Results tagged “badvertising”

Late last night the City's proposed new billboard bylaw and tax [PDF] cleared a major hurdle, unanimously passing through the Planning and Growth Management Committee on its way to a hearing before the full City Council. The meeting ran 'til about 11 p.m. and had to be moved from one of the regular committee meeting rooms to the main Council Chamber in order to accommodate fifty-plus deputants and scores of other observers. It was a pitched battle, one that has lasted through several years of debate, consultation, and resistance leading up to this moment. A tremendous victory for public space advocates, progressive councillors, and Mayor Miller, the bylaw will provide harmonized regulation of the billboard industry (the rules haven't been updated since amalgamation) and the tax will create the revenue needed to enforce those regulations.

If something looks a little amiss about the model in the advertisement above—if her head looks a bit too big for her body, her torso a bit too compact to be natural, her arms, dear God her arms, doing things arms don't do—all can be explained: Bikini Bay on Queen Street West apparently offers its models, like its swimsuits, in "mix & match."

Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas, you perverts.

Being a former child star can become a fate worse than death. Often exploited and then kicked to the curb when the cuteness wore off due to impending puberty, these former moppets spend their adult life trying to detach from the likes of Steve Urkel, Screech, Rerun, and Danny Partridge—and their characters' respective catchphrases.

Reader Ian Simpson sent us this photograph, yesterday, of a newly installed billboard for Bud Light at John and Adelaide streets. It reads: "Torontonians aren't cold. Not in August, anyway." The ad, of course, is a direct response to a Coors Light billboard in British Columbia, which announced that that company's beer was "COLDER THAN PEOPLE FROM TORONTO."

This may sound crazy, but pasting thousands of ads for bargain divorce services all over hydro poles and the backs of road signs is illegal. You'd never know it, because these cheap-looking stickers seem to propagate throughout the GTA like wet Mogwais. Even worse, the fact that their contact information and provenance are so clearly displayed shows how incompetent the city is at enforcing its postering bylaw—it's not like we can't tell who's responsible, after all.

Ah, IKEA. Bastion of the comfortably quirky; originator of accessible (read: cheap) design; first stop for first apartment decorators everywhere.

Two years ago, we asked TTC Chair Adam Giambrone about whether increasing the amount of advertising on the TTC would be a way to make the organization a bit more money. He told us then: "I think we have an acceptable level of advertising. Could it be less? Absolutely. At this point any reduction would be a budget reduction, and I'll tell you I'm not really prepared to reduce the budget of the TTC to reduce the advertising. At the same time, I think we certainly have enough advertising. Many people would say too much, and even if we went all-out, the money is just not the solution to our city's budget woes." In November of 2007, we polled our readers on whether there was too much, just enough, or not enough advertising on the TTC, and 51% of you said that, then, there was too much.

Gaze! Gaze upon the titillating young bodies above. Are you not outraged at their thousand-mile stares and disregard for shirts?

Toronto Life Square boasts a massive external screen array advertising stores and upcoming movies. One thing they probably didn't think they would be advertising was Windows Genuine Advantage.

Astral Media Outdoor uses Geotargeting Exclusive Solution—a proprietary GIS program mashing up consumer data from Generation5 and cartographic software from MapInfo—in order to allow "you to concentrate advertising faces exactly where your target customers are found. By combining socio-demographic data with the habits of the target group, it builds a consumer profile that is accurate to the postal code level. It then maps the data for precision market targeting." (Did you know that "The Toronto's Asian Community" feels that they are "too tolerant of products and services that do not meet [their] expectations"?)

We've been at City Hall a fair number of times, but it wasn't until this week that we had the rather delightful experience of being met by a beatboxing duo at the front door or rocking out to OutKast in the Council Chamber. The occasion for this upending of formality? A town hall meeting, hosted by a network of organizations known collectively as the Beautiful City Alliance. The coalition is working to convince city council to direct revenue from the billboard tax it plans to introduce this summer towards art in the public sphere and is stepping up its campaign efforts as the vote on that tax approaches. The town hall, attended by some two or three hundred artists and activists, as well as several city councillors, was part informational meeting and part pep rally, with a bit of spontaneous art production thrown in for good measure.

We hopped onto the Rogers TV site to find out with what it had been replaced, only to discover the Monday–Thursday 7 p.m. block the same as it ever was. The show's own page also failed to recognize any changes.

In case you still weren't convinced as to who exactly was behind the mysterious "Ned" stencils illegally spray-painted onto sidewalks around the city last month, allow us—in the wake of the unspectacular opening of the Design Exchange and archiTEXT's "What Has Architecture Done For You Lately?" exhibit—to summarize all of the available evidence, some of it old, some of it new.

Both the Globe and Star picked up and ran with yesterday's story about Virgin Radio's subway suicide ad; here's the Star's article, and here's the Globe's. From them, we learn that Astral Media Radio programming director Pat Holliday, upon seeing early mock-ups of the ads, said that "we were all laughing like crazy because we just thought they were so funny"; that TTC Chair Adam Giambrone is saying the TTC should review its policies for commercial still photography; and that the Star somehow managed to completely avoid mentioning either Torontoist or writer Jonathan Goldsbie in their article, saying instead that "The Toronto Public Space Committee," which Goldsbie is a member of but wasn't acting on behalf of, "didn't find the poster so amusing and alerted TTC chair Adam Giambrone, who agreed they were 'in poor taste'." And, oh yeah—the Globe helpfully restated one of the most important parts of our story yesterday, one of the biggest reasons the ads were so dubious: "Astral [Media], which holds the city's massive street furniture contract and administers all advertising on transit shelters, also owns Virgin Radio." Whoopsy daisy.

You know what's hilarious? Ads that make fun of suicide. Why, they're right up there with the ones that make light of rape.

If you’re stopping by Dundas Station while riding the rocket anytime soon, you might mistakenly think you’re pulling into Compton. A series of posters lined along the platform walls—that look like stop-motion animation from the subway cars as you pull into or out of the station—strangely resemble plate-glass windows with bullet holes punched through them. Is it a plug for 50 Cent’s new album? Good guess, but not quite.

If you live or work downtown, and a bunch of white foam people have been floating by you, tumbling into buildings and onto the ground and dissipating, or rising ever-higher up through the clouds, please don't freak out: they're just (another) marketing campaign.

Here's a good question: what are two prominent local companies devoted to design and architecture—the Design Exchange and archiTEXT—doing stenciling teaser ads on Toronto's sidewalks? The stencils are simple, vague, and identical: they say "ON APRIL 15TH, NED IS COMING," with a cross below the text, all in pink. And they're everywhere: outside of subway stations, and at intersections throughout downtown, like Augusta and Nassau, Queen and Spadina, and Bay and Bloor. The lattermost intersection is where reader John Matheson snagged the above photo and sent it to tips@torontoist.com late last week, with an e-mail that read: "On my way to work this morning I noticed pink plus signs/crosses spray painted outside some ttc stations downtown. I've heard they are all over the city. Do you know what they mean?"

It's hard to know where to start in our analysis of this ad for the website accessibletoronto.com, found above Sparkling Bubbles on Dundas Street East by local Web accessibility expert/TTC enthusiast Joe Clark. Needless to say, placing your wheelchair-emblazoned logo above a restaurant without a wheelchair ramp is sending mixed signals at best. The fact that the second floor of the building is boarded up—inaccessible to the world, you might call it—doesn't help. To top it off, the website in question is not actually accessible, at least to visually impaired visitors using screen-reading software that requires alt text, an HTML attribute that helps such programs properly interpret images.

There's something a little funny about the full page ad in this week's Eye for Joshua Jackson's new cross-Canada motorcycle movie One Week. Rather than the words of wizened critics, the ad features a page full of quotations from people who seem to have not actually seen the movie. "I am definitely going to watch this!" says one; "It's going to look amazing on the big screen!" says another; "I agree this looks like a great film" writes a third.

Here's something awful about us: when we learned last year that the TTC's latest "Marketing Communications Plan" [PDF] would include an education campaign around "Operator Assault," we got a little giddy; how would the TTC's infamously ditzy marketing department choose to frame this serious issue? "The assault goblins didn't do this ...people did!"?

Last week, further to news reported on Illegal Signs, we briefly noted the Ontario Superior Court's refusal to grant Strategic Media a temporary exemption from certain provisions of the City of Toronto's sign bylaw. If granted, Strategic Media (and most likely all other advertisers) would have been allowed to suspend compliance with these provisions until a court resolved the ongoing claim [PDF] over whether these provisions are valid.

Last week Eye Weekly launched its newly redesigned website, a bland, nondescript piece of work with which we were, at the time, less than impressed. Aside from its use of a puny font that borders on illegible for all but the eagle-eyed, our biggest quibble with the site was its lack of a distinct visual identity to set it apart from its competitors. Days later, Eye's online team has solved that particular problem; unfortunately, eyeweekly.com's new unique identity is "the website with the annoying, irrelevant, and nonsensical hyperlink ads peppered throughout every article"—which, we assume, is not exactly what they were going for.

In what IllegalSigns.ca's Rami Tabello is calling a "complete victory for Toronto," the Ontario Superior Court of Justice has ruled that outdoor ad company Strategic Media, among other offenses, "over the last year or so...began erecting signs without obtaining permits." Not that great of a strategy, really! In spite of Strategic's not-yet-resolved constitutional challenge to the City's sign by-law (which we explored the legality of in May), the court ruled that the City can begin removing Strategic's many illegal billboards across Toronto. Councillor Howard Moscoe, who we like more and more every day, told the Post that "we will go out and take them down and charge them on the tax bill if they don’t take them down themselves."

You'd think that CFRB and zig would have gotten it by now. Last fall, the increasingly irrelevant talk radio station hired the ad agency to pimp them out on the streets of Toronto with an ad campaign that centred around the phrase "We need to talk." And talk we did: the company littered the city with illegal ads (including ones that asked, appropriately, "Is advertising getting out of control?"), and paid homeless people an exploitatively low amount, quite possibly so low that it was illegal, to carry signs asking "Should panhandling be illegal?" It was all pretty reprehensible stuff, but for some reason they're ramping up the campaign again: according to the Post, zig is paying prostitutes to carry signs asking, you guessed it, "should prostitution be legal?" and "over the next few weeks, [zig] will be handing out hand sanitizer with the message: 'Does the flu shot really work?' and posting signs on public ashtrays that read: 'Should smokers be denied healthcare?'" Haven't we had enough?

      

The hoarding enclosing the Toronto Community Housing building under construction at the corner of Carlton and Mutual Streets is not that much unlike other projects like it around the city: covered with advertising posters for Fido, Toronto Stories, and The National Ballet of Canada, in spite of the "Post No Bills" signs those posters recently buried, it's a mostly unremarkable site. Still, someone's had just about enough: they've ripped down some of the posters to reveal the "Post No Bills" signs underneath and done some postering of their own, with signs that either re-affirm the rule or suggest that their reader "ask these companies why, when they get a generous tax benefit for advertising from Canadians, that they poster where they have been asked not to." The homemade 8 1/2 x 11" posters plastered onto the walls were caught this week by two members of Torontoist's Flickr Pool, Loozrboy and (former Torontoist editor) Marc Lostracco.

                    

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains of 2008--the people, places, and things that we've either fallen head over heels in love with or developed uncontrollable rage towards over the past twelve months, with one hero and one villain selected by each participating staff member. On Christmas Day: the heroes. On Boxing Day: the villains. And next week, cast your vote to determine the Superhero and Supervillain of the year.

Readers of Torontoist who prefer our lovely RSS feed may have noticed separate, blank, "Sponsored By" entries showing up over the past few days. They're inserted by our feed host, Pheedo, not by us (the feed itself is sponsored, but not any of Torontoist's content), and of yet there's no way for us to get rid of them. They're not even making us cold hard cash! Sorry 'bout that.

It's like a bunch of ad executives got together in a boardroom and decided "You know what gets the kids' attention these days? Community alerts about sexual predators!" It's like that old joke "SEX—Now that I have your attention..." except replace SEX with RAPIST or PROWLER or some other such thing.