"Billboards and commercial messages dominate the public space like never before. Can we reverse this visual pollution? This Space Available looks at diverse activists from the worlds of advertising, street art, and politics. Influenced by the writing of Marc Gobé ( Emotional Branding ), his daughter Gwenaelle directs with tremendous verve in her depiction of New Yorkers and others around the world who want to reclaim the integrity of their cities against an onslaught of visual pollution."
This Space Available is a documentary film that recently came out. It is so new I could not view the film in it entirety because it is not available yet, however there was plenty of clips and interviews and written material on their website to fully understand their message. In my research I came away with a few key points.
- Advertisements are trying to stand out in visual clutter by creating more clutter.
Everyone in the advertising business is using the same tactics to compete against each other. This way of advertising is not creating a diverse visual language for the consumers. When different advertisements are using the same techniques and mediums they all look the same to the consumer. When bombarded with the overflow of visual pollution from ads the average consumer will just stick with buying the product that they know, in most cases that would be the most established brands of major corporations. Visual pollution must make it even harder for smaller companies to be seen.
- Protecting the identity and image of a city is crucial, advertising taking over public space destroys that image.
Each city has its own individual identity through various things like the architecture of buildings, famous and historical landmarks, artworks, and more. These things make up the visual personality of the city an directly effect the personalities of the citizens. When the structures of the city are diminished by the advertisements plastered on them, the message in the ads influence the identity of the city and its citizens.
- It is inappropriate to be considered as a consumer all the time.
Unless you live in the middle of no where you cannot go anywhere without encountering some sort of advertisement. Ads have penetrated into our daily lives. they have been customized for us based on our demographic, what we search online, the credit cards we have and more. We have to remember that our public space is for everyone not just for the use of advertisers.
- In our society if something is not profitable it is not valuable.
We as a society need to learn to value things other than money as valuable. Money is really a placeholder that eases the exchange of goods and services. Somehow money has become the goods, we spend money to advertise profitable goods (not necessarily quality goods) in or der to make money. Ridiculous.
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