Something I didn’t miss one bit
We were trekking around Venice when it hit me: something was missing, and it was refreshing. There was almost no outdoor advertising.
What little advertising there was consisted of posters for cultural events plastered on walls and in the vaparetto stops. Cultural events! Museum exhibits, concerts, plays. No billboards with ads for soft drinks, alcohol, cell phones, cable TV, etc. In fact, no billboards at all. Just beautiful buildings that were free of clutter urging you to buy. It was a relief. Looking back, the same thing was true in Rome. The ads we saw there were of the 40% off type in store windows, and that was about it. Once we saw a large sign for UNICEF.
The exceptions were a couple of very large ads on some scaffolding on 2 buildings that were being renovated, the train station (which had billboards for companies like McDonald’s and LG, along with commercials playing nonstop on flat screen TVs) and the airports, which had billboards & signs on what seemed like every available space — many of them in English.
When we got back to New York, the advertising started in earnest. The walls of the jet way were lined with ads for HSBC. The customs area had giant billboards from another bank, along with others that I didn’t bother to look at. Wedged in among them were the security signs notifying visitors that they needed to have 2 fingers fingerprinted and a digital photo taken, and by the way, welcome to the United States.
