> Some places suffer from excessive advertising, other places are energized by it, and the actual contents, presentation, placement, and other details, all of which are intimately tied in with the local culture, matter a great deal as well.

São Paulo was very much like that. Billboards were all over, some were captivating and cool and there were even innovative moving billboards people talked about. Small businesses got creative with theirs and changed their façades in ways that were immediately recognizable. Brazilians are very connected to advertising, so much so that it seeps its way into popular lexicon and shape colloquial language.

Yet, no one misses them now. No one has asked for them to come back. No one will.

Ads are much less an intrinsic cultural phenomenon than you think. We think they matter to culture simply because they exist, but their absence has no important effect on it.

> Ads are much less an intrinsic cultural phenomenon than you think. We think they matter to culture simply because they exist, but their absence has no important effect on it.

The thing is, though, every culture, every city, is different, and you just don't know what the effect will be until you've done it. Maybe Tokyo and other Asian cities would turn out to be the same as São Paulo, but ... maybe they wouldn't.

Because of this, and because it would be a major change, it's not something you want to do unless there's a lot of local support for it; it's something that needs to be locally driven.

Maybe in São Paulo, there was such support, and in the end things worked out, which is great.

But if nobody actually cares, it would be pretty silly to do it simply because of a "global movement."