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The Cleaned City
In São Paolo, outdoor advertising has been outlawed as “visual pollution,” leaving the city’s landscape dotted with blank billboards and decayed frames. A year into the law, how has the city changed?
A little more than a year ago, São Paolo, Brazil, a sprawling metropolis of more than 11 million inhabitants, became the first major city outside of the communist world to put into law a radical, near-complete ban on outdoor advertising. Known for being the country’s cosmopolitan commercial capital, São Paolo put in place “Lei Cidade Limpa” or “Clean City Law,” and it was an unexpected political success, owing largely to the singular determination of the city’s conservative mayor, Gilberto Kassab. By casting public advertisement as “visual pollution,” Kassab struck a chord with much of the city, conjuring up images of a better, cleaner São Paolo, free from the daily visual assaults of the advertising industry.
Billboards, outdoor video screens and ads on buses and taxis were quickly removed across the city after the law took effect. Even pamphleteering in public spaces was made illegal, and strict new regulations drastically diminished the allowable size of storefront signage. Without its 15,000 billboards, the city felt like a battlefield, strewn with blank marquees, partially torn-down frames and hastily painted-over storefront fascias. São Paolo’s ads were often the size of the entire skyscrapers to which they were affixed.
Kassab brought the proposal to São Paolo’s city council and worked efficiently to gather support from the business community — the expected chief opposition to the law. “The Clean City Law came from a “necessity to combat pollution,” Kassab explained. “And as such we began the combat of visual pollution.”
Surveys conducted by São Paolo’s local media indicate the measure is extremely popular with the city’s residents, with more than 70 percent approval. Maíra Machado, a student at the University of São Paolo, is a strong supporter of the law.
“I like it this way,” she says. “We can really see the city.” According to Machado, São Paolo’s physical beauty was hidden behind big signs and billboards. And now that more than a year has passed since the ad ban went into effect, she says landowners have beautified storefronts, fixed buildings and improved how the city looks. “There’s already advertising in so many places,” she says. “The city is ours and we need to take care of it.”
Attempting to understand why the mayor would go to such lengths to end outdoor advertising, however, has left some Brazilians in a quandary. Roni Gotthilf, director of Fox Comunicação, a São Paolo advertising agency that makes — or made — billboards, speculated about the mayor’s ulterior motives for the ban. “The mayor wants to run a competition … to sell the rights to advertise in the city on bus stops and public clocks with thermometers, and if you have all these billboards in the city, the value of what you’re trying to bid on is smaller.”
The mayor went out of his way during the campaign to clarify to the press that he has no problem with advertising in and of itself, but rather with its excess. Alluding on a few occasions to the possibility of creating a certain section of the city where billboards would be permitted, he and his staff cited New York’s Times Square as an example. “It’s one thing to look at Las Vegas, and another to look at one street in New York,” says Ronaldo Camargo, the city’s lead bureaucrat in charge of implementing the law.
Indeed, the one place where outdoor advertising remains strong in the city is on publicly owned street furniture, including the items mentioned by Gotthilf. Additionally, a major media assault on the city’s modern subway system includes a new television station called TV Minuto, which is transmitted to more than 5,000 LCD screens in the subway cars and consists of 50 percent advertising. Though operated via private concession, the subway system receives a third of advertising revenues from the station. Traditional ads in the form of small posters, enormous hanging banners, and underground billboards provide a haven for otherwise frustrated advertisers.
One embittered player in the battle was U.S. multinational Clear Channel Communications. The corporation entered the Brazilian market in 1999, purchasing a Brazilian subsidiary as well as the rights to a large share of the city’s billboard market. Clear Channel sponsored a counter-campaign in support of billboards that did not resonate with the masses.
Paul Meyer, Clear Channel’s chief operating officer, told The Economist that “the ban on outdoor advertising in São Paulo is illegal and we will prove [that] the destruction of a business would certainly be against the law in America.” The company is still engaged in a lawsuit against the city seeking the repeal of the law, though city officials appear confident that their efforts will be unsuccessful. Over the course of the past year, nearly $24 million in fines were levied by the city for noncompliance.
Outdoor advertising has managed to hold on in some parts of the city. More than 300 billboards are still standing because deft lawyers were able to secure injunctions holding back fines against their owners. Cases continue to play out in court, but word on the street seems to favor a continued ban.
“Consumer society pushes us to do things that we don’t always need to do,” says Jorge du Peixe, lead singer of Brazilian band Nação Zumbi. “It’s a good initiative. It has complete support — not just mine — but from many residents of São Paolo, who felt that they were under attack from all of this undeserved and exasperating propaganda.”
This article appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!
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