business idea: experimental marketing (Utility poles and free speech)

Below is an interesting article from the Sunday Star about posting on city utility poles. I happened across it while chowing down on some Sunday vitels. A pleasant surprise considering I was discussing just such an idea a few days ago.

Utility poles and free speech

If it were a war, as some suggest, this would be one of its fronts: A weatherbeaten utility pole at the corner of Queen and Bathurst, hundreds upon hundreds of rusty staples clinging to its splintering girth.

They're the legacy of decades of posters announcing everything from the disappearance of a much-loved pet to a garage sale to a fledgling band's gig to, on one recent afternoon, a curious proposition to "Breathe Less, Live Longer" (from the Buteyko Breathing Association of Canada).

These are the familiar, the traditional: neighbourhood communiqués writ just large enough for locals to notice, then take or leave.

But on main arteries, like Queen, King, Yonge, College and Bloor streets, neighbourhood notices are withering beneath a flexing of corporate muscle. A recent survey: Companies like Gillette and Amp'd Mobile, blockbuster movies like The Reaping, or mega-clubs such as Koolhaus have pasted over the humble one-offs that sprout up from the grassroots.

"It's been a real shift," says Matt Blackett, creative director of Spacing magazine, which grew out of a campaign to save postering. (The magazine's first issue, in 2003, the slogan: "Freedom of speech is a thousand times more beautiful than clean lamp posts.")

But paving the way for corporate takeover is not what Blackett and company had in mind. "The ones who can afford massive outdoor advertising campaigns are the ones who do the most postering now," he says.

On every second pole on Queen, a massive baby-blue poster with bright orange lettering heralds "Freedom," a sprawling, corporate-sponsored musical event at the Guvernment. Underneath it, a handful of smaller postings are cast in darkness, invisible.

Help is at hand, at least in theory, in the city's current postering bylaw, which is in limbo until the city's new street furniture is installed. Under that bylaw, the city draws a distinction between commercial and community postering. Commercial posters would still be allowed on the new street furniture's kiosks, leaving the utility poles entirely to the community.

But with no date for the furniture set, the postering scene is in chaos. "The people I've ended up protecting are breaching all the etiquette," says Blackett.

For years, posterers jockeying for patches of pole space adhered to a common courtesy: If a rival event is current, don't paste over and don't tear down.

Then, suddenly, postering became identified with a type of urban cool that became saleable to marketers and their moneyed clients.

"That's how we sell ourselves to clients – `take a walk on the wild side with us, but know that your posters are going to be properly maintained,'" says Brian Irwin, the general manager of Grassroots Advertising, a Toronto-based company that does posters for big-name clients like Alliance Atlantis, ClearChannel and Universal Music.

Grassroots is one of a half-dozen postering companies in the city. (Grassroots, though, only posters construction hoardings, not utility poles.) Irwin estimates that the number of posters his company puts out annually is well into the hundreds of thousands. "We should be in the printing business," he said. "It's a ton of paper."

All of it, of course, pasted up in the great outdoors. "It's a huge problem," says Chris Phibbs, in the mayor's office. City crews scrape utility poles on a regular basis, with the mind to taking down the commercial postings. "Strictly speaking, they're not legal," she says. The city has the authority to charge the postering companies for the cost of removal, but rarely does so.

The city means to leave the community postings up, but on thickly layered poles, a clean scrape is usually the only option. On a neighbourhood level, some Business Improvement Associations, like those in Little Italy and Roncesvalles Village, carry out their own poster-cleansing, and tend not to discriminate between community and commercial.

Not long after, of course, the posters are back – more, brighter and bigger than before.

Irwin's posters are constantly being covered by others. "It's free rein out there," he says. "We're in a bit of a street war, to be honest."

On residential side streets, the skirmish does abate, in favour of community dispatches. "It's the lost cat ones that always get me," Blackett says. "They're extremely personal. They mean so much more to me than a huge ad for some nightclub. This is how a community talks to itself."