Has the overwhelming amount of advertising that intrudes into your life reached a critical mass? You are fair game, anywhere you look. Besides the sign waving and illegal signs tied on posts and stuck in the ground and promos for upcoming shows across the bottom of your TV, there are Ads on cell phones, ATMs and gas pumps. Everywhere an eyeball can see there’s ad signage.
Messages blare from gas pumps and store displays and the background music has transcended elevators and been amplified throughout restaurants, hotel lobbies, and reach you as you pass every other store front. In these over-amped days of cloud content, micro-niche consumption, and super-personalized media is no one safe from the onslaught? Is there nowhere to hide?
Sure there is….the new digs you bought in downtown Miami with a view of the bay!
Nothing’s going to stop you from enjoying that brand new condo! You have just moved into your dream apartment, a brand-new building at a non-affordable price. You bought at just the right time and can now revel in the fact that it’s a great deal. Let’s take a peek at what the future holds for your scenic view.
Opening the curtains at sunrise to gaze upon your realm, there, being constructed next to the Pérez Art Museum in downtown Miami and obscuring your view, is a 10-story LED billboard which, one day soon, could urge you to buy toilet paper. Museum Miami calls its new 10-story billboard an “iconic sculptural object.” It’s ‘sculptural’ all right, but not a work of art!
Do condo owners have to look forward to this for the rest of their lives? I don’t think so! Three jumbo billboards are planned for the area, with a pair of digital signs also slated for the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts a few blocks away.
Miami advertising has plummeted to a new low. Unlike the giant ads that scream at you from the sides of buildings, and the video billboards that command attention from already distracted drivers, the latest assault on our senses will change every 8 seconds with a new ad message.
These mammoth intrusions are illegal according to the State of Florida and Miami could care less. The process for approval went through the city council as quickly as a bad taco in Guadalajara. At least you could recover from the food.
The developer argued in public that the signage would ‘become a Miami icon and draw tourists’. I agree. Certain tourists arrive here on our shores for the advertising. In the last 10 years there were a total of 12 of them.
It’ll never replace a full moon through the palms. The last time Miami had an important advertising icon in public it promoted Coppertone. At least that one was cute. To mangle a phrase, it’ll reach out and touch everyone, whether they want to be touched or not. These signs will put us on the ad map. A map I just don’t want to read.
