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There’s lots of talk about the “greening” of America in this time of climate change and soaring energy costs. But don’t count the billboard industry in.
Indeed, its latest and biggest money makers are the big, brash, brilliant signs -– LED (light-emitting-diode) digital billboards -– being sited rapidly on high-volume highways coast to coast.
The flashy mega-signs are called energy-efficient but they’re powerful enough to be seen a half mile away and consume some 4,800 watts of electric power per square yard per hour. Each costs some $450,000. Over 500 are up already; one industry analyst predicts there’ll be 75,000 by 2010.
Driving on congested, stop-and-go urban freeways, it’s increasingly tough to ignore these monsters, each flashing a new commercial every six or eight seconds. “We have the ultimate ability to withstand the whole challenge of consumer avoidance,” Paul Meyer, chief executive of Clear Channel Outdoor, one of the media titans now dominating the billboard industry, told the Washington Post. “We’re there 24-7. There’s no mute button, no on-off-switch, no changing the station.”
What’s more, because each digital board can have multiple sponsors with constantly updated messages, advertisers are proving easy to recruit. The industry is reportedly enjoying close-to-astronomic profit margins.
Critics charge the new signs, like the 500,000-plus old-style billboards dotting U.S. highways coast to coast, not only blight the landscape but represent private exploitation of roadways that the public paid for.
And increasingly, charges Kevin Fry, president of Scenic America, tasteless outdoor advertising is endangering Americans’ public realm. Drive into San Francisco and a forest of signs looms ahead, obscuring one of our most beautiful and renowned skylines. New York’s great neighborhoods are being -- in Fry’s words -- “draped like a giant burrito in enormous vinyl signs.” Poor neighborhoods are plastered with ads for liquor and fattening snacks. In many metropolitan areas, buses and subway cars are being wrapped in advertisements.
The big new digital signs are kicking off a heated argument about safety. There’s no proof the intense, rapidly flashing messages cause swerving or crashes, says the billboard industry. But Fry cites a National Highway Safety Administration conclusion that it’s dangerous to divert a driver’s attention more than two seconds. “By design,” he says, “the LEDs distract for more than two seconds; otherwise they wouldn’t be useful to advertisers.”
There’s no doubt the billboard industry, which sues to invalidate local communities sign ordinances and targets decision-makers from local towns to state legislatures to Congress, represents one of the nation’s most potent lobbies. It’s effectively emasculated the 41-year old Highway Beautification Act, passed with Lady Bird Johnson’s inspiration.
And its hunger shows no bounds. Think trees, for example. This January, the Spartenburg, S.C. Men’s Garden Club planted dozens of dogwoods, maples and other trees along a five-mile stretch of interstate roadway, some of it blighted by decaying and partly collapsed billboards. But the South Carolina Department of Transportation ordered removal of 45 trees because they were inside the 300-foot highway “view window” the billboard lobby urged the state to mandate.
Indeed, some 28 states have laws that can force cutting trees, owned by the public on public land, if they obscure drivers’ clear view of billboards. Florida even insists on a 500-to-1,000-foot “view zone.” How “ungreen,”
one wonders, can government policy get?
Are all signs then to be condemned? No, says Fry, reasonably sized informational signs are fine. Even big electronic displays are OK where they spell the very character of a place, like Times Square or the Las Vegas strip. The problem is the sign and billboard lobby trying to force inappropriate signs down Americans’ throats, from city to country, wherever it sees a buck to be made.
Los Angeles, for example, has been trying to get a handle on the 10,000-plus billboards, many illegally placed or sized, that line its roadways. The City Council ordered an inspection and enforcement program, plus a moratorium on new boards. Clear Channel Outdoor Inc, and CBS Outdoor Inc. sued to invalidate the ordinance. According to the Los Angeles Times, the city was winning successive court rounds when the City Attorney, Rocky Delgadillo, suddenly stepped in to settle with the billboard giants. He agreed to legalize scores of illegally operating billboards if the industry would agree to inspection and modest fees.
Billboard opponents were enraged, noting Delgadillo had received $424,000 worth of billboard space to support his election, and that the firms had continued to contribute thousands more to him and some of the City Council members who eventually approved the settlement.
Fighting the billboard lobby looks like a classic David and Goliath struggle -- huge resources against largely unpaid volunteers. But those volunteers say that if we’re to hope for a clean, green, uncluttered America, this is one battle we can’t avoid.
Comments may be addressed to npeirce@citistates.com
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