The single biggest myth around advertising in public spaces and in
public transit is that “it generates money for the municipality”, “it
pays for the busses and trains”.
The truth is that they do not generate resources. They only use
resoures and quite a lot of it. Oh, they move around money alright.
Into the pockets of the viewscreen company that put them up.
Never let them say that the screens make money or fund our transit.
That is a scam.
Now, I’m sure quite a lot of folks are thinking “Guh, this biddy is
such an overly literal-minded Emacs user. Duh, obviously
everybody knows they don’t factually nor actually ‘generate’ any money or
resources. But they make it so that the corporations, who buy ads,
help pay for our public transit, and that is why we allow and
encourage them. Saying ‘they generate money’ is just a gricean
shorthand that we’d expect even a child to be able to understand.”
They’d be wrong because I do understand that. I do understand that they meant “they move money”. I also understand that
when we let partially-and-figuratively-true shorthands (“ads generate
money”) be treated as if they were the factual truth we end up in some
pretty darn wrong places.
Goal
we want public transit and bus shelters. Ideally corporations should
pay for quite a lot of it.
Wrong approach
“We should put up ads, including extremely intrusive
attention-grabbing video ads. They will generate money for us.”
End result
Some of the money from the corporations do go to the transit. All of
that money come from us the consumers who buy from the corporations.
But a lot of extra money and resources are needed to create
the screens (using rare Earth minerals), place and maintain the
screens, power electricity them, and create the ads for them. (And
for healthcare for the people who get sick from the ads or traffic
accidents caused by the distracting ads.) And a lot of money are
going directly into the pockets of the execs and owners at JCDecaux
and similar ad companies.
We tried to get more money from the private sector redirected to
public transit infrastructure but a lot of money was wasted and stolen
in that process. 💸
They do move money but they do so very, very lossily and wastefully.
