Visual Spam
With the government’s recent initiative to cut down on visual pollution in Amman, a new visual trend, aided by the increase of expenditure on advertising, is starting to surface; visual spam.
It’s slightly amusing how you cannot step a foot in town without being bombarded with ads in all formats for the big companies in town: they are plastered over the billboards and bus stops, front-paging local magazines, taking up spreads in most newspapers, covering buses, and they are even finding their way to archeological ruins, basketball courts, and schools by way of sponsoring. Amman is being flooded with many copies of the same messages, and you cannot run away from these sales calls, no matter where you go!
It started with the Arab Bank, who started their seemingly never-ending campaign in May. Then Mobilcom turned Orange, and the town turned pumpkin with a hundred million ads of orange stick figures, “Marhaba!”. Now, Fastlink has rebranded to Zein, and in the matter of days, the world became a splattered blotch of green and purple! Unfortunately for us though with the latter, the Zein campaign not only falls under the umbrella of visual spam, but it also qualifies to be called visual pollution. I am still in complete shock at the hideousness of the neon, day-glow, swirly, gradientated thingy that is being unveiled as Fastlink’s heir. The Zein logo has a tendency to hurt your eyes.
Sometimes, I wish I can turn on a sort of visual spam filter that does a job similar to the ad-blocking scripts of GreaseMonkey. You know, just a few minutes of driving around a town I love without having my senses flooded with ads.
