After Geneva: will Hamburg soon be ad-free?
Cars, delivery services, smartphones and shower: Hamburg, like all cities, is paved with advertising. The North District is now daring an experiment – could art instead of advertising become a model for the entire Hanseatic city? The idea came from Switzerland: Geneva wants to completely dispense with advertising posters from 2025.
Open questions such as “What is it that convinces you?”, “What are you going to do now?”, “What would you like to give away?” Can be read on numerous advertising pillars in Hamburg-Nord over the next two weeks. In addition, large posters show a watercolor in shades of blue, among others at the subway stops Borgweg and Saarlandstraße.
Hamburg: Advertising project in the north district
Behind this is the project “Dialog: Ad-Free City?” With it, students from different universities want to re-pose the question of the design options in public space. “It should show alternatives to the current street scene,” explains the initiator of the project, Liv Schnoor, in an interview with MOPO.
The group interviewed residents from the north of Hamburg. “For most people, outdoor advertising is so ubiquitous that they have switched it to mute and they don’t even notice it,” says the student. “Some advocate less commercial advertising and rather reading the next cultural or sporting event on the advertising pillars.”
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During the interviews, however, they also discovered a generation gap: “Many older Hamburgers attach great importance to outdoor advertising, because that’s how they get their information,” says Schnorr. All in all, however, it is too much advertising for them. A video survey is used to collect reactions to the project and put them together in the form of a short film.
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Just a few days ago, the Swiss city of Geneva announced that it would completely ban commercial advertising posters from public spaces from 2025. So it was decided by the red-green majority in the city parliament. Could that become a model for all of Hamburg?
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“That’s not our idea,” says Isabel Permien from the Green District Group and spokeswoman for culture. “Advertising in the city can be very positive and stimulating, but now you get overwhelmed by the crowd. Such projects as here in Hamburg-Nord can help that the public space BECOMES a colorful mixture. “