Battle of the Billboards
L.A.'s plan to spiff up sidewalks leads to more street-level ads than it bargained for
By Steven Rosen
The city of Los Angeles started its Coordinated Street Furniture Program as a way to improve and unify the design aesthetic along its cluttered sidewalks and, indirectly but not just incidentally, to stop people from going to the bathroom in the open. But it may have inadvertently sanctioned a new variety of street- and pedestrian-level outdoor advertising at a time when it's trying to control and limit billboards.
Kevin Fry, president of Scenic America, an organization opposed to visual clutter, compares the situation to the cautionary, futuristic sci-fi movies Children of Men and Blade Runner. "In both, the visual environment is filled with billboards, and that's shorthand for a dysfunctional society," he says.
Six years into a 20-year contract between L.A. and the outdoor-advertising firms CBS Outdoor and Decaux, the street-furniture program is making a visual impact around town. Bus shelters with gently arched roofs and small, minimalist benches in front of breezy, perforated screens are increasingly noticeable. So, too, are the three-sided "public-amenity" kiosks meant to welcome visitors to L.A. and its neighborhoods.
Most of the new shelters and kiosks are a soothingly environmental forest green, although a few other colors are available for use in special districts.
"They all have a similar aesthetic - they remove the clutter and provide a unified look to the street," says Lance Oishi, the Bureau of Street Services' contract administrator for the program. "They look semi-thought-out, unlike a lot of other eclectic things in the city."
The automatic public toilets that are a critical part of the program are also starting to appear. Their origins lie in a December 2003 City Council ordinance banning defecation and urination on public property - part of the council's controversial Skid Row clean-up effort. These small, private bathrooms look a bit like old-fashioned phone booths and offer sanitation and seclusion for users. A new one is currently being tested on downtown's Pershing Square; three more are due for Skid Row soon. Eventually, L.A. will have 150 of them - not just downtown but also near mass-transit stations and perhaps at Venice Beach.
"In the bigger picture, the thing that drove [the street-furniture contract] was a desire to pass an anti-urination/anti-defecation law," Oishi explains. "The city needed to have toilets for people to use around the clock. At the same time, to make the economics viable, [the toilet plan] had to tie into this latter program."
But to make that program economically feasible for private contractors CBS Outdoor and JC Decaux, who are footing the bill for all the street furniture and its maintenance, the city allowed them to sell 6-by-4-foot ads, approximately movie-poster size, in backlit display cases on the bus shelters. That's potentially lucrative, given the hometown entertainment industry's penchant for promoting its latest movies and TV shows via billboards.
So it's not uncommon, while walking around town, to come face-to-face with a close-up of a grim-looking Anthony Hopkins and the message "I Shot My Wife" (for the forthcoming film Fracture) while stepping around a bus shelter placed smack-dab in the middle of a sidewalk. Or, for that matter, the cast of Entourage promoting the new season.
Before 2001, CBS Outdoor had a bus-shelter contract with the city that allowed for advertising on its roughly 1,200 shelters. (While all those shelters, mostly dark brown or bronze and with more severe architectural lines than the newer ones, are slated to be replaced during the life of the contract, they're still used in many locales.) During the course of its new contract, CBS/Decaux is allowed 2,500 shelters citywide, of which 1,640 can have ads. (There can also be regulated advertising on kiosks.) In total, 3,300 pieces of street furniture will be allowed, and CBS/Decaux is guaranteeing the city at least $150 million from its cut of advertising revenue during the course of the agreement. It's currently supposed to provide a minimum of $3 million annually.
Meanwhile, however, a different company has been installing same-sized ads around town, presented in sleek metal frames with curved tops and tapered sides. (These are especially noticeable in Westwood and Hollywood.) However, they're on private property, attached to building sides or even sprouting out of the ground.
For instance, along a wall at the Blue Wave carwash at Westwood and Santa Monica boulevards is a small gallery of four panes featuring entertainment- or fashion-oriented subjects - all directed toward those waiting at an unsheltered bus stop on the sidewalk.
Metro Lights is the company specializing in these "panels," as they are called. A division of the New York-based Fuel Outdoor, it promotes the panels (as well as what it calls "wallscapes") on its website as the perfect way to reach not only pedestrians but motorists who spend "more and more time" inside their cars in a city where the average commute time is nearly 30 minutes.
When the city of L.A. tried to stop this practice, claiming the signs started appearing in 2003 and violated a 2002 City Council moratorium on offsite billboards, Metro Lights went to U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. It won in a First Amendment decision rendered last year and finalized this January. The city attorney's office, which declined comment but provided a summary of the litigation, is appealing.
Metro Lights' attorney, Eric Rowen, explains it this way: "What he [the federal judge] is saying is the city can't tell some people they can't put up the same exact signs that they let other people do, even if they're doing it in the guise of being the city. It's the same size, the same product."
The Metro Lights phenomenon is frustrating for Francois Nion, Decaux's Los Angeles project manager. The City Council chooses one-third of the locations for the bus shelters, and the Bureau of Street Services another third, to make sure all parts of L.A. get them. Although CBS/Decaux is allowed to select a final third on its own, it still must go through an eight-step permitting process that requires permission from eight city agencies, adjacent property owners, and neighborhood councils.
"We have a franchise agreement, and it has some commitments and duties, and the city granted us the right to sell some advertising on some of the furniture," Nion says. "And it's a citywide program, so we have to be everywhere, even if some areas or blocks are more commercially attractive than others.
"[Metro Lights] comes in, installing advertising panels the same size as ours on private property, but they select the neighborhoods that are more attractive," he adds. "Sometimes we can't even get a permit, and they can put up a sign without a permit."
He has suggested that, if the city can't stop this competitor, it reconsider the contract's revenue split or permitting process.
Since Los Angeles is considered a driving city to the extreme, it's surprising that street-/pedestrian-level advertising should be such a battleground. One factor may be that, as traffic increases and motorists get stuck in slow-moving backups more often, drivers have more time to look around them. But another possibility, offered by Scenic America's Fry, relates to the changes sweeping American advertising in general.
"In the markets that you control, people are pushing away advertising," he says. "They have spam filters on their computers, they can get rid of commercials on their TV, and there are do-not-call rules for the telephone. So they're chasing you down the street."
Published: 04/12/2007
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