by Garrison Frost

1.
Elected officials in the beach cities have found in the street banner the solutions for just about every problem. Want to raise money for nonprofits? Give them banners. Want to beautify an ugly street? Put up banners. Want to promote a traffic safety campaign? Put up banners. Want to please a major corporate sponsor? You guessed. Want to build support for a controversial development initiative? You guessed it again.

Experts in the field of communications estimate that the average American experiences about 3,000 to 4,000 advertising messages per day. Not surprisingly, research indicates that more and more Americans are increasingly turned off by advertising messages, particularly invasive ones. While this presents quite a challenge to advertising executives, it also explains why most people coming through the beach cities consider Pacific Coast Highway/Sepulveda Boulevard to be an ugly street. Although one could attribute this feeling to traffic, lack of parking and the commercial mix, one could also explain it by noting that the street is just a junky phalanx of signs, banners, billboards, placards and every other conceivable visible intrusion.

2.
Which brings me to the question of why officials often try to use banners and signs to beautify the street, to in effect use banners and signs to make all the banners and signs look better.

A good example of this is the "Celebrate Manhattan Beach" campaign that is occasionally employed in that city. Sure, one might contend that a pretty picture of the pier or a sunflower is attractive. But coupled with the message and hung on a light pole, it's just another sign, and in that sense it's not much different from an El Pollo Loco sign.

Would it be so bad to just leave the space empty? Remember that it's not the blue sky that makes the street look bad, it's the rampant blocking of the blue sky. We will return to this idea later.

3.
Officials are also turning more and more to the use of banners to inform and educate. In a way, this is nothing new. Cities for years have been hanging banners up on streets for a week or two to get people to vote or to let them know of a big fair coming up. To a degree, people expect this kind of thing. But the use of large banners and signs for the purposes of promoting a political agenda or an ongoing political campaign is just wrong. The cases of Redondo Beach's Heart of the City banners and Manhattan Beach's Stopper campaign illustrate exactly why.

In Redondo Beach, the Chamber of Commerce's Leadership Redondo group wanted to impress city leaders, so they came up with the idea of selling sponsorships to the giant banners which would be hung all around the city's harbor area. The official line was that the banners were meant to encourage the public to get educated about the massive redevelopment plan, but in actuality the catch-phrase "Leadership Redondo presents Heart of the City" and the names of various individuals and businesses could easily be construed as promotion. And that was the way the banners were perceived by the thousands of residents who were opposed to the plan. To them, these were not only street signs, but symbols of a political system rigged to the interests of politicians and developers.

These residents compelled their City Council to rescind the plan early in the summer of 2002, but because of contractual arrangements, the banners stayed up for months afterward as a reminder of just how foolish both the banners and the Heart of the City plan were. The use of this public "white space" was improper, and the end result bore that out.

In Manhattan Beach, the City Council opted to use the public white space to serve an equally faulty agenda. For years, people in that city have complained that out-of-control residential development has created a traffic problem in the city. Rather than address this core issue, the council decided to treat traffic as a psychological issue and create an educational campaign to encourage people to "Do Stop, Don't Speed." So the city is now spending upwards of $100,000 a year on this multi-faceted campaign (a good subject for another entire column), which includes street banners.

Again, officials are blocking the sky with banners that are destined to fail in their stated purpose. Traffic will not get any friendlier because education is not the problem. In fact, a case could be made that the signs will actually make the streets more dangerous, as each contains type that is way too small for a driver going 40 miles per hour to safely read.

And, for reasons stated above, the banners go totally against the stated goal of the city to improve the appearance of the street. Banners to make us forget other banners.

4.
Now we come to the use of banners and signs as fund-raising tools. When officials do this, they assume that advertising in public space will be less offensive when the profits from the selling of the space go to charity. But this fails to recognize two things.

First, advertisers don't care who profits. They only want access to the public space, which they would otherwise never be given. So, in effect, they're using the nonprofit for their own ends. Second, if ads are assumed to be ugly in and of themselves, then it makes no difference to us who profits from the sale of the space either. We see an ad for Payton Cramer Ford hanging across the street, blocking the sky, and we think it's ugly.

The previous example refers to Hermosa Beach's ongoing program of selling banner space over Pacific Coast Highway to raise money for charity. Of course, most peoples' opinion of this program will hinge on how they feel about the charities getting the money. That's fair, but it shouldn't be the only consideration. We should understand that it's not the charities being given the public space, it's the advertiser. And we should recognize that what's being given is ours, the public domain. The view of the sky belongs to everyone, and so we should be consulted before it is given away so that a private entity can profit.

The use of this type of funding mechanism is creative. City officials are selling our space, our attention spans, so that some money can go to charity. Inherent in this is an argument that there is no other way to raise these funds. But is that true? Have we used all other creative means to raise money for groups like Project Touch and the Education Foundation? I don't think so. I think the creative minds that came up with the banner idea could come up with something else that doesn't tinker with the public domain so brashly.

5.
While we're on the subject of banners, we should mention the Mervyn's Beach Bash banners that hung all summer in Hermosa Beach. These were a combination of all three of the uses mentioned above: banners for a species public information campaign, for political purposes and for fund-raising.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the background, here it is: each year, Mervyn's puts on the Beach Bash on the beach just north of the Hermosa Beach pier. This is just as much a lifestyle event as it is a sporting event, as it features music, skateboarding, BMX performing to go along with beach volleyball. Oh, yes, and Mervyn's ads are everywhere lest we forget that this is really just a giant ad for the clothing retailer.

Anyway, in order to grease the wheels for what has become a somewhat controversial event in the area, Mervyn's nicely "donates" about $40,000 each year to the city of Hermosa Beach's Parks and Recreation Department (in addition to the fees it pays for the event itself). This $40,000 goes toward various pet projects that the Parks and Recreation Commission can't find funding for, including the skateboard park (which itself is littered with Mervyn's ads) and a giant community picnic. Keep in mind that it is the Parks and Recreation Commission which votes each year on whether to recommend the Beach Bash to the City Council. But still, both Mervyn's and city officials deny that any quid pro quo exists with regard to the signs.

Anyway, each year Mervyn's is allowed to put up giant banners all throughout town promoting both its even and its stores. This year, somebody in Hermosa Beach had the genius idea of allowing Mervyn's to leave its banners up all summer long, as long as they contained some kind of message to encourage people to drive, bike and walk more safely.

The ensuing banners were really just ads, and all the more annoying because they used what little traffic safety messaging they contained in service of the sales pitch. "Drive Safe, Shop Safe" read one ad, "Walk Safe, Shop Safe" read another. I think you get the idea.

So what exactly was the payoff for residents for this gift of the public domain? Were the signs a trade-off for the community picnic? Or for political goodwill for the Beach Bash itself? Or safer traffic?

I think it's safe to say that the only entity that really benefited from the banners was Mervyn's, and not the residents who gave up a chunk of their blue sky in exchange for nothing.

6.
Another aspect of this is the Adopt-A-Stormdrain program. Put together by a nonprofit organization, this program involves selling sponsorships and banners to private entities. The money raised from the sales go toward storm drain upgrades.

Pretty much everything that's wrong with other banner programs is wrong with this gem, except it goes one further: It allows major polluters such as Chevron a venue in the public domain to make the claim that they are environmentally conscious.

Sure, Chevron isn't the only one putting crap in the storm drain, but they put more in there than most people, if only through their ongoing efforts to promote a gasoline-based transportation system.

But that hypocrisy aside, an even stronger philosophical argument against the Adopt-A-Stormdrain program is that it aims to combat one form of pollution with another. We exchange the blight of pollutants in our ocean water for the blight of visual pollution over our streets. Why would anyone think that was a great idea?

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