art not ads

What is this all about?

This website is the start of a campaign to replace intrusive advertising in public spaces with more thought-provoking content. Imagine, for example, spending your commute to work sitting opposite a painting by Turner, instead of an advert for the latest mobile phone. Or perhaps you'd prefer to read an extract from the writings of Sun Tzu, Shakespeare, or Socrates, instead of gaze absently at yet another billboard advertising car insurance? We hope one day to make this possible.

How will this be achieved?

In order to achieve this, we could encourage people to simply tear down or deface advertising. But of course we couldn't possibly incite such behaviour (although, if you're in that kind of mood, you may want to check out the billboard liberation front ). Instead, we want to start a fund which will pay for the placement of "anti-ads" in spaces currently used for advertising. We are aiming to start small, with just a single ad placed in a London Underground station. But this will be just the beginning. Check out our roadmap to see the rest of our plans. In summary, we want to set up a charity or foundation to fund and promote the placing of thought-provoking content in place of advertising. If you want to help us out, please join our pledge at PledgeBank .

If you're not quite convinced, then read on for a discussion about why intrusive advertising in public places is disastrous for us all.

So what's the problem?

What makes public advertising so bad? Why should we seek to prevent it? Surely it enables private companies to profitably provide new and interesting services, for a non-paying public?

People today are surrounded by intrusive advertising. Whether you want to see them or not, you are probably exposed to dozens if not hundreds of advertising images, every day. Billboards are positioned next to major roads and junctions; buses are decorated with pictures of celebrities and TV shows; your magazine or newspaper will be littered with ads. And advertising no longer means clearly-delineated adverts. We are subject to "product placement" in any major film, for example. Over the decades, this has become a routine part of our lives. The accepted wisdom is that we should accept this, since advertising pays for certain services which would otherwise cost us money. However only a small percentage of the ads that we see every day are funded by services or products we actually use. The vast majority are hoping to persuade us to upgrade to the latest version of a familiar product, to swap a current service provider, or simply to buy something new that we don't need.

Most advertising is designed simply to persuade you to spend more of your money. This is the focus of advertising: to create a constant churn of customers, each with the desire to possess more or better goods. At the heart of this is a deeply unpalatable suggestion that people can be made to desire and purchase anything, regardless of the need for that product. People will make a purchase not because they need to, but because they have been told to.

A brief history of advertising and marketing

Advertising is the primary tool of marketing companies. The goal of a marketing organisation is to "price, promote and distribute goods, ideas and services" 1. Three or four decades ago, the approach was "product-led". In other words, a company would try to persuade the public to purchase their product, regardless of the desire or need for that product. After the 1970s, the emphasis shifted to "consumer-led" marketing. As the name suggests, this model is driven by the belief that the customers will be far more willing to purchase goods and services that they actually want. This seems to make sense, and to be a fairer way of allowing the customer to decide what they want or need. However, the desires of the customer have now become the target of advertising and marketing organisations. It is this desire that they seek to manipulate, and to inculcate. Rather than persuade the customer to buy a product, the provider now persuades the customer that they want the product. Rather than send a salesman to your house, marketing organisations now persuade you that you need the product, and wait for you to make the purchase yourself. Advertising is key to this business model. Without advertising to create and maintain the desire, it will be very difficult to market the product.

Use of advertising to fund public services

For decades, advertising has been permitted in public spaces. It has now become ubiquitous in most cities and towns. This is due to an increased willingness for public services to take funding from advertising. And so there are two issues: first, the "customer-led" model of marketing which permits advertisers to persuade people that they want something they may not actually need, as discussed above; and second, the ingrained notion that advertising should be permitted to be ubiquitous.

The funding of public services is often cited as a defence of this second issue. In using this as a defence of advertising-funded services, the implicit suggestion is that a free service must be good or useful. Unfortunately this does not necessarily follow. It is entirely possible that a free service could be awful, or useless. A secondary defence is often that the service would otherwise be unavailable. This argument is equally invalid. A truly indispensible service could be provided by many other means: public funding through taxes; volunteer work; charitable contributions; and so on. In fact, these methods are by far the more common means of providing public services. Use of advertising indicates a laziness and lack of thought on behalf of the fund-raisers, and a willingness to foist the burden onto the public as a quick solution. It would be very difficult to find a public service that is funded completely and only by advertising revenue and yet is genuinely necessary or useful. So this defence of advertising as a benign and benefactorial doesn't stand up.

The purpose of advertising in public spaces

Any public service provider that displays advertising is no longer in the business of serving their customers, but is in fact in the business of providing an audience for the advertisers. Take, for example, local transport systems - such as buses, trams, trains or the London Underground. These make heavy use of advertising. The display area is public, and has a guaranteed audience. The ingrained notion that the service relies on advertising means that we accept ads in these public spaces. But any service that is genuinely reliant on advertisers must necessarily reduce the importance of all other concerns, such as providing a reliable and efficient service to the public. Considering the example of public transportation, this leads to three possible conclusions:

1. The transport provider genuinely relies on advertising, and hence has to put advertising concerns on a higher footing than customer service.
2. The transport provider is not reliant on advertising revenue to provide customer service, but chooses to run ad campaigns to generate extra income.
3. The transport provider has somehow managed to place customer service at a higher priority than advertising revenue, while managing to placate the needs of the advertisers.

These conclusions can be drawn when considering just about any service provider that chooses to display advertising to its customers. Conclusions 1 and 2 are the most disturbing, since they clearly indicate that the primary role of the customer is to generate revenue. No longer is the member of public in fact a "customer", they have become simply traffic for the advertiser. The "customer" is in fact the advertiser, and the "service" provided is no longer that of transportation, but of guaranteeing an audience to the advertiser.

Conclusion 3 is far more pleasant to consider, since it appears that it would be possible for a service provider to have reconciled the provision of good service to the public, with the display of advertising in a public place. So for some reason, the service provider elects to display advertising to its customers, and yet doesn't need to do so. Unfortunately it is clear that this would be a very unlikely choice. Why display advertising unless it is necessary, or you wish to generate revenue? It seems we are stuck with either conclusion 1 or 2.

Damage done by advertising

There are other reasons to dislike advertising. Taking the example of advertising-funded televsion, we can see that advertising is largely responsible for the "dumbing down" of British television. In an effort to provide the advertisers with the largest possible market, programme makers must guarantee large audiences. The largest audience can be generated by appealing to the lowest common denominator. And so we see the rise of reality TV, which provides endless and barely variable televisual sludge, with little or no educational value. TV companies are so keen to attract football fans, that they regularly enter into bidding wars for the broadcast rights. Football has become big business, and every aspect of it - the mid-game ads, the team strips, the stadiums - is daubed with advertising. Increasingly these shows are broadcast during prime-time slots, whereas the amount of genuinely thought-provoking TV content broadcast at this time is minimal. The BBC and its detractors have fallen into the trap of believing that audience size is the crucial measure of success, and so have been drawn into the collective dumbing down. The opportunity to provide a genuinely provocative and informative public broadcast service has been squandered. Indeed, we the public expect the BBC to change, and to justify its continued existence and public funding. We have been persuaded that "free means good", and X-Factor is what everyone wants to watch.

Far more damaging than the simple reduction in intellectual content, the "lowest common denominator" approach encourages uniformity. It is easy to market and advertise to a uniform audience whose desires and ambitions are understood. Audiences are divided into socio-economic groups, and each group has an associated marketing strategy. Adverts are displayed at the optimum time and place to target each group. Credit card and loan ads are placed on public transport. Alcoholic drink manufacturers sponsor football tournaments. Entire swathes of the public are expected to want the same things, and behave in the same manner. This encourages a feeling within any one group of distrust towards any other group whose desires and ambitions are alien. Homogeneity within one group breeds fear and hatred of another. Although it is doubtful that this fracturing of society is deliberately encouraged, it is an unfortunate side-effect of current marketing and advertising strategies.

Then there is the more direct damage done by advertisers who manage to take editorial control of other information. David Cromwell, writing about Noam Chomsky's "propaganda model", describes the situation: "Newspapers have to attract and maintain a high proportion of advertising in order to cover the costs of production; without it, the price of any newspaper would be many times what it is now, which would soon spell its demise in the marketplace... [any commercially viable newspaper] has to hone itself into an advertiser-friendly medium. In other words, the media has to be sympathetic to business interests". He notes several examples, including: "In 1999, British Telecom threatened to withdraw advertising from The Daily Telegraph following a number of critical articles. The journalist responsible was suspended." Read more at The Propaganda Model: An Overview

The battle for the audience

Advertisers and marketers will go to incredible lengths to guarantee their audience, and public service providers will go to equally asotnishing lengths to help them achieve this. A couple of interesting examples:

The entire London Underground and bus systems have recently been upgraded to use "Oyster" cards instead of paper-based tickets, at a cost of millions. These cards allow Transport For London to collect incredibly detailed information on the millions of people using their services. This information allows advertisers to target their campaigns to a thoroughly understood segment of the public, increasing the likelihood that the advertised services and products will be purchased.

The "Nectar" loyalty scheme now encompasses supermarkets, wine merchants, telephony providers, and energy utilities. You can earn money off your gas bill by patronising particular shops. The tremendously powerful data collected is used to "cross-sell" products to people who will be most likely to purchase them. The conceit here is that the loyalty scheme offers the customer a great deal, whereas of course the value of the data collected far outweighs the goods the providers give away in exchange. As with the Oyster card, the data is extremely useful for advertisers looking to increase sales.

These are just two examples of the many extraordinary lengths to which advertisers will go in order to procure the public as an audience. With each victory the advertisers take, the public loses a small amount of the right to live without being subjected to constant advertising and pigeon-holing; the public makes the transition from a free-thinking, free-living, independent collection of people, towards a neatly segmented cluster of homogenous herds. Trivial examples occur everywhere, and nobody bats an eyelid. TV screens appear in train stations and theme park queues, displaying adverts and a lazy, corporate world-view to everyone who walks past. Taxis and buses have become moving billboards. These things have all become so common-place that it is difficult to think of a public place in a city that doesn't contain some form of intrusive advertising.