Outdoor advertising ban in Sao Paulo benefits social media and digital

The mayor termed advertising ‘visual pollution’

“Four years ago, the streets of São Paulo, South America’s biggest city, were strewn with advertising. Messages on the surfaces of buildings, buses, shops, taxis and even private homes competed with billboards to create a chaotic and dizzying corporate assault on the senses.

“The Clean City Law came from a necessity to combat pollution . . . pollution of water, sound, air and the visual,” he said. “We decided that we should start combating pollution with the most conspicuous sector – visual pollution.”

Read the whole story to see how digital and social marketing got a boost.

The problem with location technology is us

We live in a bubble. And by we, I mean those of us who either work in disciplines that require us to keep up with technological knowledge on behalf of our clients, or who are early adopters: and young.

I was reading a NY Times article this morning on how Google, Foursquare, Gowalla, Shopkick and most recently Facebook, all offer services that let people report their physical location online. And smelling the money, venture capitalists began pouring $115 million into location start-ups since last year.

The problem is that you need a decent smartphone or similar device to access these services and although there are millions of them in people’s hands, most of them don’t want to share their location. It’s the old ‘you can lead the horse to water…etc’ conundrum. [Update: It has been pointed out to me that you can use SMS for checking in to Foursquare on non-smartphones. Yes, I live in a bubble.]

The article points out that “just 4 percent of Americans have tried location-based services, and 1 percent use them weekly, according to Forrester Research. Eighty percent of those who have tried them are men, and 70 percent are between 19 and 35.”

Then there’s the problem of the over-hyping of these services in tech media. As Maggie Fox, the founder and CEO of Social Media Group, writes in her post – Foursquare – Shiny Object or Mainstream?:

“Over the weekend, Foursquare scored a major coup via a new partnership with American Eagle: they got their name and logo plastered all over Times Square. The first story I saw on the subject was on Mashable, where blogger Samuel Axon noted,

Foursquare has just over three million users and you need a smartphone to use it. It is far, far from “mainstream”. And the article in Mashable feels like something I’ve been seeing a lot of lately – mistaking a brand using a niche and emerging web service [the “shiny object” in the title of this post] as a way of positioning themselves as cool and hep, for some sort of validation of something as “mainstream”.

In the end, the pundits predict, the battle over who wins the location game will be between Google, Foursquare and Facebook. Unfortunately, at the moment, Foursquare doesn’t have the users nor the financial muscle to escape the Google/Facebook sandwich. And all these companies have to make location service use mainstream – somehow.

Facebook Places – How to set your privacy settings to keep control

Predictably, as soon as Facebook launched its new Foursquare killer Places app, everyone started screaming about privacy. So here’s a quick how-to on changing your Facebook privacy settings to protect your whereabouts in the world. I’ve included screen shots of my settings.

First – from your profile page, click on the Account tab and select Privacy Settings. At the bottom of that page you will see Customize settings. Click on that link.

Navigate down to the Places I check in to box and select Friends only. You can also select Customize and change it to Only Me. Below that box you will see Include me in “People Here Now” after I check in. Uncheck enable.

Scroll down to Things others share. You will see Friends can check me in to Places. Select Disabled.

I hope this helps.

Sasha Frere-Jones – beautiful photos if barely photography

“There are people who spend a day putting together a thoughtful five paragraph post, and they’re doing great work. There are also people posting pictures of onions and soda they can’t understand the name of…”

This one is worth sharing. Sasha is a musician [in which guise we became long-distance friends some time ago,] and is a staff writer and music critic for the New Yorker.

In his voiceover, as we watch his captured images float by, he points out that “there are a lot of photographs now that are just like text messages..[edit] ..I’m here and this thing happened, now you my friends and strangers, now you know..”

And my favorite insight – “It helps when you’re sorting through the web, to not have a fixed idea of what you want language or pictures to do, but to think of what purpose they’re serving.”

That’s a line that digital designers could take to heart.

@SFJ | Songs You Taught Me | Blog

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