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 Advertisers have no manners, zero regard for privacy and absolutely no respect for the sanctity of unmolested public space. They'll hit potential customers anywhere they can and are always searching for new ways to do so.
I can remember going to the ocean as a kid in the '50s and seeing banners towed behind airplanes as well as ads written in the sky by slow flying smoker-writers. Today machine emboss mile-long messages into the coastal sand while advertising entrepreneurs work out the details of casting brand logos upon the Moon.
While we wait for the arrival of the Moon Swoosh, you might be interesting to know that the invasion of the Flogos has already begun.
As the appended article asks:
[Imagine getting up in the morning, taking your cup of coffee and morning paper out to the porch or deck for a few minutes of peace, and, instead of starting the day under God’s pristine sky, you look up and see it’s filled with Mickey Mouses or little purple pills or Nike Swooshes or political ads. … The possibilities are as limitless as they are dismaying.]
 QUESTION:
Should there be laws to protect at least some spaces from advertising, or should every inch of this planet (and beyond) be fair game to advertisers?
COMMENT:
Until recently, the US Forest Service did not permit advertising within
our National Forests. Sadly, the agency caved to pressure from the ski industry.
Scott
Learn more at the Flogos homepage http://www.flogos.net
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Invasion of the Flogos
By Paul Greenberg
TOPSAIL ISLAND, N.C. — A German poet once said that the great advantage
of being in love is that one loses all interest in newspapers. Much the
same effect can be achieved by a walk on the beach, and without all the
subsequent consequences.
Time slows. The clock disappears. Only high tide and low count. The
sound of the surf lulls continually. Each wave is different, each the
same. The sight of the ocean stretching to the horizon steadies like
the stars in the night sky. … The news of the day? It is put in its
eminently forgettable place, unable to compete with the waves.
But a newspaper addict is not so easily cured. I find myself searching
for the local papers. No USA Today, please. That’s the paper for
airports and hotels, for the permanently transient. I want my news,
like my food, served up with a local flavor.
So I go scouring the little IGA next to the only intersection in town
with a stoplight. I’ll settle for even a week-old copy of the Topsail
Voice or Pender Post. It may be old news to the locals, but it’s fresh
to a visitor. And I still maintain my umbilical connection to the
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which is full of homegrown flavor.
But an unsettling story awaits in the Business and Technology section.
(“Look, up in the sky, it’s a … logo cloud.”) The things are called
Flogos, and are the latest way to advertise, says their inventor. A
former magician, he’s developed a machine that sends foamy clouds as
big as four feet across into the air, which can assume any shape the
advertiser desires.
Next month the air above Walt Disney World in Orlando is due to be
covered with Flogos shaped like Mickey Mouse. In the future you could
follow a trail of Toyotas or Schwinns or longneck bottles of Bud to
wherever they’re sold. The sky’s the limit, literally.
Imagine waking up on the beach one morning to find the sky filled with
the kind of ads you went on vacation to escape. The Disneyfication of
the world proceeds apace as a faux enchantment supplants the real kind
that Nature provides.
What impressed most about this long story is that it raised — and
dismissed — any number of questions about Flogos’ effect on the
physical environment, but nowhere did it discuss the visual pollution
they represent.
Imagine getting up in the morning, taking your cup of coffee and
morning paper out to the porch or deck for a few minutes of peace, and,
instead of starting the day under God’s pristine sky, you look up and
see it’s filled with Mickey Mouses or little purple pills or Nike
Swooshes or political ads. … The possibilities are as limitless as they
are dismaying.
The American genius for commercialization — of everything — strikes
again. How long before Flogos become as common as Muzak in elevators,
or Head-On ads shouting at you from your television screen, or some
disembodied, uninterruptable voice on your phone trying to sell you
something? The mind recoils. So does the spirit.
The news article, by Jay Reeves of the Associated Press, explores the
pros and cons of Flogos. Environmentally, there doesn’t seem to be a
problem since Flogos are nothing but a mass of bubbles — soap, water
and air — that soon float away. But the local office of the Federal
Aviation Administration might have to be notified when they’re
launched, lest the sight distract aircraft pilots. (Even so, you know
some lawyer somewhere will someday, somehow claim damages.)
Before reading this in-depth analysis of Flogos, I had no idea that the
University of Florida had a professor of English and Advertising, a
combination that alarms. Like an endowed chair of poetry and
propaganda. The professor’s name is James Twitchell, and he sees
nothing essentially novel about the basic concept of Flogos; he recalls
that once upon a misguided time there was a plan afoot to launch an
advertisement into space that could be seen every evening at sunset.
Happily, the idea remained only theoretical.
I don’t want to sound like an alarmist, or like the script of a B
sci-fi movie, but the Invasion of the Flogos may be imminent. The
danger is clear and soon enough may be all too present. There oughta be
a law, or at least a regulation. Quick. Before the need for one becomes
as evident as the once clear blue sky.
But no law, no regulation, can prevent this kind of mundane desecration
if something within us — some elemental reverence — is not offended by
the thought of a sky dotted with soapy Post-It Notes.
It’s not so much the absence of a law that allows such schemes to take
float, but a failure of the culture. Formal law is a poor substitute
for manners, for the old understanding that one does not deface others’
property. And the sky belongs to us all. It should be beyond such
intrusions. But somewhere along the confused line, we’ve come to think,
or rather assume, that the Universe is there for man to scrawl his
graffiti on it.
I doubtless make too much of Flogos, for they are only another small
but annoying example of the general intrusion on the private
appreciation of public spaces. Other examples abound, from the loud
cell-phone user next to you in the airport to the planners who figure
the best use of land is to raze every tree on it for parking. It’s not
Flogos that are the basic problem; they’re just one more instance of
how valueless we’ve come to consider the invaluable.
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