In 2006, Gilberto Kassab, mayor of São Paulo, Brazil, passed the "Clean City Law." Citing growing concerns about rampant pollution in his city, Kassab decided enough was enough. But this was no ordinary piece of pollution legislation. Rather than going after car emissions or litterbugs, Kassab went after the billboards. Yes, you read that right: Kassab wanted to crack down on "visual pollution."
Saying that visual pollution was as burdensome as air and noise pollution, Kassab banned every billboard, poster, and bus ad in São Paulo with the Clean City Law. Even business signage had to go. Within months, city authorities had removed tens of thousands of ads both big and small—much to the dismay of business owners, who said the ban would surely ruin them.
Five years later, have all the businesses in São Paulo gone under? Hardly. In fact, most citizens and some advertising entities report being quite pleased with the now billboard-less city. A survey this year found that a 70 percent of residents say the Clean City Law has been "beneficial." "São Paulo’s a very vertical city," Vinicius Galvao, a journalist, said in an interview with NPR. "That makes it very frenetic. You couldn’t even realize the architecture of the old buildings, because they were just covered with billboards and logos and propaganda. And there was no criteria."
Where businesses are concerned, it turns out some advertisers are actually thankful for the ban, as it's forced them to reevaluate and improve. "Companies had to find their own ways to promote products and brands on the streets," Lalai Luna, co-founder of ad agency Remix, told the Financial Times last year. "São Paulo started having a lot more guerilla marketing [unconventional strategies, such as public stunts and viral campaigns] and it gave a lot of power to online and social media campaigns as a new way to interact with people."
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