Daffier Age Mourned : Billboard Art Takes On a Tamer Tint

Roland Young fondly recalls the day he had his own billboard set on fire.

The billboard was a towering montage on Sunset Boulevard heralding the appearance of the rock group Humble Pie at the Whiskey A Go Go. The week the billboard went up, the Whiskey A Go Go nearly burned down and the performance was canceled.

Another time, another place, Young, who designed the billboard, simply might have had it removed. But this was 1971. Rock ‘n’ roll was not meant to die quietly, not on the Strip, at least not without a funeral pyre.

Symbol of an Age

“I said ‘Boys, get out the blow torches.’ Scorch the sign. It was the purest act of creativity I could think of,” Young said. Charred but recognizable, the board stayed up for a month, he said, an apt symbol of a daft age.

For a time this summer, there wasn’t a single billboard promoting popular music on Sunset. Gone was the strip’s plywood pantheon of rock idols--from the Beatles, to Cher, to Bette Midler kneeling voluptuously over Cliff Raven’s tattoo parlor. The strip has come to be dominated by sedate signs for big banks, British luxury cars, menthol cigarettes and Swiss watches.

The billboard industry, too, has changed. Some people, like Young, who have left the business say it has lost much of its verve and spontaneity. Those who defend the business say that to survive in a complex and competitive marketplace, the industry must be more cost-conscious, conservative and sensitive to public criticism.

And so an economy of words and images is giving a new, rather self-effacing bearing to the oldest and often brashest commercial art form in the world. At least 3,000 years old, outdoor advertising was used by merchants in Egypt who displayed sales messages on stone tablets and obelisks erected along roadsides.

Los Angeles and its environs, because of its climate, car culture and love of novelty, has always been the capital of outdoor advertising. It remains so, with an estimated 18,000 to 20,000 billboards, more than in any other urban area of the country.

A City’s Character

Without its billboards, Los Angeles would not be, well, L.A ., wrote historian Reyner Banham in his acclaimed book, “Los Angeles--the Architecture of Four Ecologies.”

“Anyone who cares for the unique character of individual cities must see that the proliferation of advertising signs is an essential part of the character of Los Angeles; to deprive the city of them would be like depriving San Gimignano of its towers or the city of London its Wren steeples,” said Banham.

Advertisers appear increasingly aware of the opportunities that billboards afford. Last year, nearly $1 billion was spent nationwide on billboard advertising, 30% more than five years earlier. The increase reflects higher rates billboard advertisers are willing to pay rather than an increase in the number of the signs themselves.

According to industry research, a typical citywide billboard campaign, costing about $130,000, will expose the advertiser’s message to 79% of the population. The same amount of money spent on television commercials will reach 83% of the population. But people will see the billboards much more often, the industry argues, maintaining that the same amount of money that buys 29,000 “gross impressions” on TV buys 137,000 billboard sightings.

Yet, in Los Angeles as well as other parts of the country, the billboard business is being challenged by a variety of forces. Industry executives say that the environmental movement, rising real estate prices and competition among billboard companies are holding profits down.

Tom Hudson, who heads the Southern California office of Patrick Media Group, one of the two largest billboard companies in the country, says that Patrick’s average annual revenue for one sign in Los Angeles is about $32,000. Some signs bring in a lot more, but, for them, a company like Patrick can pay a steep rent.

Top Dollar Site

For example, Patrick says it pays about $100,000 a year for a rooftop site overlooking the intersection of Wilshire and San Vicente boulevards, at the southeast edge of Beverly Hills, where some of the city’s most well-heeled consumers pass every day.

More than the message itself, location of a billboard can be the key to a successful advertising campaign. “Positioning,” a word used a lot in the business, means getting the message up on a busy street where the right people will see it.

In Los Angeles, there are several prime locations--on Sunset, near the Los Angeles International Airport, or close to one of the city’s fashionable Westside neighborhoods. There are also places--along the San Diego Freeway near Carson is one place--where industry officials admit they overdid it, erecting ugly pickets of billboard after billboard.

This year, Patrick executives say they are putting up at least one Spanish language showing--a series of signs advertising one product--once a week and estimate that Spanish showings have grown by 15% to 20% over the past three years.

The first Spanish language billboard was posted in Los Angeles at the outbreak of World War II, said Joe Blackstock at Patrick. It was a recruitment poster for jobs at the Douglas Aircraft Co., and it read “Este Guerra Es SUYA . . . Tambien Se Necesita de Usted.” (This is YOUR war . . . You Too Are Needed.)

Something for Asians

Just last year, the first Asian language billboards began appearing in Los Angeles, according to spokesmen for Patrick and Gannett Outdoor Co. Inc., a nationwide billboard company and Patrick’s principal competitor.

In the past, when a billboard company wanted to find a prime spot for a sign, it would send out a salesman and tell him to run a traffic count at a busy intersection. Today, the process is more complicated and expensive.

A firm like Patrick may pick a location to advertise a household product only after learning all it can about the neighborhood--the average age, income, and education level; whether the residents prefer cereal or eggs for breakfast, whether they eat a lot of snack food, and how much they spend on alcohol and cigarettes. One billboard display strategy was based on locating Latino neighborhoods where people eat a lot of peanut butter.

Finding strategic locations for billboards has become increasingly difficult over the past several years as more and more communities place new restrictions on the construction of new signs.

The Outdoor Advertising Assn. of America, the billboard industry’s lobbying arm, says there are about 700,000 fewer billboards along U.S. highways today than there were in 1965, the year that the federal Highway Beautification Act began restricting billboards to areas zoned for commercial or industrial uses. Since then, about 500 cities have banned or limited outdoor advertising.

Billboards have aroused both outrage and fascination since the turn of the century. In their book “Billboard Art,” authors Sally Henderson and Robert Landau point out that complaints of visual clutter and environmental degradation were raised before the advent of the automobile, when billboards were posters slapped on walls and fences.

Billboards are accused of blighting the landscape, blocking scenic views, distracting motorists and worse. Near Ojai, a group of citizens recently claimed that a billboard would attract rabid bats. The group, Citizens to Preserve the Ojai, argued that at night the big illuminated sign would draw insects the bats feed on. The bats, which are occasionally rabid, might bite household pets and, thus, pose a threat to humans, the citizens’ group contended in its successful campaign against the billboard.

In “The Great Gatsby,” the novel that immortalized the romance and excess of the 1920s, a giant billboard becomes a symbol of hellish desolation, presiding over “a valley of ashes . . . where ashes take the form of houses and chimneys and rising smoke . . . and finally of men who move dimly, already crumbling through the powdery air.”

Ironically, the ‘20s was a time when billboard companies like Patrick’s local franchise, then known as Foster & Kleiser, were working hardest to create oases of natural beauty around their signs. Foster & Kleiser acquired the land around the billboards which were then nestled among palms and formal gardens. Foster & Kleiser operated its own nursery, employed 50 horticulturists and sponsored a radio garden club of the air.

Since 1986, when Los Angeles passed its toughest anti-billboard ordinance to date, Patrick and Gannett say they have taken down more than 500 billboard structures while erecting fewer than 70 new ones. Patrick officials say that only 50 of the 140 Southern California towns where it has done business over the years now allow the firm to put up new billboard structures. (The company may put up new signs on all existing structures.)

The 1986 Los Angeles ordinance requires billboards to be at least 300 feet from one another. It bans them from rooftops, although existing rooftop structures were allowed to stay up. The law says the signs must be at least 200 feet from residential neighborhoods and prohibits construction of new billboards along freeways within city limits.

Under current laws, the ad that launched the golden age of billboards on Sunset wouldn’t be legal. Commissioned in 1953 by the Hotel Sahara in La Vegas, the billboard had a 65-square-foot swimming pool jutting from the sign, live models in swim suits, and the day the sign was unveiled, an impromptu performance by Red Skelton, who jumped fully clothed into the pool.

Billboards on Sunset played host to live performances as recently as five years ago, when a group of young actors spent four months living on the catwalk of a sign advertising a blinking computer chip called the “winkie.”

But production costs and zoning laws have made the “living board,” like the Sahara and the Winkie, a thing of the past. Allen Rossi, Gannett’s creative director, said his company recently had to turn away a request for a board promoting a television show about women in prison.

“They wanted us to do a board complete with a jail cell and live women in there in striped suits hanging out the bars,” Rossi said. “We had to stay away from it. We told them we could do mannequins. The proposal went back and forth and finally died.”

Along Sunset Strip, where there are 30% fewer boards than there were 10 years ago, the ban on moving parts is also having an effect on animation. Rossi said he had to pass on one ad that would have shown a rabbit beating a drum and another ad featuring two kissing dogs.

“It wasn’t the kissing that posed the problem,” Rossi said. “It was going to be an ad for a video cassette of ‘Lady and the Tramp’ and it re-created one of the best scenes in the movie where two dogs come together over a strand of spaghetti.” Rossi said the ad would have violated the West Hollywood law against movement.

Artists and copywriters mourn the freedom they once enjoyed.

“At the agencies, people are dismayed because they can’t let their creative juices flow,” said Rossi. “We’ve literally had to turn away thousands of dollars in business because we’re prohibited from displaying certain kinds of ads.”

Today, billboard creativity is likely to be measured by the simplicity of message and imagery. “Think Small,” the slogan that launched a famous ad campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle, sums up the current trend in billboard creativity.

As outdoor advertisers compete for our attention, they figure they have six seconds to make an impression on the average driver.

“It has become the art of omission, the more you leave out of an ad the better. . . . Say it in seven words or less and make it stick,” said Blackstock.

Simplicity is a quality shared by many of the winners of this year’s OBIEs, the industry’s annual awards for creative excellence. One of the winners is a Colgate toothpaste ad. Across a mostly blank billboard, a ribbon of toothpaste forms a broad white smile. Only one word, “Colgate,” appears in the ad. A winning ad for the San Diego Zoo depicts a snake forming the letters “Z O O.”

Billboards clearly have not abandoned sex. The latest head stopper on Sunset is a lusty ad for the “Barbi Twins,” two young women without much on. The billboard is the latest in a long line of Sunset signs that have displayed the faces and figures of young women hoping to break into the entertainment business.

There are two dominant types of billboards. The smaller and more numerous are “poster panels,” made up of 30 printed posters arranged across 300-square-foot panels. The biggest billboards are bulletins--800 to 1,200 square feet. Traditionally, they have been hand painted, on the wooden surface of the boards or, more recently, on vinyl stretched across the wood.

Billboard painters work from a photograph projected onto a huge paper screen stretched tight across the billboard. With an electronic stylus, tiny holes are burned into the paper, tracing the lines of the enlarged photo image. The tracery is called a “pounce pattern.” Charcoal is then applied to the pattern. Filtering through the tiny holes, the charcoal impresses on the wood below, giving the painters an outline.

Over the past century, billboard painting has both imitated and influenced artistic styles and launched careers. Pop artist James Rosenquist is perhaps the best known contemporary painter to emerge from the ranks of billboard artists.

Retired 88-year-old billboard painter Gino Raffaelli makes no distinction between fine art and commercial art.

“I developed artists. I didn’t develop sign painters,” Raffaelli said, referring to the years he taught apprentice billboard painters. Raffaelli said he had his students work only in black and white and concentrate on form. “I said ‘How can you paint a nose if you don’t understand it’s a pyramid?’ ”

Raffaelli, who started painting billboards when they were being hauled from the paint shops in buckboards, savors his own achievements.

“I did the first billboard cutout. It was in April of 1936, a 17-foot figure of Michaelangelo’s Moses . . . I was the first guy who painted bubbles on a glass of beer.”

A widower, Raffaelli lives alone with his dog, well aware that the craft he passionately defends maybe in jeopardy.

Computer-guided paint sprayers and electronic message boards are the wave of the future. Computerized painting is already capable of finishing a billboard in less than 24 hours that, hand painted, takes four to five days.

Some industry executives worry about the impact of the new technology on their painters. At Patrick, Hudson urges his painters to work faster and, he admits, less fastidiously.

“We’re not painting for the Louvre. We don’t need that level of quality for people going by our signs at 75 m.p.h.,” Hudson said.

But industry purists are concerned that the steps taken to keep Patrick and other firms competitive will put an end to the craftsmanship that caused billboard design, at least in some circles, to be regarded as art.

Raffaelli says he would gladly come out of retirement to show up the computers.

“Painting is an illusion. It’s capturing the mood of the day. How are you going to teach a computer to do that?”