![](\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/images\/graffiti-sfcity.jpg\")
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I came across three advertising campaigns that are worth noting. The first is a City of San Francisco outreach campaign to property owners asking them to clean their walls of graffiti tags or call the Graffiti Watch hotline (the text reads: “Clean up tagging in your neighborhood before it really spreads”). By the looks of it, SF and Toronto share a similar abatement policy where they place the onus on property owners to get rid of tags or face fines.<\/p>\n
The campaign’s execution is quite clever. While I’m no fan of tagging, I don’t find it that offensive. But at least San Francisco is not hiding their attempt to white-wash the city — it looks like paint-rollers have covered the white space at the bottom of the ad. It’s a shame they didn’t actually use real taggers because the ones on the walls are even worse than the ones we see in back alleys and on the sides of buildings.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/images\/zoo-sf-adcreep.jpg\")
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The second campaign is for the San Francisco Zoo. I’m torn about this — I think the idea is brilliant but the ad creep watchdog in me cringes. This may come across as hypocritical, but I usually don’t mind when a city (or one of its agencies) advertises on its own property. What bothers me is that Coke or Nike will see this and want to do it too. Once it has been done its hard to say no.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/images\/folgers-adcreep.jpg\")
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The last one is a campaign unveiled in New York that uses the steam rising from a manhole cover to look like it’s rising from a coffee mug. Again, this is amazingly creative but is also completely obtrusive. My only conflicting emotion with this example is whether to point blame at the company’s voracious marketing campaign (and their ad agency) or at New York city officials for allowing it to happen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"