Urban spam and corporate responsibility

Russian blog Metkere posts several pics of how Ikea enacted a sort of lovely guerrilla redecoration campaign on some subway cars in Novosibirsk. If you don’t care to look at a map it’s somewhere halfway north of Borat and Genghis Khan (via PSFK).

Meanwhile here in NYC we have stuff like this as of last month - subway trains wrapped entirely in hideous advertising inside and out. It’s been done a few times on a stunt basis in times past but looks to become a regular thing now.

Russell Davies started talking about urban spam a couple years ago (dunno if he actually coined the phrase but he’s the first Google result for the term):

I’ve been thinking about urban spam… It’s clearly subjective; one person’s spam is another person’s useful service or entertaining promotion. Just like with email spam. It’s just the balance of annoyance to usefulness is way out of wack. But I think the reason it winds so many people up is it makes us examine the deal we’ve done, as a society, with marketing and forces [us] to decide if we want to do it again.

Of course as individual members of society we have very little say in the matter outside of advocating for controls on outdoor advertising. But it is perfectly possible and legislation is happening in more and more places.

It’s also a matter of corporate responsibility though. If you own or manage a media outlet - now defined as any visible matter anywhere - consider how naked, public hatred for your media might affect your brand. Be smart. Play nice. And don’t provoke a revolt that puts artificial constraints on what you can do.

In Russia, Ikea surprises and delights with prettified subway cars. In NYC, the MTA sells a large chunk of our daily visual field to the tune of $125 million in advertising revenue for 2008. And untold psychic damage inflicted on 8 million New Yorkers. Chalk one up for the downsides of living in a major city - eyeballs.