Green Day spray paints the streets of Sydney – graffiti or just plain old advertising

by StreetCorner
21/06/2009

Why is it that Green Day thinks it’s cool to graffiti the streets of Sydney? One of the world’s biggest bands has enough marketing dollars to buy any billboard in Sydney it wants. In today’s advertising market it could probably buy all of them.

The answer is simple. Green Day wants to project an edgy image and someone at an advertising agency has thought there’s no better way to do that than getting out the spray paint and putting their advertising message up next to graffiti tags.

Not that Green Day have actually done this in person, no, instead they have paid someone to do the “graffiti” for them. And they haven’t come up with anything edgy, they have just paid to have the Green Day album cover for 21st Century Breakdown reproduced. A pretty straightforward way of achieving free (or close to free )advertising in a cool urban setting. Or so someone obviously thinks.

According to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, Warner Music’s defense is that it paid someone who they thought had permission to do so, a “legal graffiti” company who can paint in designated spots. That is, they thought that a company has rights to spray paint ads on Sydney’s walls and to spray stencils on skate parks.

You have to wonder at this. Right or wrong the argument for legal graffiti locations is that if Council designates spots where graffiti is allowed it will not only encourage graffiti with a higher aesthetic value it will also lower the incidence of graffiti on other locations where it defaces public and private property.

Councils do not allocate designated locations for graffiti so multi millionaire bands can advertise their albums on them.

And is it possible that anyone with any common sense thought otherwise? If it is legal to spray paint your advertising message all over the streets of Sydney why isn’t everyone doing it? With the economic downturn there are any number of companies that are struggling to make budget and marketing budgets are getting squeezed. If this was legal every marketer worth their salt would be in on the act.

If Warner Music had bought eight standard inner city billboard locations across Sydney the cost would be in excess of $200,000 a month. One suspects that the “legal graffiti” company isn’t being paid $200,000. And one also suspects that the “legal graffiti” company isn’t passing on any of the money it collected from Warner Music to the City of Sydney or Waverley Council.

If Waverley Council and the City of Sydney don’t have an express prohibition on this use of designated graffiti areas for third party advertising could they please let us know. We would also very much like to use a spray can on the streets of Sydney to promote our website and we promise to be arty when doing so.

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