Can you imagine driving along a major road and not seeing any billboards or bright, back-lit company signage? In 2007 the city of Sao Paulo, Brasil, did something bold. The city's mayor banned all outdoor advertising and signage by implementing the Clean City Law or as they say in Portuguese, Lei Cidade Limpa.
Pretty drastic, but it's almost five years later and according to reports and feedback, the city and its business community is doing just fine. In fact, even the local advertising industry has figured out how to thrive and remain viable thanks to creative thinking, social media and other non-traditional marketing tactics.
If you've ever driven up Woodward into Bloomfield Hills you've surely noticed a visual difference in the affluent community nestled between Birmingham and Pontiac. Bloomfield Hills has a very strict signage policy. Signs can only be black and gold and fabricated and sized in a specific way simply because they don't want to pollute their community with poor, gaudy design. You're probably thinking a company like Ideation — who spends a lot of time creating and installing environmental graphics and signage — would have a hard time in a community like that.
Quite the contrary, actually.
Design is about quality, not quantity. Poor design and execution nullifies good placement and eyeball traffic. It's a significant reason why white space is more important than logo space or type space. Unless you're in the middle of New York City's Times Square, bigger, brighter and bolder doesn't always equate to better. We live in a 4-color world, but there's something refreshing about a reduction in visual noise that we've grown accustomed to in the marketplace. There's noise up and down the street. There's noise on the web. There's noise on your cell phone. There's noise in your mailbox and inbox. There's noise everywhere. You're only contributing to that noise when you layer communication on top of communication in order to be louder than the next person.
A few years back, product placement within movies and television shows started to become more popular. From promotional tie-ins with fast-food restaurants to the contrived placement of a specific brand of beer in every other scene, product placement is still figuring out how to be authentic in this medium. Because it has to. The traditional commercial has been struggling since the dawn of the VHS tape and continues on life support with the popularity of Tivo and the DVR. Like any type of branding, the stuff you don't notice is typically the stuff that sticks and the stuff that sticks is what's generally real and authentic. Clutter, however, is burning our eyes and causing us to ignore the message entirely. For brands to be effective in their communication, they need to give their consumer's eyes a rest. A police officer once told me that cops are trained to look a minute down the road, meaning that they are looking out for things that could become obstacles like hidden driveways, speeding cars and winding curves 60 seconds before they drive by them. By the time you're right on top of something it's too late to react. When you're a company trying to engage with your audience you have to focus on the longer vision rather than the quick impact.
With communities like Bloomfield Hills and Sao Paulo aware of the visual pollution that can plague their cities, there's a clean and calming feeling when you realize you won't be inundated by poorly executed design intended only to grab your attention away from everything else around you. It's not about being anti-advertising like Sao Paulo. Should we ban advertising and signage? No way! But we, as marketers and creatives should be more responsible for what goes out there.
It's not about being louder, it's about being memorable. Just remember, there aren't any 26.2 mile sprints.
Friday, May 4, 2012 at 5:07PM 