanagan’s [Meat Locker] has a wooden façade and the signage seems unique to that place. Another place there called Bungalow has a sign with stylized lettering—they’re all cutout letters. That kind of advertising really catches my eye when it seems like they’ve made an extra effort to hire a proper designer and given some thought to the visual identity of the place.
What about sponsor signage at public events? Which brand has done a good job of that?
The Virgin Festival that used to be on Toronto Islands seemed to do it nicely, especially around the entrance to the ferry docks that took you to the festival. Virgin has a very distinctive logo with that red colour, so it really caught your eye. But sometimes you go to festivals and it’s just a vomiting of logos next to the stage; there’s just too much going on. That said, the great thing about the city itself when you’re out in public is there’s this chaos of different store signs. That’s what makes the streets really unique.
You’ve worked on Stroll City, an interactive media project that displays tweets about Torontoon the city’s subway screens. Given general advertising clutter these days, was it hard to get people’s attention?
I think so… but then if your subway isn’t there you have to wait and people’s eyes wander. With those screens there’s something useful as well as advertising: [they show] the weather and when the next train is coming. So pairing the Stroll City observations with an ad, I think we had a better chance of capturing people’s eyeballs. I was in the change room at the Y and someone said “Are you the weather guy?” So he hadn’t read my tweets; he saw my [profile picture] near the weather. It was funny, but also a rather good insight into how people look at this stuff: they look really quickly and make quick associations.
What advertising do you see as an all-around flop for public spaces?
The stuff that gets into people’s way either physically or visually is the annoying stuff. There’s just such a dumping of A-frames for all the condos… they are the worst kind of guerrilla marketing. I know some people enjoy kicking those things over because they get in your way physically. And one of the problems a lot of people have with the billboard proliferation in Toronto is that it gets in your way visually. Sometimes you just want to see the rest of the city or the landscape and they’ve plunked all these billboards in the way.
Also, those information pillars on the sidewalks in Toronto, which I think are near universally reviled because they’re in your way and do nothing but advertise. They were supposed to have maps, but the maps were crappy and small and it was mostly ads. They become blights on the landscape when they’re like that and that’s I think where it goes too far. But definitely when they’re directly geographically linked to a [store] nearby that they’re advertising for, that seems totally fine and good.
