Advertising Graffiti
If defacing public surfaces is illegal, then advertising graffiti strikes me as remarkably stupid: "Visit this website in case of prosecution!" Yet it's everywhere in Almaty, showing off companies as massive as Jameson or as hyper-local as the laghman joint on the corner. A good deal of them, it's true, are promoting URLs for ordering prostitutes. They clearly give the law little regard to begin with. But what about the chain stores and the start-ups with something to lose? What are they thinking?
I had no way of answering that question until I stumbled, quite literally, upon a logo that looked familiar. "Study English with Study Inn!" it read, framed in a decently-executed stencil. Study Inn...Study Inn...rings a bell. Oh, that's because it' was on my pay stub! My very employers had been seduced into this dubious advertising strategy. When I asked about it the next day, my boss laughed. "Some guy on our advertising team paid his friends five bucks to drive around and put those down in the middle of the night." It was cheap and free of red-tape, she said. And the cops hadn't come ringing...yet.
I had no way of answering that question until I stumbled, quite literally, upon a logo that looked familiar. "Study English with Study Inn!" it read, framed in a decently-executed stencil. Study Inn...Study Inn...rings a bell. Oh, that's because it' was on my pay stub! My very employers had been seduced into this dubious advertising strategy. When I asked about it the next day, my boss laughed. "Some guy on our advertising team paid his friends five bucks to drive around and put those down in the middle of the night." It was cheap and free of red-tape, she said. And the cops hadn't come ringing...yet.
