Let's Ban Billboards

Similar here but sort of the opposite, grew up with advertising and I didn't think it could possibly get worse. Then I visited Florida for the first time in a long time and I saw a floating ad on the water. Killed the trip entirely for me.

I once made a long drive through Vermont and was stunned at the absence of car-culture detritus compared to almost any other freeway I've seen in the US. Without all the gas stations and strip malls you can barely see the highway from a distance; it just disappears into the forest.

Kill billboards and you move the Overton window. Billboards are a no-brainer, so if we can't control them then we have no hope for any ads of any sort. If we can eliminate them then we can start on the next thing.

From [0]:

In the early 1960s, Washington was one of the first states to successfully ban billboards from freeways. An exception can be seen in the lands owned by the Puyallup Tribe along I-5 near Fife, where massive billboards and video screens now flank both sides of the freeway. (Being classified as sovereign nation, the Puyallups can have their own sign laws.) If that state ban had not passed, you would now be seeing hundreds of similar signs from Vancouver to Bellingham, from Port Angeles to Spokane.

The City of Seattle, like many other cities, later passed a law limiting the installation of more billboards, aka off-premises signs. This was an outgrowth of a national effort to reduce the proliferation of commercial advertising that was spoiling our views of mountains, lakes, forests, pastoral lands, and architectural landmarks. It also took an inventory of billboards, ordering removal of those that had been erected without permits.

The City’s law was challenged in court by Ackerley Communications, the owner of most of the billboards in Seattle. The courts upheld the law but the dilemma was that there were scores of billboards in all corners of the city. So a deal was struck that if a billboard that was near certain sensitive locations, like schools or parks or homes, and was then removed, a new one could be erected in certain acceptable locations elsewhere.

Many billboards are installed in parking lots or vacant lots that have since been developed and those could not be replaced, as sign owners lost the leases. So, therefore, over time, the number of billboards would gradually decrease.

[0]: https://www.cascadepbs.org/2012/08/hinshaw-billboards

It isn't a political statement there are other avenues in marketing besides advertising. If a product is genuinely good it should serve on its own. Advertisements lead too much opportunity for exploitation.

Establishing that you support the extreme action does not mean that you are unwilling to accept incremental action as well.

Let's start by banning billboards, and then let's keep going and ban more forms of mental pollution until the overton window has moved enough that we can entirely ban the ability to pay to control someone's attention.

I don't think GP was suggesting this a political policy worth pursuing, but was just stating a preference. And stating an extreme preference does not imply that one would not be pleased with incremental improvement.

I, too, would love it if all advertising just disappeared.

How? People would still use their money to buy things. A lot of advertising is adversarial. If demand stays the same but neither you nor your competitors can advertise your products, everyone makes more money.

Of course, there are lots of products where people don't know they would benefit from the product - or don't think of it. For example, life insurance, business loans, university education, movie releases, etc. In those cases, arguably the advertising is creating a positive for society. (Since its resulting in a need being addressed that wouldn't be addressed otherwise.)

Cancer treatment is bad for health too, but it's worth it to cut out and kill cancer before it kills the host. Not everything that is "bad for the economy" is bad for the humans who have to live under it.

You tell ChatGPT I said - if all it takes to destroy the economy is banning ads then the economy deserves to be destroyed.

Poland != Portland. But very close as they're both in the Northern Hemisphere, although not on the same continent.

Sopot, Poland[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sopot

Wait, doesn’t Austin have a billboard ban? There are some billboards but they’re grandfathered in and cannot be rebuilt if they fall over.

https://www.kut.org/austin/2022-04-21/advertising-companies-...