Results tagged “ads”

Embattled by the state's economy and some of his (and his staff's) own missteps, Governor Paterson is considered an underdog to run for governor next year. But here he is, releasing television ads touting his case. The NY Times says of the pair of ads, "The two ads, each 30 seconds long, highlight his biography and address criticism Mr. Paterson has faced from labor unions and business interests over his proposed cuts to the state budget. Both directly confront what polls say is Mr. Paterson’s central political problem: widespread public skepticism that he has the ability to lead the state effectively."

The Parks Department is about to impose heavy new regulations on the pedicab operators in Central Park, but the New York City Pedicab Owners Association is begging the city to backpedal. Under the new rules, pedicabs will be forbidden from areas where taxis and carriages make pick-ups; required to operate in the right lane of traffic, not the bike lane on the left; and, weirdly, prohibited from displaying advertisements at times when other motor vehicles are barred from the park.

Over this past weekend Jordan Seiler, who runs the Public Ad Campaign, organized a billboard takeover in New York. Artists and those who just wanted to help came together, many of them as strangers, to create something new where there were once illegal advertisements. Though many of those spots were reclaimed by ads the next day, the project was still successful on some scale. This week he told us about that day, and the overall goal for projects like these.

A former Miss Oklahoma is suing a Flatiron District strip club because owners have been using a photo of her in those advertising cards street hawkers shove at passers-by. Laci Kay Scott, 22, says she's never been a stripper or even posed nude—such activity would disqualify her from the pagaent circuit—and has had to repeatedly deny her presence on the pole to friends, family and colleagues. Most of her fashion modeling consists of posing in prom dress ads targeting teens, and the photo on the cards distributed by Ten's Gentlemen's Club depicts her in a backless, gold-trimmed gown. One designer predicts the false stripper connection "would reflect unfavorably" on future jobs, and Scott describes the impact as "personally distressing and embarrassing" in court papers. Of course, her lawyer sounds even more appalled, telling the Post, "It is absolutely offensive that Ten's would steal the image of a young woman and use it to attract men to the private rooms and what we can only imagine goes on back there."

The owner of a home-based Staten Island travel agency could be in for a huge payday from Carnival Cruise lines. A Brooklyn federal court judge has ruled that Carnival violated the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which prohibits faxing unsolicited advertisements. Sherman Gottlieb, owner of SMG Travel, says the company has been bombarding him with fax ads since 2000, despite repeated cease-and-desist faxes and phone calls to Carnival. He pegs the number at 1,387 unsolicited fax ads, and since the TCPA sets fines at $500 per fax—with triple damages of $1,500 per fax if they're sent knowingly and willfully—Gottlieb could collect millions of dollars in damages! Carnival doesn't deny sending the faxes, but the company says they only sent maybe 540. According to the Staten Island Advance, a ruling on the amount of damages is pending; in the meantime, anybody got a cheap fax machine for sale?

Is Poster Boy angling to be street art's Keyser Söze? He's only fooling the Paper of Record so far, after a friend of the artist told them “Poster Boy can be anybody.” Mysterious!

When we first heard of Poster Boy it was for his subway ad "mash-ups." More recently a video came out showing him work on a much larger scale, above ground, and promising it's a sign of what's to come. Earlier this week we tracked down the anonymous artist to ask him about his plans, ideas and why he does what he does.

This month there was a strong reaction against the new Coke ads running on the subway windows. The MTA has now spoken up and the organization's Jeremy Soffin tells us that it's merely "a month-long pilot designed to test the effectiveness of this material in discouraging scratchiti. We are evaluating both whether to test this further to fight scratchiti and whether it is a potential source of advertising revenue, although the focus is on the scratchiti at this point."

In case you weren't feeling confined enough while riding through the underground tunnels of New York, the MTA has taken a step to ensure everyone gets that cozy feeling of claustrophobia during their commutes. As shown in the above photo, the organization is now allowing full window ads. These aren't the kind that you can see clearly out of either, as one disgruntled straphanger noted: "outward visibility is significantly reduced in outdoor lighting, and severely reduced to totally eliminated at night or in low lighting." Someone bail the MTA out before we all become walking billboards.

The MTA is currently testing out new digital screens that display ads on the sides of buses running on the M23 route. The screens, which use GPS technology to change according to each neighborhood's demographic, are being installed by New York-based ad company Titan Worldwide; the company's website declares that the 12-foot displays "are bright and unavoidable and will enable advertisers to target mass audiences by time of day, block, zip-code, demography and ethnicity." Yay!

Following the news that garbage trucks would soon be creative canvas for advertisers, and with ads already in and now around subway cars...it was only a matter of time before the interior subway tunnels themselves became a money-maker as well. Who looks out the windows while underground? Who knows, but LA has commercial images projected on the interior of tunnels, and now NYC is going to try it out. The NY Times reports that "starting next spring with the 42nd Street-Times Square shuttle, passengers will see advertising outside the windows as the train travels between stations. The messages will look rather like jumpy 15-second TV ads." To illuminate the underground with your ad, it'll cost around $95K for one month. Okay fine, it's actually kind of cool. But if you think the adsuration of NYC stops there, think again--turnstile arms (Purell should really get in on this action), station interiors and exterior station walls are also up for grabs now.

Nothing wrong with helping mend the huge city deficit by putting up ads right on city property, right? Billboards are already filling up the skyline, and advertisements have even begun to wrap themselves around the subway cars...but what if they were on a garbage truck? amNY reports that one estimate shows that "the city could generate up to $10 million to put toward billions in deficits by selling ads on garbage trucks and city vehicles." What surface of the city isn't marketable to a client at this point? Vanessa Gruen of the Municipal Art Society says told the paper that: "It seems to make sense that there would be a saturation point. Once it spills out to residential areas …people object to having it in the neighborhood." She also noted that it's hard to imagine "Chanel or Gucci putting an ad up on a garbage truck." [via Curbed]

      

After his mother died from cancer, Dr. Robert Jackler of Stanford University worked through his grief by searching out print tobacco ads from the '20s through the '50s. Appearing in publications like Life and the Saturday Evening Post, the ads featured such cigarette-smoking luminaries as Rock Hudson, John Wayne, Joe DiMaggio, Ronald Reagan, and Santa Claus. And of course there were plenty of models hired to pose as doctors and dentists for ads with slogans like, "38,381 Dentists Say, ‘Smoke Viceroys.' They can never stain your teeth." Because if it was only, say, 38,300 dentists, nobody would have bought it.

      

Not satisfied with making sure New Yorkers know exactly how fat they're going to get off food at chain restaurants, the Health Department is taking its calorie crusade underground with a new educational campaign that launches today. The posters confirm your worst suspicions about fast food and also expose deceptively harmless snacks, like a perfectly innocent-looking apple raisin muffin, for the high-calorie frauds they are. That cute little muffin packs 470 calories—nearly a quarter of your daily allowance, which officials put at 2,600 calories a day for adult men, and 2,000 for adult women. (Sorry, ladies.)

The One Times Square building is empty. Why? Because the owner can afford it by selling ad space alone. It costs $300,000/month to advertise on that structure -- one of things you'll learn in this behind-the-LED-screens look at Times Square.

     

Subway ads are always undergoing transformation, but And I Am Not Lying recently spotted a more advanced form of subway ad art. He reports:

Those great big billboard ads you see on the subway are nothing but giant peel-and-stick Coloforms, really. I love the accidental collages you see when people randomly pick and peel those thing like they’re great big scabs, and I just knew it was a matter of time before someone started making art out of them.

Not the first time sci-fi has overtaken the streets of New York (last year the USPS installed some R2D2 mailboxes), Spike TV has sprinkled Star Wars ads all over town. Their most eye-catching yet involves lightsabers in a bus shelter (pictured), which amNY spotted at West 34th Street and 8th Avenue.

After some City Council members were caught red-handed using public funds to distribute self-promoting ads to voters--even in election years, which is illegal--the council voted 48-1 in favor of banning the practice. The vote comes on the heels of the release of a report [pdf file] by Citizens Union that showed elected officials spent $1 million in paid advertising singing their own praises during the last five years. According to The New York Sun, city...