Eye candy is brain candy

I collect snapshots of city posters that catch my eye. As you can see from the images, Berlin has been a goldmine.These posters do what ads are supposed to do: grab my attention, spark curiosity, and - imagine this - actually get me to read the words!

But beyond their job as ads, they’re beautiful, intriguing, or just plain cool. I could hang them on my wall.

The surprising part? They rarely come from big media buyers. Instead, these gems are from smaller players: galleries, theaters, local stores, magazines, events, and the occasional start-up. It’s almost as if the less money they have to spend, the more creative they get.

I come from São Paulo, a massive, thrilling city that, let’s be real, isn’t exactly a looker. We locals are used to it, like frogs in slowly heating water. But for outsiders? All that concrete and sensory overload is a shock. I used to bring bands to Brazil as a side gig, and that first drive from the airport to downtown was a rite of passage: this was not the tropical paradise they had in mind.

In a bid to mitigate the problem, São Paulo banned out-of-home ads in 2007, except for a few types of street furniture. The execution wasn’t perfect - we lost some iconic graffiti that didn’t need to go - but the relief from visual chaos? Remarkable. The city felt lighter and easier on the eyes; a social experiment gone right.

It became clear to me: out-of-home advertising is an uninvited guest in our public spaces. It demands your attention whether you’re in the mood or not, just adding to the mental clutter we’re all juggling every… single… day. So if we are going to keep putting posters up and robbing people of their attention, shouldn’t they at least be worth looking at?

How about less eyesore and more eye candy?