Back in March, the TTC indicated that it would entertain proposals to sell naming rights to subway stations and subway lines. It was a small clause buried in a long document outlining the requirements for those seeking to bid on the TTC’s advertising contract, and we decided to have a bit of fun with it. On April 1, we published a map of what the TTC might look like with the stations renamed after potential corporate sponsors.

We had a great time putting the map (and corresponding platform mock-ups) together, and you, dear readers, seemed to enjoy discovering what your new transit system might look like.

Regrettably, it might turn out to be less of a joke than we intended. This week the City of Toronto also released a proposal that will be examined by the Executive Committee later this month; it calls for a new policy on naming rights for public spaces in Toronto, and would make it easier for a company to, say, purchase the naming rights for a playground. The Toronto Star asked mayoral brother and advisor Doug Ford (Ward 2, Etobicoke North) about this new approach to naming. Would he, for instance, be comfortable taking a subway to Spadina-McDonalds station?

His reply: “Whatever. If it brings in revenue, I honestly don’t believe anyone cares.”

The Torontoist put together some great mock ups of what stations might be called in the future….

The atheist group (Centre For Inquiry) behind last year’s controversial bus ads suggesting “there’s probably no God” is rolling out a provocative new set of posters on buses across the country that places Allah beside Big Foot and Christ beside psychics.

The new posters bear the slogan: “Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence” with “Allah, Big Foot, UFOs, Homeopathy, Zeus, Psychics, Christ” listed below.

They will hit Toronto streetcars in January, pending final approval from the Toronto Transit Commission, said Justin Trottier, national executive director of the Centre for Inquiry, an atheist organization. After the Toronto debut, the organization plans to post the ads to buses in Calgary, Vancouver, Ottawa, Saskatoon and Montreal.

If you can’t afford a condo on Queen West, have you considered a lovely makeshift tent in the heart of Trinity Bellwoods Park?

One of Martindale’s tents, on a side street near Trinity Bellwoods Park.

It wouldn’t come with a stainless steel refrigerator, and you’d never be able to fit a seventy-two-inch HDTV in there, but you’d be walking distance from the farmer’s market and just steps from shopping and transit. And it wouldn’t even necessarily set you back a single cent, if you were to build it out of the same materials Sean Martindale used to build his.

Martindale, a street artist, has, for more than a year, been removing those large outdoor banner advertisements that condo developers use to draw attention to their new buildings. Rather than throwing them out, he’s been hoarding them. Now, using broom handles as poles, he’s fashioned the ads into one-person pup tents, which he spent yesterday placing in strategic locations downtown, where the public would see them. He’s also accumulated a collection of sandwich board condo ads, the type that sit out on sidewalks all over the city. These, he’s rebranded with a logo and some ad copy of his own making. (“TENT: THE ULTIMATE IN OPEN CONCEPT LIFE-LIKE LIVING.”)

“I thought it was appropriate for condo ads. It’s shelter. And the material lent itself to being turned into a tent as well,” said Martindale of his handiwork, while showing off a tent he’d just finished erecting near Trinity Bellwoods Park. He had a five ‘o clock shadow and his fingers were covered in bandages―both symptoms, he said, of working long hours on this and another installation project.

“And there’s this huge gap between people who can afford condos and the homeless in the city.”

Martindale obscured the original advertising copy on these sandwich boards with tape, and substituted his own.

But as is typical for Martindale’s outdoor work, the main concern is with public space. “The advertising in general is really what I’m trying to draw attention to,” he said. “The aggressiveness and obnoxiousness of it.”

Martindale said he attempted only to take ads that in some way contravened the City’s sign bylaws.

The proliferation of condo ads across the city reflects a trend. The Queen West and Liberty Village areas, in particular, are increasingly dotted with high-rises. With exceptions for projects like the recently opened Artscape Triangle Lofts, where units are rented to artists at below-market rates, the creative community that once defined those neighbourhoods is largely priced out of the new buildings.

Martindale conceded that development isn’t always a bad thing. “Density is important, and condo developments are necessary in an urban environment,” he said. “It’s just that they can be done in better ways.”

“Their marketing really shapes our city.”

In fact, if Martindale’s project has a flaw (other than the moral quandary inherent in taking private property, even if it’s allegedly illegally placed), it’s that the fake brand identity is almost too convincing. For a developer to adopt a tent city theme would only be about 10 or maybe 20% more bizarre than the current standard for condo marketing. It could even even create buzz.

Martindale will be capping his project by opening a “presentation centre” for his tents at the 107 Shaw Gallery, at 107 Shaw Street, starting on November 19. The show will end on November 26.

Photos by Dean Bradley/Torontoist.

While “baked” and “fried” are usually methods of food preparation, in a decidedly un-PC ad campaign from Toronto greasy spoon Dangerous Dan’s Diner, they’re actually the target market.

The eatery, whose menu includes items like The Coronary Burger and The Big Kevorkian, has developed a campaign catering primarily to young adults experiencing drug–induced munchies.

Radio ads running exclusively on Ryerson University’s radio station, CKLN, feature unscripted, drug-fueled conversations on everything from Frisbee golf and Grease to how tattooed genitals will look on an old person.

All of the participants speak in the lazy drawl of the stoned, while each ad is filled with the sounds of laughing, frequent coughing and a bong burbling away in the background.

The radio ads are accompanied by a series of print ads showing Dangerous Dan’s menu items in all their greasy, drippy glory accompanied by messages like “You bake. We fry,” and “22% of Ontarians are obese. We can do better.” Some of the ads feature the tag “Dude, we deliver.” (Its success will likely hinge on whether its target audience can remember where they left the phone.)

The campaign was developed by Toronto’s Tattoo Sound + Music.

If there’s one thing people of Italian descent tend to dislike, it’s Mafia-themed marketing. This hasn’t occurred to Toronto mayoral candidate Rocco Rossi, himself an Italian Canadian, whose campaign posters label him a “wise guy” and a “goodfella,” and make some uncomfortable references to his “bocce balls.” Rossi means no disrespect, but this stunt won’t help his already-dismal showing in the polls. The response from Toronto’s Italian Canadian community has been largely negative. Good intentions or not, no one who still thinks mob allusions are fresh material should be running a first-world city in 2010.

This ’50s-style ad for Bic Soleil razors has been pulled from Toronto’s subway after an outcry from those who say it portrays women as nothing but sexual objects. Many of the posters were vandalized—some with homemade stickers offering impressively lengthy messages of protest. Read one: “Hey ladies! Don’t kid yourselves. Your gams are for glaring at—pure decoration. Your legs are NOT for kicking ass, standing tall or marching. Like a slab of meat or a tasty cake treat, you are an object to be consumed, and don’t assume otherwise. If you are wise, you will do everything you can to look pretty, because that’s all that matters.” A Bic rep apologized for the ad, and said: “It was certainly not our intention to offend anyone.”

A new ad campaign by the Niagara Parks Commission has Toronto media buzzing. As part of a reported $300,000 ad blitz, the commission created a collection of ads airing on CP24 and CTV, as well as on the commission website, that paint Canada’s largest city in traffic-infested, crowded, stress-filled light. The reaction so far today include pieces in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and a segment on CBC’s Metro Morning. Here’s a selection of how Toronto took to Niagara’s needling.

“The Niagara they show. The Niagara we know.” @ Toronto Star :

We can diss you too, Niagara. … Any place where a girl can come back from a bachelorette weekend having signed someone’s butt and enjoyed the cliché awesomeness of a heart-shaped Jacuzzi shouldn’t be taking jabs.

“I don’t even need to diss Niagara,” said Chris Slawson, 28. “Have you even been there?!” The Toronto-bred King West dweller couldn’t leave it there though.

“What’s tackier? Artistic graffiti and street murals or Boston Pizza across from Louis Tussaud’s wax museum mixed with Planet Hollywood and a haunted house?”

“Smearing Toronto: A bad case of Falls advertising” @ The Globe and Mail

Acting mayor Joe Pantalone, a board member of Tourism Toronto, wondered why the parks commission would resort to “an unnecessary cheap shot” when the city has traditionally been an ally in promoting Ontario to the world.

“Whenever we advertise Toronto internationally and nationally, we always say, ‘Come to Toronto and go to Niagara Falls,’” Mr. Pantalone said. “I would hope that they realize that a mistake has been made … and simply pull those ads and come up with something more constructive.”

“Niagara tourism beats up on Toronto” @ blogTO

I suppose all of these things do happen in Toronto (graffiti, stolen bikes, etc), but I’ve never been so stressed-out by life here that I just had to escape. And certainly not to one of the tackiest towns in North America.

“These are photos of my friend Jes,” says photographer Holly Norris about her series American Able, which is part of CONTACT 2010’s Contacting Toronto exhibit, and is being shown on TTC Onestop screens in fifty subway stations. “She has a disability. She is really hot. What’s shocking?”

Norris’s attitude reflects the ethos of American Able, a project that catches your eye and then asks why you’re staring. The series depicts twenty-five-year-old model Jes Sachse, who has the genetic disorder Freeman-Sheldon syndrome, re-enacting a range of American Apparel advertisements notorious for featuring barely clothed hipster nymphets.

“American Apparel claims to use employees, friends, and fans of the company—not professional models-—and they claim they don’t airbrush, which positions their models as ‘regular women,’” says Norris. “However, their models all fit into a specific idea of what a ‘regular woman’ is, so I wanted to address that.”

AA ads do conform to the standard advertising norms, almost exclusively featuring women who are young, thin, and semi-naked. Yet Norris and Sachse (who has her own show in CONTACT, The Justice League of Gawkamerica), saw a more elusive absence. For a company that advocates the representation of real women, no AA models have visible physical disabilities.

Part of the goal of American Able, Norris says in the introduction to the series on her website, is to address how women with disabilities are frequently represented in an asexual way. “We’re talking about how people with disabilities are unseen,” Norris says about the project. “Media exists throughout public and private space and is creating notions of who sexy people are and whom we should find attractive, yet there are many, many people who go unrepresented in the media.”

While some critics of AA ads have argued that they disenfranchise women though sexual objectification, the twist of American Able is the empowerment Norris displays in the portraits of Sachse. “Jes said she enjoys self-rep work because, while she can’t control people’s gazes when she goes to the grocery store to buy milk, she can control and manipulate the gaze when she creates the image,” Norris says.

The photographs will appear on TTC Onestop screens on subway platforms this Saturday, May 20, and on Monday, May 31. They’re likely to garner some stares, but that, says Norris, is all part of the plan. “This has the potential to make people do a double take and question how this differs from a regular ad, as [the photos] will be mixed in with advertising and media,” says Norris. “I hope the realization that it’s a spoof makes people question and critique why they only ever see able-bodied people in fashion advertising.”

The issues of advertising and body image reflected in American Able are coupled with the lighthearted fun of dress-up. In each portrait, Sachse evokes the titillating sexuality that made AA such a successful company, showing us that she’s just another girl rocking a deep-V. Says Norris: “At the end of the day, American Able is just sexy and fun.”

Ad images courtesy of Holly Norris.

Passing time on Flickr the other day, I caught wind of a new project that Toronto street artist Dan Bergeron (a.k.a Fauxreel) is working on. Unlike the wheatpastes he’s well-known for, these new pieces feature hacked billboards and some pretty amusing advertising. Originally on three billboards in the west end of the city, the ads feature “Carl the Plastic Baby.”

Carl, they tell us, “keeps life flexible,” and doesn’t produce “pee-pee or poo-poo.” Not only that, “it’s okay if you drop him.”

Intrigued by this cryptic campaign, I sent Bergeron a note inquiring about the project and decided to check the pieces out for myself (based on the Flickr photos, the locations aren’t too tough to figure out). Despite a few comments on Fauxreel’s photostream that had me worried about their (continued) existence, I was happy to find that two of three billboards are still in place. The third, located in the Junction, has already been pasted over with a Fido ad (see below).

Below is the brief email correspondence we had about the plastic baby campaign and what it’s designed to accomplish.

blogTO: There were some mixed reports about the existence of the billboards. Can you start by confirming that they actually exist?

The billboards are real.

Before I go any further though, I want to say that this project was created in a tongue and cheek way, and that I like babies and kids and I would like to have one of my own.

This project definitely rides the wave between comedy, social critique and an examination of advertising. I put it out at this time of the year because the CONTACT Photography Festival is on and their theme is Pervasive Influence.

I was going to try to propose a Public Installation or register as an Open Exhibition, but I thought that this series would do better to fly in under the radar. As much of my work is illegal, if Carl was really to be a pervasive influence it needed to do it on its own. (Ed. note: Hank Willis Thomas does have a billboard exhibition as part of CONTACT this year.)

I get the sense that this project rides the line between comedy and social intervention. At its core there’s a serious interrogation of the degree to which capitalism is caught up in the “right” to have children, to propagate, to spawn — but there’s also a lightheartedness. What would you say the goal of this project is?

As I wrote on my Flickr stream, the project formed from a couple of different trains of thought, which seemed to piggyback one another.

The idea first came to fruition when I thought about creating a product to sell to people that they didn’t need. To figure this out I looked at my life and the lives of my friend’s and family to see what we were buying.

Being that I am 34-years-old, and many of my friends have started families recently, I began to notice how many unnecessary products were being hawked at parents and how expensive they were.

This led to connections to celebrity adoptions and high-priced “ransom adoptions” of children from Russia and I was originally going to run with that stream of thought and create a line of Russian and African plastic babies that you could adopt to be just like Madonna or Angelina Jolie. I scrapped this after the earthquake in Haiti because I didn’t want to take any shine away or place negative commentary on all of the kind, warmhearted people who have been adopting children from Haiti or other parts of the world and taking them away from some horrible situations. That would be too heavy-handed and was not the right approach.

After I figured out that I should create something baby related, I discovered that the average age of Canadians when they have children is rising, and that Canada is in the top four countries (widely considered second) worldwide in this regard, depending on whose statistics you believe.

What finally convinced me to do this project, and complete it in the tone that I did, was when I rode the internet superwave and discovered all the bizarre websites that are dedicated to baby products and babies in one way or another. You can see some of these in the links section on the Carl site.

Carl was created in the same vein as the unnecessary products that really have been created for parents to compete in our consumer based society. These aim of these products is to get parents to compete with one another in terms of who loves their children more because they have the more expensive stroller. So the project isn’t so much an interrogation of the capitalist right to have children, but rather an interrogation of the capitalism surrounding having children.

I know it’s predictable to ask, but are the babies really for sale? What’s the price range?

The babies are for sale. Check on the website. More babies arriving daily.

Might it be fair to say that these babies are just the vehicle for a wider criticism of advertising? I see on your Flickr page that you point out that the idea of selling someone a plastic baby (something that they can’t possibly need) is a prototypical example of advertising’s purpose — do you feel that commandeering ad space for this ulterior purpose might make people rethink the degree to which ads turn them into consumers?

If people were to look at these billboards and rethink how they have been turned into consumers because of advertising than that would show just how powerful advertising can be. I’m not sure that this will happen and I’m not sure that this is my point. It’s okay to be a consumer. We need goods to do things in our lives and to keep the economy afloat as it exists. What I find interesting and provoking however, is that some of the products are useless and that these products are sometimes advertised to us at the lowest common denominator. I like playing with people’s perceptions of what actually exists and why.

Look once, and you might think the Gardiner Museum was testing a tongue-in-cheek advertising campaign for its latest exhibit. Look twice, and you’ll see the golden arches and flashing arrows tempting you to try the new McMini Sandwich with its “not so subtle” flavour. What have we here?

Click to view slideshow.

According to Chapter 693 of the Toronto Municipal Code [PDF], it’s an illegal sign. The city bylaw bans portable signs that do not belong to the business on whose property the sign is displayed (§ 693-18 B[4]), as well as portable signs that are “animated, illuminated, [or] have flashing lights” (§ 693-18 C[3]).

According to the Gardiner, it’s a piece of revenue-generating advertising that supports the museum’s programs without offending its mission and vision. With less money for the museum’s programming, the Gardiner has looked to proposals from advertising agencies for extra funding.

The Gardiner has agreed to host other outdoor ads in the past, including one for the Visa “Go” campaign (and McDonald’s has placed 3D ads elsewhere before). While the Gardiner ads are always located outside the exhibition areas, the advertiser otherwise chooses where to place it—in this case, right between two “What’s On” posters for the Gardiner.

The Gardiner doesn’t deal with the issue of city permits or legality; presumably, that’s left to the advertising agency representing McDonald’s. Sadly, McDonald’s would not return our calls on Tuesday. [UPDATE, April 10, 2:30 a.m.: McDonald's returned our call on Friday: the creative agency behind the ad is Cossette, the placement agency is OMD, and the same ad is also on display in Montreal—and, possibly, Vancouver.]

Mary-Margaret Jones, a public relations consultant speaking on behalf of the Gardiner, called the installation “tasteful,” “not garish,” and “not as rankling” as other forms of outdoor advertising. Truth be told, this seems an odd stance to take on an always on, act-now advertising campaign that uses big arrows and flashing neon lights to draw attention to itself. But hey—if you don’t try the McMini, at least you can ponder the uneasy marriage between art and advertising because of this illegal, not-so-subtle sign.

The Gardiner Museum’s Illegal McDonald’s Ad from Torontoist on Vimeo.