Yesterday and last night, a group of artists and activists working throughout downtown removed ad posters from street-level advertising pillars, and painted billboards with whitewash. In place of the ads, they posted artwork.

The project, known to participants as the Toronto Street Advertising Takeover, or TOSAT, had been months in the making, and was highly organized. All involved were operating under strict secrecy.

The group planned to hit forty-one advertising pillars, and twenty to twenty-five 10′ x 20′ billboards. Most of the ads chosen for this treatment were property of Pattison Outdoor Advertising, an ad company that maintains many advertising signs of various types in Toronto. Billboards owned by CBS and Astral Media were also hit. TOSAT organizers claim that they specifically targeted ads that were illegal. Torontoist cannot say with certainty that any of them were.

All photos by D.A. Cooper/Torontoist

Related Article: How TOSAT Took Over Toronto’s Street Ad Space

Related Article: TOSAT Posts a Comprehensive Gallery of Its Work

Once nestled between the Gardiner Museum’s exhibition posters, our favourite McDonald’s ad has migrated to the southeast corner of Bay and College. Trailing a yellow extension cord, the ad still lights up at night and begs for attention like a carnival midway ride.

It’s still illegal, although no one seems too concerned. Ads such as this free-standing sign require a permit from the city—which must be affixed to the ad. There’s no such permit for this ad, however, and any request would run up against city bylaw Chapter 693 [PDF] because of the ad’s location, setback, size, illumination, and third-party copy. While specific violations depend on how the sign is classified (as permanent or temporary, mobile, or portable) there is no doubt that this ad does not legally deserve its current digs.

The ad’s location is owned by Candarel, who have a contract to keep it there until May 9. Titan 360 placed the ad, and have also handled some memorable look-at-me campaigns around the city. Remember those people climbing up the giant Cadbury bar above Dundas Square Or this giant, steaming cup of McDonald’s coffee? Same people.

Unfortunately, Titan’s General Manager Alyea Henderson didn’t return our calls about this particular piece, so we have no word on whether this ad will be making more appearances. If its circus-like visuals are any indication, it may be pitching its tent all over town.

Related post: McGardiner Museum

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.

Let’s just say you’ve got an advertising brief in front of you for a new ultra-upscale Toronto condo.

This condo, The Avenue, is being built on the very edge of exclusive Forest Hill. It’s got twenty-four-hour valet parking, a private elevator to your suite, million-dollar price tags, and all the other things that make Toronto Life so very excited.

To attract your core audience, you’re going to be thinking glamour. Exclusivity. You’re going to want to appeal to the fabulously wealthy and devil-may-care. People all about conspicuous consumption, who sprinkle powdered gold on their breakfast cereal and shop for cat litter at Swarovski.

Well, what’s more glamorous, dangerous, and expensive than smoking? Congratulations—you won the contract!

Smoker Girl, as we will call her, starred in an ad at the southwest corner of Avenue and St. Clair West, cigarette in hand, starting in early March. She oozed sophistication and class. (She also oozed a little tar from her fingernails.) And then, about a week after she first appeared, her cigarette vanished from her fingers.

Not everybody who went past this corner was the ad’s target audience, and so many may not have appreciated the three-metre-high Hepburn-a-like flapper with a coffin nail. Avenue Road is a major route into the city from the 401, and thousands of cars drive past every day, not to mention fleets of Greyhound and Ontario Northland buses, whose passengers must be dying for a smoke after a seven-hour ride from North Bay. To cap it all off, the girl was a puff and a gust of ash away from 55 St. Clair West, home of the Ontario division of the Canadian Cancer Society—an organization not commonly thought to be fond of nicotine.

Billboard adverts promoting tobacco have been under a federal ban since 1997, but adverts promoting something else, which happen to feature cigarettes, are a different story. There’s no law against it, as far as we can tell.

Still, someone decided that something had to be done, and so the cigarette was meticulously removed from the ad, leaving a thin cutout of a rectangle in its place.

Torontoist can’t decide whether that bowdlerized banner was a complete, crashing snafu, or a work of genius: cutting a cigarette-shaped hole in a cigarette, revealing a cigarette-coloured piece of building underneath, did not really make it look as if Lauren Bacall here was no longer holding, you know, a cigarette. (What were we supposed to think she was holding? A hot sausage?)

Alas, the ad altogether disappeared sometime early Friday morning. Our emails to Camrost Felcorp, the firm behind the construction of the building, asking why the advert was taken down, were left unanswered. And on Sunday afternoon, a new advert appeared with a different picture of a woman clad in black getting out of the back of a limousine. Presumably she was arriving at Smoker Girl’s funeral.

All that’s left to do is marvel at the architect whiz who configured the building behind the advert precisely so that the sliver of it visible underneath the ad still looked like a cancer stick. Rest in peace, Smoker Girl, and your not-very-invisible invisible cigarette.

Gum, anyone?

The property at 224 Queen Street West, at the corner of Queen and McCaul, appears at first glance to be an ordinary neighbourhood coffee shop. That is, until you look closer. Inside, the glass fridges are filled with bags of fake blood, newspapers blaring “China to stop all blood exports” headlines line the windowsill, and the drink list looks like a vampire’s favourite meal. Stepping back, there’s a sign reading “Capture Humans” with Uncle Sam pointing at the passing pedestrians. And above that, a gigantic billboard advertising the new vampire thriller, Daybreakers. This isn’t a coffee shop at all: it’s one giant promotion.

Juxta Productions, an outdoor-advertising sign studio located on Front Street, has been renting the space since the summer, and is responsible for the Daybreakers Blood Café. It combines an art installation on the inside with large advertisements that wrap around the outside.

Maple Pictures, the company behind Daybreakers, contacted Juxta after seeing the success of previous advertisements at the location for Sherlock Holmes, Whiteout, and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

The installation is certainly a conversation piece, but part of it is also illegal. Rami Tabello of illegalsigns.ca, a organization dedicated to eradicating unlawful billboards around the city, said, “The signage is illegal because it violates the fire safety provisions on the Ontario Fire Code for obstructing windows required to be unobstructed under the code.” That means Juxta could face about one thousand dollars in fines right now, and that the number would increase when the new billboard bylaw that was passed by City Council on December 7, 2009, regulating and taxing outdoor advertising, comes into effect this April, said Tabello. Furthermore, the original Harry Potter display that adorned the property last summer was erected during the city workers’ strike, specifically to bypass normal licensing procedures.

But Patrick Little, executive producer of Juxta, says, “Why should I be fined for creating cultural jobs in the knowledge economy? Writers, designers, printers, scenic painters, set decorators, grips, actors, hair and makeup, wardrobe, projectionists and even a graffiti artist doing their own piece worked on those installations.” (The Toronto-based artists include Melissa Yang, who played the vampire, and also did everyone’s hair and makeup for their promotional day. Larry Saunders was the key scenic painter for the Daybreakers display, and Wen Xie was the ice sculptor for the Whiteout installation.)

Little also points out that they transformed the property from a “crack-house squat” into a respectable gateway attraction.

But it doesn’t look like Juxta will be inhabiting the property for much longer. An application for a demolition permit was filed in 2008, and an application to build a new property is currently working its way through the planning process. Soon, fake blood and huge billboards will likely be replaced by a five-storey mixed use development that includes storefronts, parking, offices, and residences. Little adds, “Unfortunately, it is now the visual artists, like the film workers before them, who are at risk of losing their jobs due to the misguided and narrow-minded priorities of the current administration which has embraced condo development as the holy grail of city building.”

It’s prime real estate that a whole bunch of people are waiting to sink their teeth into.

From the National Post
The TTC has rejected a bid by the Ashley Madison Agency, a website that promotes adultery, to wrap a streetcar with ads promoting the controversial site, along with the slogan, “Life is short. Have an affair.”

The commission’s advertising review committee, comprising six city councillors, made the decision this afternoon after being made aware of the potential ad campaign by the TTC’s ad agency, CBS Outdoor.

“This is an issue about community standards,” said Councillor Joe Mihevc, a TTC commissioner. “We are, at the end of the day, a public body and the citizens of Toronto own the TTC. In this case, the reason why I voted not to accept the ads was because they violate a basic community standard around cheating.”

“When it’s a core fundamental value around cheating and lying, we’re not going to let those kind of ads go on.”

Yesterday the TTC revealed it was considering running the ads on one streetcar, a proposition that evoked criticism from pro-family organizations.

“People are generally outraged by that type of a lifestyle and to advertise it in such a public fashion, in my opinion, is wrong, said Dave Quist, executive director of the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada.

Earlier today, Noel Biderman, CEO of Ashley Madison, offered to drop the fare by 50 cents for any rides taken on a streetcar with ads for his company.

TTC spokesperson Brad Ross said such a proposition was impossible, given that TTC fares are policy decisions.

From the Torontoist

Six days ago, we told you that City Council was about to discuss a proposed new sign bylaw and tax. Today, they finished. After seven years of campaigning by public space and arts activists, two years of research and work by city staff, and a day and a half of debate in the Council Chamber, Toronto now officially has a new system for regulating billboards. In a 29–12 vote, Council passed a harmonized billboard bylaw that will coordinate sign placement, size, and material, replacing the hodgepodge of regulations we’ve been stuck with since amalgamation. Most importantly, the new bylaw will ensure that billboards maintain their place in our city without becoming overly intrusive.

The tax rate was the most controversial part of the proposed package, with some claiming it was far lower than it ought to be given the industry’s presence in the city, and some that it was high enough to bankrupt that industry entirely. The staff recommendation was for a tax scheme that would bring in approximately ten million dollars a year, which the economist contracted by the City to research the matter concluded would amount to a 4–7% taxation rate [PDF]—though the billboard industry vehemently disputed that assessment. Council decided to trust its staff over the word of the industry (which never provided a detailed breakdown of its earnings or revenue to the City or the third-party economist) and voted in favour of the staff’s recommended tax rate 25–16.

Chair of the Planning and Growth Management Committee Norm Kelly had proposed an amendment that would allow companies to replace existing conforming billboards with LED signs and well as build new LED signs anywhere they get permission to install a billboard at all, greatly increasing their visual impact. Along with another motion which would cut the staff’s recommended tax rate by 40%, this spurred a renewed wave of the telephone and email campaign activists had been waging for weeks, flooding councillors’ voicemail boxes and inboxes with pleas to vote for the staff recommendations untouched. Some of his fellow councillors too found these motions unacceptable. Said Councillor Vaughan (Ward 20, Trinity-Spadina): “The notion that we have electronic blinking signs as-of-right in every neighbourhood in this city is unbelievable…We have got to get a handle on this.” Vaughan then went on to point out that the tax rate staff recommended had been reduced, twice, over the past few months, after the industry protested that it was set too high, and that further reductions would be excessive. In the end Council agreed with that sentiment, voting against the move watering down the regulations by allowed LED signs 26–15, just as it had voted in favour of the recommended tax rate.

Staff had originally recommended that the revenue from the tax be set aside—once the bylaw’s enforcement had been paid for—for arts funding. This was the one major recommendation Council rejected, deciding instead to send the money into general revenues. Recommendations as to its allocation will be made by the Budget Committee in the course of establishing the City’s budget. The arts activists who had campaigned so hard for this regulatory package and tax were sanguine, however. Devon Ostrom of the Beautiful City Alliance told us that “this tax wouldn’t exist if the arts community hadn’t it shepherded it through the process, and the Budget Committee has the moral responsibility to see it through.”

At core, though, is this: the City now has the ability, the resources, and the mandate to regulate an industry that has, since amalgamation and for years before, been operating largely unchecked.

BeautifulCity.ca is a city building initiative that aims to beautify, democratize and diversify access to public space, and in turn — hold companies investing in billboard advertising accountable for their impact on shared spaces through an annual license fee.

From Marketing Magazine (November 25, 2009):
Outdoor ad campaign takes on Toronto’s outdoor ad tax

In response to an impending new law that would tax billboard advertising in Toronto, the Out-of-Home Marketing Association of Canada (OMAC) has launched an outdoor campaign to bring the issue out of city council chambers and into the streets.

OMAC objects to the estimated $10.4 million in new taxes, which it claims would outstrip estimated industry earnings of $8.8 million.

The new law goes before a council vote on Nov. 30 , and is scheduled to go into effect in July 2010.

The association put up 139 billboards yesterday–provided by Astral Media, CBS Outdoor and Pattison Outdoor–that drive curious passersby to CityBillboardTax.ca.

Copy on the billboards say “How can the City tax an industry more than it earns?” and “Any tax affects you. Even one on billboards.”

Rosanne Caron, president of OMAC, said the tax will act as “prohibition” on outdoor advertising, driving costs up for businesses and charitable groups that receive donated ad space.

“We feel it is critical to communicate what is truly at stake if the new sign by-law and tax are passed into law,” Caron said in a statement.

OMAC has asked the council to postpone the vote for one month to examine the law and “reach a workable solution for all stakeholders.”

Toronto Adscapes has been following this story. For related posts, check out…
Signing off?
Toronto’s Ad Busters

On November 4th, 2009, the Planning and Growth Management Committee unanimously passed the City’s new billboard bylaw and tax proposal.

This victory for public space advocates, progressive councillors, and Mayor Miller will provide harmonized regulation of the billboard industry and the tax will create the revenue needed to enforce those regulations.

Representatives from the billboard industry argue that the proposed amount of the tax ($10 million / year city wide) would put them out of business. However, many believe that the billboard companies are underestimating their earnings, greatly. The City hired David Amborski, an outside economist, developed the tax rate on the belief that it would amount to only 7% of industry revenue.

The most interesting moment of the night occurred when industry representatives, there in protest, argued that the proposed bylaw does not support, nor accommodate their continued growth, limiting the number of billboards that go legally be put up. These restrictions include imposing minimum separation distances between billboards and prohibiting them at intersections. In response to this, Councillor Janet Davis (Ward 31, Beaches- East York) said: “Well maybe we just shouldn’t have growth in advertising. I don’t want to live in a city with an ever-growing and burgeoning number of signs…it’s not my vision of a beautiful city.”

The bylaw’s next step will be a hearing before the full City Council.

For more information on the bylaw, read the City of Toronto’s official page for the bylaw at http://www.toronto.ca/signbylawproject/ or read a great overview from Torontoist.com at http://torontoist.com/2009/05/everything_you_ever_wanted_to_know.php