PASSAGE 3 – Questions 21-30
ADVERTISING – ART OR POLLUTION?
How many adverts do you think you’ll see today? 10? 30? According to the market research firm Yankelovich, some of us see as many as 2,000-5,000 adverts a day! There are adverts all around us. Most of the time we’re not even consciously aware of them. But think about your town or city. How many billboards, shop signs and posters does it have?
Tokyo, in Japan, takes urban advertising to the extreme. Although the city temples may still lay claim to being more impressive, the explosion of sound and colour in the commercial centre can take your breath away. Whether you find the overall effect stunning or nightmarish is a question of personal taste. However, it would be hard not to admire the advertisers’ ingenuity. Recent innovations include interactive games projected onto walls for people to play. ‘Smellvertising’ is also catching on - that’s the idea of using pleasant smells like chocolate to attract consumers’ attention!
Innovations in Tokyo are of huge significance in the world of advertising because where Tokyo leads, other cities soon follow. Big cities from New York to London already have outdoor television screens. Although Tokyo is far from being universally admired, many urban authorities find its approach to advertising exciting and dynamic. So what’s the problem?
If every city copied Tokyo, it would be absolutely terrible!’ exclaims Roberta Calvino of the advertising watchdog group, Ad Alert. ‘At the moment, Tokyo’s futuristic style sets it apart. It invites our attention because there’s simply nothing like it. But we don’t need 100 poor imitations. In many cities, advertising is as bad as litter or vandalism - it spoils our environment. Go beyond the city outskirts and you’ll find that advertising is taking over the countryside, too. The world’s biggest advert was actually in a field in Austria, below the flight path to Vienna airport. It was the size of 50 football pitches!’
According to Roberta, advertising can also influence the way we think and feel. ‘Advertisers want to convince us that their products will make us happy or successful. Unfortunately, that’s all an illusion - you can’t simply “buy” a celebrity lifestyle at the shops! Nevertheless, advertisers work hard to get us to swallow this message. For instance, fashion brands prefer to advertise using images of glamorously made-up supermodels because they want “ordinary” girls to feel inadequate in comparison as the more dissatisfied we feel with our lives, the more we’ll spend to cheer ourselves up! Although outdoor advertising may seem to make less of an immediate impression than TV commercials, its message can have greater force.
In 2007, one Brazilian city made a radical protest. Gilberto Kassab, the mayor of São Paulo, ordered the removal of more than 15,000 adverts! In justification, he condemned urban advertising in very strong terms as ‘visual pollution’. Unsurprisingly, this made many local businesses unhappy. One marketing executive argued that adverts ‘are more like works of art, hiding grey office blocks and industrial estates,’ However, a more typical response can be summed up in this statement from Isuara dos Santos, 19. ‘If we’d known what a difference it would make, we’d have got rid of the adverts years ago. Now we can see the real Sào Paulo, and it’s wonderful!’
