From Places Journal:
From billboards to graffiti to guerrilla marketing, civic and commercial interests have long fought to control the visual environment of the city. Today the contest is more heated than ever.
Soon after I arrived in New York City as an art student in the early oughts, my roommate, an occasional graffiti writer, asked if I wanted some “quick money work” on a “street team.” We would “sticker bomb” a vinyl decal of a two-headed Rottweiler on lampposts, power boxes, bar bathrooms, and park benches throughout the East Village. We would be paid by “unit distributed.” After doing the math, and weighing the odds of getting caught, I declined.
I soon learned that street teams drew from the ranks of underemployed art students and former graffiti writers who have “gone straight.” Guerrilla advertising happens in the gray zone between what’s maybe legal and downright illegal, and between what’s frowned upon by the advertising industry and what works on the street. The relationship between advertisers and the street teams they employ (often through a marketing agency) is typically a “see-no-evil, hear-no-evil” sort of deal. The teams agree to spread the word about the brand in “innovative ways,” without getting into much detail about those ways. 1
Street teams can be arrested and charged with vandalism, but usually police choose to ignore both the teams and the companies that unofficially commission them. In our case, we learned months later that the Rottweilers were promoting Viacom, which was then rolling out a reboot of its MTV2 channel. Guerrilla marketing didn’t begin at the turn of the millennium — that’s just when it acquired a name. In fact, it’s part of a long history of urban streets and public spaces being covered with — or defaced by, depending on your point of view — visual information of all sorts, from political posters to municipal notices to commercial signage to corporate advertising to those Janus-headed dogs. This history underscores the long-running battle between civic and commercial interests for control of city streets and their surfaces — a contest that remains very much alive in our own era of proliferating media and consolidating corporate control.
Snow Hill, Holburn, London; pencil and watercolor drawing by anonymous artist, ca. mid 19th century. [via Wikimedia, public domain]
When the British journalist Henry Sampson published his 600-page History of Advertising from the Earliest Times, in 1874, London was in a period of tumultuous and often chaotic growth. The population had doubled since the turn of the century; slums were crowded, crime was rising. And industry was booming. Factories were producing huge quantities of goods, and traders were eager to market and sell their products. All around the city the archaic and ad-hoc practices of posting signs and public notices had given way to the new and increasingly ruthless business of commercial advertising. Sampson’s book traces a long history of advertising, from signs carved in stone tablets, in imperial Rome, and written on papyrus, in Thebes; to early Christian scrolls and medieval town criers; to shingles hung outside shops and inns, often with pictograms showing the services offered inside (“a knife for the cutler, a stocking for the hosier, a hand for the glover, a pair of scissors for tailor, a bunch of grapes for the vintner”). But he devotes particular attention to his own era, when outdoor advertising was becoming an issue of keen civic concern due to what critics deplored as the psoriatic-like profusion of posters across the teeming metropolis. As Sampson notes, street advertising was “a comparatively modern institution,” enabled at once by increased literacy and advances in printing techniques. “It was not until printing became general, and until the people became conversant with the mysteries of reading and writing,” he writes, “that posters and handbills were to any extent used.” 2 ....
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