Strange advertisements on the streets of Madrid

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Those who see advertising exclusively as evil, who have no alternative, consider it a virus, through which modern society infects people with the desire for endless consumption, are mistaken. Advertising may well carry spiritual messages. For example, that unusual advertisement, which has recently appeared on the streets of Madrid thanks to an initiative called Madrid Street Advertising Takeover.

The very concept of "advertising" in our time has an almost open negative meaning. She filled everything: television, newspapers, the Internet, streets, public transport. And often it even interferes with our lives, taking away our time, Internet traffic and normal street views. But not all ads are created equal. There are also social advertisements that urge us not to buy-buy-buy, but to think about really important things. For example, about the health of adolescents, about the safety of life or about the interconnection of processes on the planet.

And a few days ago on the streets of Madrid there was such an external advertisement, which can generally be described as a "guerrilla war for human souls." This project was initiated by artists hiding under the pseudonyms NEKO and A. De Pedro, who created and implemented a project called MaSAT (Madrid Street Advertising Takeover).

To begin with, they offered one hundred and six representatives of the intelligentsia (scientists, teachers, artists, lawyers, writers, etc.) via the Internet to send them short texts that they would like to see on social street advertising. Moreover, according to the idea of the organizers, on the advertising posters themselves there should be just black text on a white background.

On the night of March 30, NEKO, A. De Pedro and six more of their associates went to the streets of Madrid, carrying printed advertising posters and special keys to open the light boxes. Moreover, they used for their own purposes only free advertising media, of which a great many have appeared in recent years. And in the morning, instead of the usual street advertising, city residents saw more than a hundred short messages urging people to come out of the psychological cocoon that they themselves created around themselves for at least a second and think about important things.

For those who are poorly familiar with the English language, we translate the phrases placed in the illustrations for this article. "Love me", "Buy me cocaine", "Hmmmmm" (the sound made during meditations), "Money destroys the world", "We believe in love", "Everything is fine. Go shopping. " And these are just six of one hundred and six inscriptions in English and Spanish that appeared on the streets of Madrid overnight.