There’s a few thousand “More trains/trams/buses = less traffic” stickers out there, but it’s not that common to see them “in the wild”. By “in the wild” I mean stuck to cars that are not owned by PTUA committee members or their friends and family.
I don’t know who owns this little white car, but I was thrilled to see it had a “More trains = less traffic” sticker on the back of it.
It’s a bit hard to read the sticker… here’s a better picture of one (on my car):
You might think it odd, but the stickers were designed to go on cars. The implicit message to following motorists is that if PT were better, that car (and lots of others of course) might well not be on the road.
Also observed in the world of promotion yesterday — it seems Penguin Books are jumping on the bandwagon of bill posters, more commonly promoting concerts.
6 replies on “In the wild”
Poor, poor Bill Posters, the most prosecuted guy around…. ;)
Hey! Don’t knock Penguin’s 75 new books promotion! I appear in their YouTube ad (I’m the guy who looks like a young Tom Cruise at 1:14).
Are those posters actually illegal?
I am now bamboozled. I don’t see anyone looking like young Tom at 1:14.
The other strange thing about that ad, it seems to defy to current racial quota which decrees that 50% of the females and 0.0001% of the males appearing in any ad should be Asians.
So that makes two of Daniel’s readers to appear in the Penguins ad (I’m the one who doesn’t look like a young Tom Cruise).
I have also seen bands advertising their wares with a rip-off (homage?) to the Penguin orange layout – maybe it’s all come full circle.
Yes, they are illegal – it’s the same as spraying a tag. You can’t deface someone else’s building without permission. Daniel thoughfully included the ‘Post no bills’ sign, so we know that the building’s owner has explicitly refused permission to put up this form of advertising.
The problem is if you are the owner: who do you sue? Penguin? The advertising company? The company that actually stuck the poster up? The grunt doing the deed? If you did go after Penguin, I’m sure their defence would be that the advertising company was exceeding its instructions and they would promise to be very stern with them. Similarly with the advertising company. If you want to go after the company sticking them up, how do you even find who they are? And, of course, in the unlikely event that you actually caught someone sticking up posters, and they were convicted, it would be a minor penalty and certainly wouldn’t hurt the companies actually responsible. In all cases, the monetary cost of actually sueing someone would far exceed any damages you would get.
It’s one of the things I do if I were Premier… Make the companies being advertised responsible… and allow the owner to retrospectively set the ‘advertising fee’ for the use of their wall per day (limited only by some ludicrously high value). It would kill this form of advertising stone dead. Of course, I am sure the advertising companies would wail about how it would kill the Australian live music industry…
Must be in a grumpy mood today :-)