Public Ad Campaign’s “New York Street Advertising Takeover”
Last Saturday when we had our first taste of Summer-like heat, I noticed some billboards around the neighborhood being ‘whitewashed’ and replaced with some interesting ‘pieces’ that I took some flicks of:
There’s was also a small sign which accompanied each of the pieces which read:
Now I was a little confused reading this because NPA City Outdoor has had the monopoly in NYC with pretty much all of the ’snipes’ aka Wildpostings that go up for as long as I can remember. There was even an ‘urban legend’ that the company had ties to the mob, that’s why they ran NYC like that, paying off building owners for the use of their spaces and construction site scaffolding. If you even tried to do your own guerrilla campaign and went over their stuff, like graffitti beef, they’d do a ‘throw up’ over you, find you, then throw you a beating. I’m exaggerating about the latter, but you get the point, any company/brand wants to do a ‘citywide domination’ with ’snipes’, NPA is the company you go through. Considering NYC sees new ads going up on a weekly to bi-weekly basis, seems like no one’s enforcing the law that’s mentioned in the above letter. I had no idea what was going on when I saw these pieces up, only later finding out that the artists involved and the letter pictured above were part of an ingeniously planned campaign called the “New York Street Advertising Takeover” put together by the Public Ad Campaign. The event was organized as a reaction to the reality of the ‘unenforced law’ and the group targeted the hundreds of illegal billboards throughout the city as well as Brooklyn, replacing the cluttered ads with art, making much better use of the visual space. Although many of the pieces were short-lived, I tip my hat off to the entire NYSAT effort and hope to see more of the ‘guerrilla style’ art going over the spaces again in the future:
Below is some video footage from NYSTA as well as a link to images of the event:
More images from “New York Street Advertising Takeover” here
