OPEN

(BTW: Been laid low with a virus over the weekend, so apologies for the lack of posts…)

I’ve posted about the incredible story of Sao Paolo banning outdoor ads on Brand Republic. It’s like a dream come true for me because, as I say, I’ve been playing with a day-dream about what the world would be like if all marketing had to be useful for a little while now.

Here’s a copy of the post for those password-refusniks among you:

Imagine there’s no billboards. No display ads in the sky.

While the thought may run shivers down the spine of many marketers, thinking about a world free from marketing that isn’t useful is something I’ve been doing a fair bit of recently. Working, as I do, in social media and search engines,  the rules of the game for ads, editorial and sponsorship are that you have to be relevant to the user, in context, not interuptive, if you want to be successful.

So what would the world be like if we applied that rule to all marketing. If the first principle of marketing for and not at people we were interested in talking with was: thou shalt be useful.

In a striking set of photos on photo-sharing website Flickr, Tony de Marco shows us Brazilian city Sao Paolo in the aftermath of an ordinance banning outdoor advertising.

Now, imagine if thata happened in the UK and you were only allowed to put up adverts that were truly useful to people who saw it. What would they look like?