News, Chicago Aldermen Push To Stop Mobile Billboards.

[eevee]

Originally Posted by Drover

And spare me the "environmental impact" nonsense. There are millions of vehicles driving the area streets, it wouldn't even be possible to measure the impact of a dozen more.

true, but the vast majority of those millions of vehicles are serving another purpose, whether it's transporting goods or people. the sole purpose of a moving billboard is to go up and down the streets to be looked at.

again, I know it's not up to me (you've mentioned this several times), but I do think there are better ways of advertising that won't have much of an impact (I've always loved the idea of companies paying people to advertise on their car). IDK, just my opinion. whether or not you believe in the "green movement", you have to agree that 1) the air here sucks (why make it worse, even it's only a teeny tiny bit worse; 2) gas is not unlimited and now would be a good time to figure out how to conserve what we have left. and yes, people are looking at how green companies are becoming, whether it's via packaging or advertisement. hopefully people who are against these type of billboards will speak up to the companies using them and voice their opinions (I would do it this second if I even knew which companies were doing it! they aren't really advertising around Pilsen...)

having said all that, I'm not into gov't mandated bans, so not really for this, but I wouldn't mind a bill that forces companies that uses such advertisement to pay some sort of fees

[Drover]

Originally Posted by eevee

true, but the vast majority of those millions of vehicles are serving another purpose, whether it's transporting goods or people. the sole purpose of a moving billboard is to go up and down the streets to be looked at.

again, I know it's not up to me (you've mentioned this several times), but I do think there are better ways of advertising that won't have much of an impact (I've always loved the idea of companies paying people to advertise on their car). IDK, just my opinion. whether or not you believe in the "green movement", you have to agree that 1) the air here sucks (why make it worse, even it's only a teeny tiny bit worse; 2) gas is not unlimited and now would be a good time to figure out how to conserve what we have left. and yes, people are looking at how green companies are becoming, whether it's via packaging or advertisement. hopefully people who are against these type of billboards will speak up to the companies using them and voice their opinions (I would do it this second if I even knew which companies were doing it! they aren't really advertising around Pilsen...)

having said all that, I'm not into gov't mandated bans, so not really for this, but I wouldn't mind a bill that forces companies that uses such advertisement to pay some sort of fees

I'm still not sure why you don't consider marketing to be a legitimate purpose for energy consumption, but whatever. Oh, and they already do pay fees, they're called "gasoline taxes." The more those things drive around, the more they pay in taxes.

[Steve-o]

Originally Posted by Chicago60614

I LOOOOOVE the billboard for the strip club that drives up and down Boystown every weekend.

have they not...over the past year....looked around at the neighborhood they're driving through with the huge naked lady?

Talk about barkin' up the wrong tree!

[Costa Rica Chica]

Originally Posted by Drover

Marketing costs money. If a company decides that spending part of their marketing budget on gas provides a satisfactory return on their investment, who are you to say it's a waste?

Unnecessary emissions is what I meant.

Eta, just read the rest of this thread and I guess I'll get jumped on for making the environmental argument. So be it, that's how I feel.

[Avengerfire]

Originally Posted by Costa Rica Chica

Unnecessary emissions is what I meant.

Eta, just read the rest of this thread and I guess I'll get jumped on for making the environmental argument. So be it, that's how I feel.

Ok, lets outlaw Pizza and Chinese food delivery while we are at it.
Where do we draw the line? Hmmm?

[eevee]

Originally Posted by Avengerfire

Ok, lets outlaw Pizza and Chinese food delivery while we are at it.
Where do we draw the line? Hmmm?

bad analogy, the line seems pretty clear to me: these guys are transporting goods to a customer. they are bringing food from point A to point B, nothing like a moving billboard which transports nothing (yeah, it's carrying around an advertisement, but it's not transporting it anywhere, just driving it around)

JMO, but a vehicle should really just be used for transporting goods or people from one location to another. I can't think of any example outside this at the moment. almost every single vehicle type out there serves this purpose, some better than others. JMO, it shouldn't be driven w/the sole purpose of being seen, since there are other ways to be seen. if these trucks served ANY other purpose other than as a moving billboard, if they were transporting goods for demos, for example, I wouldn't have as much of an issue w/ them.

guess we'll just agree to disagree...

[JanuaryGirl]

Thank God! I lived in Wrigleyville, and would always see those things outside Cubby Bear, sitting in traffic, where it is already so congested, just burning through gas.

[jdiddy]

As long as they don't have external speakers I generally side with Drover here. But I remember last spring I was downtown and there was a mobile billboard with video screens driving around the loop, absolutely blasting the audio on the commercial they had looped.

I haven't seen (heard) anything like that since, so maybe they realized annoying the absolute hell out of people walking down the street isn't an effective marketing ploy. Or maybe it violated existing nuisance laws. Either way, if that ever makes a comeback, that's one lame alderman nanny law I'd love to get behind.

[Suthnautr]

Originally Posted by Drover

Again, whether there are "better" ways to advertise is not for you to decide. It is for the people buying the ads to decide. And spare me the "environmental impact" nonsense. There are millions of vehicles driving the area streets, it wouldn't even be possible to measure the impact of a dozen more. Not to mention this is Chicago where the air is nasty, and if those trucks were built relatively recently and they use gas engines (I think they do), chances are the air going out of the tailpipe is cleaner than the air coming in.

Here's an idea too - People looking for things to buy drive all over the place for that perfect product they can't seem to find. So when the mobile billboard drives by, it shows them that product and they know where to buy it. Also, these trucks are hollow, just toting around a bunch of air - so not much gas there - then there's the fact that to be effective they have to drive fairly slow, saving gas. Also - they are relatively rare. Its not like there are fleets of them all over the place. Busses drive empty all the time too when they have to return to the depot... so the only good they're doing is showing their ads on the side. Another point is that these guys tend to deal with a lot of negative feedback about the gas issue and they're turning to bio-diesel and synthetic oil in some cases. The bio-diesel burns cleaner and uses old fryer oil from restaurants. The synthetic oil goes for about 5 to 7 thousand miles between changes.

The best part about mobile billboards though, is that they seem to work because people have been putting more of their advertising budgets into mobile on an annual basis (outdoor advertising has risen: see [url=http://adage.com/datacenter/article?article_id=127914]Total U.S. Measured Advertising Spending by Category - Advertising Age - DataCenter: Advertising Spending[/url] ) and mobile billboard advertising rates are up 20% - so what works for businesses gets re-invested in.

Cons and rip-offs abound. So if you know your product or service (say lawn service for example) is better than the other five guys in the area who are watering down the chemicals - or if your lawn service uses mostly only organic pesticides and fertilizers - you owe it to the public to make sure they don't get ripped off. You also, as a good guy in business, deserve to make money and take it away from the cons and rip-offs - so you go with mobile scrolling, back-lit billboards that use bio-diesel and synthetic oil (or not) and - but that's the trade off. You help people, you help a guy with an ad truck and his family, and your organic lawn service thrives and grows and helps turn the whole world green - at the price of one slow moving, under-powered scrolling mobile billboard truck supporting some poor slob who just needs to make a living. I don't see the harm in it.

[PokerPlayer1]

This sort of thing makes me absolutely want to puke and IMO, is one of the worst aspects of 'urbane' living; where the city can be crumbling around everyone, yet there are always plenty of idiotic politicians who are perfectly willing to waste precious time and resources pursuing some impotent and totally symbolic gesture that has zero real world impact, other than to satiate the emotions of a few philosophically driven morons.

Like, when the city council of Cleatusville, Georgia decides to issue their own "censure" of Bill Clinton and wastes a month debating the issue- when half of their 6th graders are stone cold illiterate... Or the alderman of Treehugger, Vermont spend all of Q3 drafting a scathing 'village resolution' against Bush for War crimes, when their unemployment rate is 35%.

If there was any sort of meaningful outcome that might come from something like this, yeah, examine the facts and we can argue about the philosophies after the fact. Stupid, token gestures like this are insulting and particularly offensive when they're done while punched in on the taxpayers time-clock, detracting time away from the other pressing issues that legitimately warrant attention.

It's like the cop who passes by an ongoing robbery, a knife murder, a rape, a stabbing and a severe car accident to catch up with the guy he just saw flicking a cigarette butt and write him a $10 ticket for littering.