The boundaries between public art and advertising are becoming even more permeable. (as traditional "fenced off" advertising becomes less effective, the boundaries between advertising and everything are becoming more permeable.) The new industry standard term is ambient advertising, at least that's how it was used in a presentation by the President of Leo Burnett Asia Pacific, which I attended on Monday.

Even if we restrict our view to the monumental role of public art, where art memorializes social heros, advertising has usurped this space to an amazing degree. Think of the giant Adidas banner of Zenedine Zidane in Marseilles, and the public debate over whether it should be taken down because of his head-butting at the World Cup this summer. (Just look at the way Nike, Adidas and others have usurped the rhetoric of a kind of public art that public institutions no longer can manage.)

Interactive advertising is growing quickly, and the current conventional wisdom is that it could grow faster if there was enough web content to host it (?). But the even faster growing sector is "ambient", comprising outdoor, promotions (performance advertising), etc.

it's an important phenomenon. How many street artists are in fact just doing R&D for the advertising industry. And is that even a bad thing?

The excuse for writing about this now is that Singapore's Outdoor Advertising Awards have been recently launched. A list of the 26 different categories gives you an idea of how pervasive this channel is. One of the great advertising business success stories of the last 20 years is French company JC Decaux, which has built a business offering municipal services in barter for public advertising space. In the words of its founder: "the city is the last mass medium."

Technorati Tags: advertising, billboards, public art, ambient advertising, street art

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