One of the things I liked most about the Creative Review “green issue” was its admission that it couldn’t solve everything in one go (note my British turns of phrase), but that it was committed to getting its house in order and that the changes it made for its green issue—like the biodegradable polybag and recycled paper stock—weren’t just a gimmick but the first steps toward a sincere promise to address ecological concerns. To quote the article “CR and the environment” on page 36:

However, we know that this isn’t enough. There are a lot more aspects that we should consider including…

You can imagine my disappointment to get the new issue and see that the cover is back (no biodegradable polybag) and the indicia specifying the paper as Galerie One Silk, which doesn’t appear to be recycled, instead of the Cyclus Print (100% PCW) named in the last issue. It’s also a double issue, with “over 100 extra pages”.

Almost as disappointing is the “green issue” from one. a magazine produced by New York’s One Club, a non-profit dedicated to “the recognition and promotion of excellence in advertising”. They must have a different definition of “excellence” than I, as their awardees for their green issue include GE’s clean coal greenwashing, Diesel’s “global warming ready” clothing line, and BP’s Helios campaign which features a LEED-certified gas station as it’s centerpiece (or “branding beacon” as the Senior VP of Global Brand Marketing and Innovation calls it). Yes, a LEED-certified fucking gas station. Even BP’s ad agency Ogilvy & Mather admit the idea was:

Let’s take an existing gas station site and re-wrap it in an eco-friendly way.

Maybe just bulldoze it next time? I mean, it’s like they do this just to see if anyone notices how screwed up it is. They were probably giggling the whole time.

Speaking of “beacons”, the only light at the end of the tunnel was an article in the Creative Review by Tom Wnek about how the ad industry is (partially) to blame for everything from global warming to obesity called, “How Did We Get To Be The Bad Guys?” It offers a pretty good analysis of how “selling the sizzle, not the steak” has gotten us into some hot water. The next issue promises a part two on how to get out of this mess… Promises, promises.

My step-father is a business professor at Krannert School of Management and recommended I check out David Aaker, whom I guess is considered a bit of an authority on the subject. Aaker stresses relevance as an element of branding that a lot of people forget.

Relevance occupies the space between someone knowing who you are and someone liking what you do. Say I’m hungry for a salad. There are thousands of places I could go to get one (including produce stores to make my own). Even though I’m familiar with McDonald’s, it’s not going to pop into my brain as a destination. I don’t connect “salad” and “McDonald’s”, even though I might connect “food” with “McDonald’s”. It’s not relevant to the current question. Similarly, while I might consider Black & Decker relevant if I were looking for a hedge trimmer or cordless drill, I wouldn’t if it were a rice cooker I was after.

In this way, branding closely mimics findability on the web. Findability is the conceptual sequel to information architecture that stresses the process of users finding your information over the internal structure of the information itself. Do I care if your product is considered top of the line if I never click to the page that describes it?

The folks over at Xerox PARC (who have previously brought you the mouse, desktop icon, etc.) have put together a model of human behavior while looking for data that they call “Scent Navigation Information Foraging”, abbreviated both appropriately and hilariously as SNIF. SNIF suggests that people roam the web like hungry beasts in search of information. When we catch a scent, we bound off in that direction (by clicking a link) and smell the air again (by scanning the page). For instance, if I were looking for a job from Lockheed Martin, I wouldn’t expect to find a job description on their (awful) homepage, but I would scan for any trigger words that might help me get closer like “careers”, “jobs”, “opportunities” or failing those “about us” or “corporate”. Finding one, I’d pounce and then see if I could get closer from the next page, until I had the poor data-gazelle in my gnashing teeth.

With farms and factories producing far more than we could ever want, the problem of scarcity has been for the most part solved on a physical plane (though problems of sustainable production and equitable distribution of resources remain). Still, demand for branding remains high due to the “supply” of relevance being finite. We simply cannot hold information about the offerings of every single company in our heads. Our collective psyches are slashed and burned for profit, with very little regard for what we ourselves may or may not want to store in there. Cynicism, sarcasm, and an increased resistance to advertising is the end result.

A healthier and more sustainable strategy for branding may be to further pursue the foraging model in greater depth. Advertising would be limited to those seeking advertising, and specifically seeking the products being advertised. This simple evolution—contextual branding—is not only respectful, but how Google makes billions of dollars a year. Like other landscapes allowed to recover after intense resource extraction, perhaps our minds will eventually return to a more peaceful state.

I’ve always found urban decay beautiful, or I guess specifically I’ve found it hauntingly beautiful. Walking around the scenes from Henk van Rensbergen’s abandoned places photography really puts perspective (“Too much fucking perspective” I can hear David St. Hubbins say) on what we think of as major achievements. Shelley’s “Ozymandias” comes to mind.

I think we can agree that the ruins of modern advertising, while perhaps a worthy monument to a substantial victory in reclaiming our own mental environment, are a bit depressing. Fortunately, there are a great number of things with which we can replace these former monstrosities. Some of them might even be useful.

Solar panels are an obvious choice. I’ve been to Brazil before (they call it “Brasil” there… don’t they know how to spell their own country?) and I recall it being quite sunny and smelling like gasoline. I believe the term I used was, “like a wildlife preserve where the zebras drive Hummers”. Even putting aside any mock and/or pathological jingoism, solar would seem to be an excellent decision.

Art is another viable option. Why should big multi-national corporations get all the fun? Local communities should get a chance to decide how to decorate their own neighborhood. People are already doing this, just not entirely legally, which leaves a lot of people with important things to say—but who won’t jump a fence to say them—silenced.

Finally, call me crazy here but we could just take them down.^* Leaving them up as skeletons suggests that they need to be filled, whereas taking them down would leave our next generation with an impression that they never belonged there in the first place. Then, if advertisers ever wanted to put up billboards again it would represent a change in the status quo, both physically and mentally—much more difficult to accomplish. We’re never any farther than one generation away from an entirely different world.

There are other things we could do, certainly. Windowbox-style local gardens, windmills, dynamic information (temperature, traffic conditions, etc.), or even painting each one a different bright color could all satisfy the need to turn commerical chaotic into populist pretty. What would you do with your own billboard?

* Actually, this hadn’t even occurred to me until I asked someone else what they would do in the situation.

Beantown (named after Boston Baked Beans, no doubt) was shut down on a scale that San Francisco only reserves for peace protests, labor protests, gay rights protests, anti-immigration prote—you know what, let’s just move on. Anyway, Boston flipped out today at the discovery of “suspicious” devices placed all over the city by terrorists.

These “terrorists” turned out to be an advertising firm doing guerilla marketing for the upcoming Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie. In case that last sentence made no sense to you, let me put it another way. Boston went apeshit over Lite Brites giving people the finger. No seriously, here’s what they looked like:

You can’t see the finger, because FoxNews at least has the decency to blur out a cartoon bird-flip. Don’t want our kids to pick up any nasty pixelated habits.

As much fun as it may be to watch Boston freak out, this is not a victimless crime. I speak not of the poor people who were late for work (gasp!) but the creator of the devices who was arrested on “a recently enacted statute making it a crime to place a hoax device that results in panic“. I’m curious to know what the definition of a “hoax device” is, as these devices were clearly not hoaxes, but Throwies.

Webster defines “hoax” as “an act intended to trick or dupe”. In a world were we are constantly inundated by “hoax devices” trying to trick us into buying clothes by duping us into thinking we’ll be loved/feared/respected or trick us into buying cigarettes by duping us into thinking they’re not going to give us cancer/emphysema/stinkiness or trick us into driving cars by duping us into thinking that global warming isn’t real/dangerous/our fault, I think these devices do not qualify as threats.

The Anti-Advertising Agency correctly states that “advertising is the graffiti of the Fortune 500” and arresting someone for throwing light on a building, much less using such brash words as “terrorism” to describe it, leave me feeling very afraid for both our values and our collective Spidey Sense in this country. I place the blame squarely on the people who think LED lights are somehow dangerous (they don’t even get hot, clearly ranking them below Xmas lights on the Threat Level).

Adult Swim got some serious bang for their buck though. Hire these guys again!

Update (2/1/07): Following their arraignment, the two guys arrested for putting up the devices agreed to only answer reporters’ questions if they were about haircuts in the ’70s. It’s great to see that they’re treating this issue with exactly the amount of respect it deserves. Here they are laughing in court: