Londoners join the anti-billboard brigade
The digital-billboard backlash appears to have reached Britain.
Residents in the west London area of Hammersmith, where out-of-home media owner Ocean Outdoor last year invested £1m ($1.5m) in a pair of digital tower-format screens, have been quoted by a local newspaper as saying that the billboards are annoying, wasteful, and dangerous.
The double-sided LED screens – located on each side of the A4 flyover in Hammersmith and dubbed the Two Towers – are intended to reach drivers journeying between central London and Heathrow Airport, as well as locals.
But, according to the newspaper, an unwanted side effect is that “residents claim glare from the double-sided boards is keeping them up at night while draining enough power to supply a whole street”.
One was quoted as saying: “Everyone’s seriously annoyed with it, and if that’s not a distraction to drivers, I don’t know what is.”
Their criticisms echo those of anti-billboard campaigners in many U.S. cities, who have tended to concentrate on the issues of light pollution and traffic safety, with power consumption rarely mentioned.
Most jurisdictions there that have allowed digital billboards – and many have held back from permitting them, usually citing the need for further study – have imposed rules to minimise the problem of excessive night-time brightness, for example by mandating minimum distances between the advertising sites and from residences.
The potential distraction to drivers has also proved a persistent concern, although no hard evidence supports the theory that digital billboards cause accidents and most areas permit only rotations of static images, rather than moving images.
In London, the newspaper article also pointed out that the local council refused to give nearby St. Paul’s church permission to erect its own digital display, saying it would spoil views of the historic building.
But the deputy leader of the local authority Hammersmith & Fulham Council said that leasing the site to Ocean Outdoor, expected to gain the council $0.5m ($750,000) annually, would help keep taxes down.
Nicholas Botterill told the newspaper: “In these tough economic times residents are demanding that council tax is kept to an absolute minimum and we do not apologise for using innovative ways that help generate year-on-year tax cuts.”
He added: “We have asked Ocean Outdoor to turn down the brightness of the adverts at night to the minimum possible setting following feedback from residents.”
The billboards were supplied to Ocean by Lighthouse Technologies.
www.lighthouse-tech.com
www.oceanoutdoor.com
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