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aesthetical effects of open-air media © copyright by victor aquino 2001 2006 wea books publishing inc monroe la usa all rights reserved inquires should be addressed directly to world editions of america books publishing inc 94 elm st monroe louisiana 71201 usa 3

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i several years ago during a meeting of advertising agents organized in paris by sodecom society of communication studies for the market i had occasion to meet several professionals from the united states to discuss subjects related to the academic research situation in the area it was curious observing their shock when i mentioned the case of visual pollution in our large urban centers they were even more surprised the following day when i took on the question at one of the official working committees naturally this had not been a very sympathetic subject in publicity circles it may well be because this very thing was responsible for the deterioration not only of the horizons but the entire urban space there are hundreds sometimes millions of different visual elements on the same street from the central zones to the peripheries of any city in the whole world 4

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until now no large work on the subject has been undertaken the effects of all this congestion at some moment will for certain give rise to some type of individual or collective reaction one imagines that the reaction will not be very positive it should have at least something to do with an unwanted excess just as lampreia comments emphasizing the question of quantifiable excesses in publicity yang e linz also call attention to other aspects of the problem relating to its content however even without debating the issue of content which is moreover highly controversial the simple mention of the problem of environmental saturation by large advertising messages is already reason for active constraint for a long time it has been noticeable that among publicity professionals there subsists beside the natural corporativism of those who practice the same activity the sensation of a comfortable neutrality towards other problems other than those most immediate and by implication directed at the efficiency and the practical effects of campaigns and advertisements the constraint that discussion of this type usually generates in this professional environment besides indicating that it is the clue to a certain awareness problem serves also to point in the direction of a growing necessity to begin worrying about the subject since the rise of external media which dates probably from the appearance of the 5

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first sale or first merchandise counter up to its adoption as an instrument of promotion signs billboards banners posters and an endless number of variations of those well-known displays that proliferate through the streets of the entire world it has even arrived at the point that a commercial establishment is not even conceived without the necessary external designation there will have been probably the anxiety of commercial competition that produced this longdistance dispute in an informal competition to make oneself noticed among competitors and competitors it should be pointed out that don t just express themselves at the level of similar merchandise it is above all a use of appearances as a whole of all merchandise services brands ideas slogans institutions public or private and so forth whoever observes today through the access roads of the periphery to the enter of whatever large city of the world perceives immediately that the signs billboards outdoor lighted and the mega displays are already incorporated into the scenery this incorporation however represents an irregular and unplanned growth in the whole of constructed elements such as the large roads avenues streets passages viaducts squares and monuments since they were not objects of a planned configuration and tend to increase with time it is not difficult to see that more will be constructed soon in what could turn out to be a big and very serious problem 6

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ii the problem itself speaks to the impact that the whole so-called open air media or highway media will end up producing environmentally it cannot be predicted what the extent this infinite number of visual elements will have in the future what is known thanks to a few and superficial studies on the subject suggests a certain spatial saturation indicating that the governmental concern in some countries is already sufficient indication to have a clear idea that we are facing a very serious dilemma it was at the beginning of the 80s starting from a working group set up in the discipline of record production at editing course in the art and communication school university of sao paulo that this problem began be discussed the work group set up originally to discuss questions relating to the excess of noise normally caused by record stores ended up coming up against even if tangentially 7

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also the question of urban visual saturation by the exaggerated posting of advertisements at that time while teacher of the aforementioned course i ended up exchanging some ideas on the subject with one of the most famous brazilian professionals professors and researchers in the field of advertising prof dr otto scherb just a little before his death the thenpresident of espm escola superior de propaganda e marketing surely already the principal school on marketing communication and advertising in sao paulo brazil also was starting to be concerned with the same theme i was working i told myself at the time that advertising agents precisely because they are advertising employees involved with urgent and immediate topics have the tendency to be overly concerned with immediate interests whose importance loses sense over the long term perhaps for that some of their initiatives end up taking on a certain predatory tone the opinion of the late professor who before dedicating himself to academic life ended up earning a reputation as an executive in the advertising world enough to be somewhat incisive but it was understood that this was the reason for his proverbial weakness accustomed to hastily prioritizing ideas that went from what was really necessary to what was dispensable he did not tire in affirming that to sell a product to washerwomen you shouldn t fail to announce it equally to the bishop 8

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when the council of the department of public relations advertising and tourism of art and communication school deliberated at the beginning of the 90s setting up a single large line of research in its undergraduate and graduate courses the necessity presented itself to reopen discussions on the subject the line of research that then was chosen was contemplating quality of life and communicational opulence as priority of academic concerns both in advertising and public relations the large evidence of necessity for academic concern in this area is that it combines the study of the techniques of persuasion with ethical arguments and the aesthetics of advertising consists in the expectations of the audience in front of the function of the advertisement regardless what category people become used to living with advertising in their day-to-day life without questioning very much its efficiency or its real necessity more than sufficient reason to produce at least one investigation all this spectacle of colors forms and ideas would not be failing to further the true ends of a process that is just to sell products ideas or services if the answer is yes we will be running into another problem regarding the redundancy of this type of communication redundancy that in the words of bohrer everything that exceeds in propaganda besides being useless gets in the way 9

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if on the other hand the answer is no the problem is still greater this is because the principal objective of the advertisement that is announcing products ideas or services would be running into the question of environmental invasion compromising excessively the whole of planned urban elements and producing an unnecessary visual excess in this sense the formation of a specific work group was sought in the advertising course of art and communication school at university of sao paulo with the intention of studying the subject there remains not the least doubt of what it says in respect to communicational opulence in light of a problem that surely affects quality of life 10

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iii the greatest difficulty since the beginning has been with the formulation of an adequate research methodology the environmentalization of the study was sought by stages in three different universes to know the center of the city of sao paulo four municipalities of the so-called greater sao paulo area that corresponds to the metropolitan region of the capital an finally a study comparing the data of the two initial phases and three other brazilian capitals porto alegre belo horizonte and salvador the objective of the proposed division is to obtain by means of the systematized map a panorama of indiscriminate exploration or not of the spaces of open-air media in an papere published in 1989 fair considered worrisome the impact of advertising media in third world countries exactly for associating promotional exuberance with a false idea of development almost always the use of open-air media is related through the characteristics that are 11

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its own to an exaggerated eloquence of the advertising argument and with this argument as can be perceived evolved the physical and spatial dimensions of billboards so quickly was the initial universe defined other problems precluded the realization of the research that of the formulation of an individual system for the data collection in the specific case of the initial step we opted for material collection by means of photographic images that is selected the block composed by a square area formed by the perimeter of four streets or avenues that intersect document the whole space with photos from those subsequently emerged what would be unalienable to local commerce and that which simply would be serving as display for affixing advertisements in a disorganized and occasional way following a year of continued research more than two thousand photos were obtained proportioning an initial calculation of some parameters to know what would be normal and what beyond being excessive would occasion some type of harm to the urban environment for example there is already existing legislation that has no other finality other than taxation the so-called cadan of sao paulo city hall serves only as registry for the collection of a tax on the use of external advertisement regardless of origin nature or concern with explicitly aesthetic or visual aspects 12

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there are about four million external advertisements that fit into the aforementioned cadan by means of the photographs obtained in the course of the initial phase of this study a projection could already be foreseen that could swing to at least double this number it is important to point out that even there it is even having an unmeasured impact the registry does not even serve the purpose of enforcing the law which is simply to tax open-air displays worse than this is admitting by the evidence that a much greater problem persists such a problem as it was supposed since the beginning of the study speaks directly to the compromising of visual spaces chiefly by the cluttering of signs billboards banners lettering and advertisements of whatever type all of them more and more add new elements congesting not only the physical urban area like the very capacity of perception of audiences that remain exposed to its occurrence gade already at the beginning of the 80s coincided with the opinion of another much earlier work on the adaptations of the consumer to the stimulation of propaganda the author that preceded him in this area dunn still today is held as a classic on the subject principally for being preoccupied with the question of excess at a time in which this had not come to present the same problem the study on open air media proposed in a third world country ended up being itself considered redundant this is because one could not escape the merely quantitative aspect of this study even so the evidence to which the excesses are harmful cannot be overlooked 13

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eldersved dodge studying way back in 1954 the case of mailed media was already a warning for the inconveniences of this practice today that is so common amongst us and in a way it was already foreseeing a brutal transformation of postal services into an instrument of unloading this avalanche of current-day promotional materials it would not be found strange therefore if open air media ends up turning into a giant conglomeration of scrap iron because the simple accumulation of non-reusable promotional material already detected by the photographic revelations of the current study indicates that not long from now we will be facing another more serious problem that of also contributing similar pollution to the physical deterioration of urban spaces 14

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iv the aforementioned study produced untilnowenoughofasuggesti ve indication inrespecttothefo rm sofuseofopenairmedia thereistoconsider firstofall that it is divided into three large wholes a designations of commercial establishments of services or of institutionsofanynature b supported designations or integrated pieces of advertising campaigns or permanent promotional programs c fortuitous designations of businesses of any nature so the cited classification should be made clear in the sense of not only facilitating understanding on the part of users as a future regulation with the intention of correcting the anomaly the designations of commercial service or institutional establishments or any nature correspond to a hundred of forms and models of advertisements these regardless of the dimension include signs billboards lighted signs in the most 15

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