An Ogden Nash poem from my childhood goes like this-- "I think that I shall never see a billboard lovely as a tree. Unless, of course, the billboards fall...I'll never see a tree at all"
When I saw this story on CNN about a company that will help you from house foreclosure in trade for covering your home with an advertisement, I couldn't fucking believe it. Everybody's got an angle. Can you imagine how many of these might pop up in the U.S. if the economy doesn't improve soon? It will be like living in a huge aisle in the grocery store, with towering shiny people selling us tampons or dog food on the neighbor's garage door. Nowhere to look, nowhere to go to escape the Madison Avenue cranksters who thought this up.
Not everything bad is bad for everybody. This is a painful lesson to learn in life--someone profits from war, corporations make millions from mistakes, and ad agencies will cover your house with a douche ad for a few mortgage payments. Yuck.
America is quickly becoming a sad place, but I never thought I'd see it come to this. I have a couple of friends that have lost their houses to foreclosure--I wonder if this had been available to them if they would have done it. Will anyone do it? This should just be called "Dignity for Sale". There is no help without a catch, no compassion without compounded interest, and certainly no free lunch.
Am I the only one outraged by this? I live in New York City where everything is already a billboard...I guess the suburbs can't be far behind. We have wrapped cars, wrapped busses, projections on the sides of buildings...what's next? I loved the advertisement covered world of "Blade Runner".
I just don't want to live in it.
Seeya soon, Chris
Amen. Very well said.
ReplyDeleteyou know, in rural malawi people cannot afford paint for their shops. in comes "zain", a mobile phone company based in the middle east. they bought up a local mobile phone company and started aggressive marketing - distributing neon pink t-shirts and offering store owners to get their store front painted in neon pink or neon puple or whatever that color is supposed to be. now the color of the former cell-phone company was just "plain" red and blue. i met somebody from zain once and he said he was present at the meeting when the color scheme of the campaign was decided on and a person from the middle east said: "this is more african" and the malawian guy said "are you kidding me" - however, neon pink it was and it has taken over the country. there is almost no street without it. so the picture u posted looks nice, tasteful, ... in comparison ;)
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