Retro Urban Spam

Following up retro craft week of last week, - was it good for you? It was good for me - I checked out a photography exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery, a small but lately strong collection of shows, on the work of a local Vancouver photographer named Franz Herzog.  The best work was from the fifties and sixties chronicling life in Vancouver.  I really enjoyed the nostalgia of my hometown from years before my existence.  What really struck me was the tremendous amount of advertising clutter that used to exist that today has been cleaned up.

I don't know if this is unique to Vancouver but it put a question as to how pervasive the urban spam problem really is.  Don't get me wrong, the last thing the world needs is more crappy ads and logos adorning our streets but undoubtedly there is a happy medium without going as far as Sao Paulo.  (Fruits of Imagination directed me to this neat Flickr group of images in past ad Sao Paulo before the billboard structures are removed.)  Then again it would be gorgeous (or really drab) to see cities around the world with ads removed. 

What will be interesting is to see where the monies and efforts will be invested for ad dollars in Sao Paulo.  Will this lead to ever better and more creative TV, Radio and digital advertising.  More "digital billboards" on websites and "sponsorships" and logos on everything digital.  Will that coin a new term of digital spam.

Who knows, but lets have a party down there and start to find out. 

Image courtesy of Equinox Gallery.