The billboard problem

A beer buddy of mine is a profound yet undiscovered wit on contemporary Ethiopian Society. His amazing mind just brims with factual anecdotes on virtually any topic I throw at him – I confess I like tapping into this font of Ethiopia trivia as I mull over this page every week – I was not disappointed when I requested his opinion considering billboards in our city – our topic of the week.
My pundit friend grinned at my description of the proliferation of street advertising as “a forest of billboards”, before responding with an unexpected turn of mind, “Do you know what were the first billboards in Ethiopia? he asked me with a twinkle in his eye. Caught off-guard, I remembered and suggested those few billboards erected during the imperial era at the five gateway roads to and out of Addis. If you recall, they had two simple messages – Bon Voyage on the side facing the city and Welcome to Addis on the reverse.
‘Good try but not close enough’, he said, “The first modern form of street sign was the
‘tella-meleket’. He was referring to the upended cans suspended on slender sticks in front of a gateway indicating that the household has tella (a dark Ethiopian ale) to sell.
I don’t think anybody ever thought then that the cans would nearly be extinct from the city only to be replaced by gigantic billboards that do not have such a concealed meaning. The road from Flamingo to Olympia, for instance, features lots of billboards of varying sizes that it seems like the treeling transplantation campaign has also been launched for billboards.
Though it at times looks like a poorly planned scheme, if it has got any, there is some aesthetic role that the billboards play – they at least block the dreary scenes of some of the city’s slums. Let’s also not forget the money the city administration generates from them.
Considering these positive sides, I think there should be an organized and modern approach to billboard posting in the city.

What should be done about
billboard forests?

I hate them, abhor them and even wish for a return to a centrally planned economy if that’s what it takes to get rid of unsightly advertising boards. Seriously though, what municipal regulations exist to protect the city scope? Please find out and tell us soon!

Anat, Lecturer

Billboards are not creatively designed so they are not attractive. I suggest that if there are to be so many of them, they should be more imaginative. In my opinion the advertising agencies that conceive billboards should adopt the experiences of other countries in regard to creativity and other aspects of proper display of signage and advertising.

Luel, Student

I wonder if you recall what Addis Abba and Ethiopia in general looked like before free market policies were introduced in 1991. Streets were plain and if they had any signs they were the ugly communist slogans written in uglier lettering and worse, the dominant color was blood red. I really don’t mind the current so called problem of bill boarding proliferation. It simply is not a problem.

K.K, Advertiser

We are a developing country which has to solve thousands of urgently critical socio-economic problems before we can afford the luxury of worrying about the beautification or otherwise of our urban areas. We should not retard any form of development (even billboards which after all are no big deal) as everything must go through developmental stages until the so called problem will find a solution for itself. That’s how a free market works so I suggest we accept objective reality.

Kebre, economist