Smoky Hearth owners explain Billboard ad

Last week I wrote urging that you "vote" on Oregon's proliferation of billboards since the passage of Measure 37. You can cast at least one vote by emailing the owners of one billboard message. The billboard's "tenants" are Don & Jeannine Hokanson of Smoky Hearth Pizza, whose sign looms over U.S. 26 outside Sandy. Don's e-mail is don@smokyhearth.com

Back in June, the Hokansons wrote the following letter to those who complained about their sign. I thought you might find it interesting and indicative of the couple's possible openness to reconsider.

Re: Smoky Hearth’s Billboard Advertisement
Dear Customer and Community Member,

Thank you for your comments regarding our advertisement on the new billboards off Hwy 26. Jeannine and I appreciate your concern for the corridor between Gresham and Sandy and recognize that it is only by community concern and direct involvement that such corridors can be protected.

Unfortunately, Measure 37 has had some unintended consequences for all of us, – including the new billboards. We would have preferred not to have billboards there. Perhaps someday decisions will be reversed and the boards will be removed. It is unlikely that the owner and operator will remove them willingly because of a local public boycott since most of the advertisers are state or national accounts and the signs are booked for several months in advance. We should point out that Smoky Hearth is not affiliated with either the billboard advertising company or the landowner. We are merely a client of the advertising company.

As you know, we pride ourselves on serving one of the best pizzas to be found anywhere in Portland and we strive to please every customer. We treasure referrals because they have been the key to our growth. We have been in business for two and a half years now and community support for our restaurant has been great, but our growth has not been as good as it needs to be. Smoky Hearth must grow in order to become financially viable. Since we are tucked in by the Cinema and off the highway, we are not able to get our name and message to the majority of the 50,000 people who travel on Highway 26 each day.

A billboard on the highway appeared like the only answer to achieving the growth we need to stay in Sandy. We understand that many of our customers will not like the billboard and some will decide not to return. We wished we had a better solution, but due to restrictive sign ordinances within Sandy, the billboard seemed like our only cost effective solution.

We appreciate your comments and hope that you understand a little better why we placed the advertisement. We hope that sometime in the future, we might see you in the restaurant again. Either way, we will remain fellow citizens committed to our community, our environment and our children.

Very Truly,

Don & Jeannine Hokanson
Owners, Managers

"Vote" now against billboards

In an editorial attacking the epidemic of billboards since the passage of Measure 37, The Oregonian editorial board today urges a November vote for Measure 49 as a way to reject the billboard epidemic.

Voting for Measure 49 is a good idea for all kinds of reasons, but citizens should “vote” between elections as well. As I have pointed out here and to The Oregonian (in an unpublished letter), the most direct way to fight billboards is to let advertisers know that “outdoor advertising” is counterproductive.

The billboard pictured with today’s editorial is near Sandy and advertises Smoky Hearth Pizza Company, home of “Portland’s Best Pizza.”

Your vote is one phone call away. The phone number for Smoky Hearth Pizza is (503) 668-4466. Ask for co-owner Jeannine Hokanson. Or you can e-mail her.

I talked with Jeannine today on the phone. Jeannine, who is co-owner with her husband, Don, is very pleasant and an excellent listener. If you state your concerns politely, respectfully and even helpfully, I think you will find that your “vote,” added to others, might make a difference.

I told Jeannine that if Smoky Hearth took down its sign, I’d go out of my way to drop in for a pizza on my next trip to Mt. Hood via Sandy.

By the way, Jeannine told me I was the first person from outside the Sandy area to complain.

Will you be the second?

P.S. I hope that someone in Sandy, who has "eyes" on the billboards, will pick up on this little effort and clue us in on others to contact. The manager of the Sandy Safeway perhaps?

Meanwhile, I have put out a call to our Metro Counselor Robert Liberty because Jeannine informed me that the Portland Zoo, which is operated by Metro, has advertised on the Sandy billboards. I'll let you know Robert's response.

Billfolds vs. Billboards

I sent the following letter off to The Oregonian yesterday.

I had a letter to the editor printed last week, and, quotas being quotas, I doubt the editors will print this one.

Still, I think it is worth sharing here.

Your front-page story in Sunday’s paper (“Billboards pit Beauty vs. Business”) fails to mention the single most effective weapon against billboards.

We all carry it around with us. It’s a wallet or a pocketbook.

Using the Internet, it is relatively easy to organize a community to prove to advertisers that offensive, blighting advertising is counterproductive — to show them that it will lose, not make, them money.

Post the phone numbers of CEOs or managers on the Internet for easy reference. Encourage readers to phone to say that they and their neighbors vow publicly to take their business elsewhere unless the billboards come down.

If that fails, trump billboards with your own signs using a good old-fashioned picket line. Bottom-line: Businesses should be openly and systematically held accountable in the marketplace for the methods and content of their advertising.

Rick Seifert
SW Portland

Pixated

Yesterday I found myself writing a fellow editor from my print days that the “ink in my veins” has dried up and been replaced by free-flowing pixels.

Publishing is still about words and pictures, except that ink and paper are a lot more expensive than pixels — and that makes a big difference.

If you have a computer (and who doesn’t these days?), the start-up costs for on-line publishing are virtually zero. Because of that, there aren’t a bunch of advertisers looking over your shoulder.

Of course there’s a whole lot more competition for readers, resulting in what mass media moguls rue as the dread “fragmented” market.

But one publisher’s fragmentation is another’s diversification.

Besides, any moderately tagged site not fixated on profit is instantly accessible through search engines. I’m amazed at the numbers of readers who “stumble” on The Red Electric because they are searching for “Ernie Pyle” or “A Pattern Language” or “Olympia Typewriters” or “Thoreau” or “billboards” or “farmers markets.”

Now that’s diversity!

I started posting less than a year ago. Over last weekend I passed the 400-post mark. I won’t do it tonight, but I need to examine the scope of those post topics to see whether I can stitch together a theme or two.

Without going into detail here, I’ll let you in on one: I am a “res … publican,” but I’ll leave that for another time.

Finally, just to show you how bad my obsessed, pixated brain is, I’ve started another web site, and, as of today, the first post is up. If you are interested, visit Back Space Typewriters.

Oh, and then there is always Hillsdale News, a site/e-newsletter serving our community.

See what I mean? Total pixation!

Arguments with advertising

My Sunday Oregonian arrived on the driveway this morning stuffed in an Ikea wrappper ad that read in big letters, “Home is the most important place in the world.”

Call me a crazy, but to me the most important place in the world is … the world. Without it we would not have our homes. And if we continue to fill up our homes with junk — even elegantly designed Swedish junk — we won’t have the world.

***

Consider this quote from a Friday New York Times article carrying the headline “Product Packages Now Shout To Grab Your Fickle Attention.” The quote is from a chief executive of a “brand agency” in Cincinnati who thinks off-beat packaging is a hot advertising medium.

“The media is fragmented, and we can’t find people — we can’t get them to sit down and listen to our argument on a television spot.”

Argument on a television spot?

Since when do television spots present arguments. The whole appeal of television as an advertising medium is that it short-circuits reason and goes for gut emotion.

If you look at the new glitzy packaging — Kleenex in oval boxes, Mountain Dew in graffiti-inspired bottles — none has anything remotely to do with making an argument.

***

Last spring the University of Oklahoma agreed to sell the naming rights to one of its premier campus schools. Voila! Conoco-Phillips School of Geology and Geophysics, the university is only the most recent institution to sell a respected name for corporate money. In this case, for $6 million.

Could it be that one day, public institutions will be so financially starved that this city, this state, and even this nation will sell their names to corporations? I once thought I would be spared such travesty in my lifetime, but now I’m not so sure.

Here’s an idea. Let’s name our major environmental disasters after corporations. Hurricane Exxon Mobil? Chevron Global Warming?

And why not name our wars after those for whom they are being fought? Isn’t the Iraq War really Big Oil War?

Credit where credit is due.

***

Finally there’s the Oregonian front page story this morning about the explosion of billboards in the state since the passage of Measure 37. The story quotes folks who are rightfully offended by the blight caused by the new signs.

When I ran The Connection newspaper, I launched an editorial campaign to fight a huge sign that went up at the corner of Shattuck and Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway, right across from Albertson’s.

My approach was simple and I wish it had been mentioned in the Oregonian story (I’ll write a letter to the editor tomorrow, which may or may not get printed). The solution: Get readers to call the companies advertising on the billboard and tell them that their ads are counterproductive. As in, we don't do business with outfits that blight our community.

As an editorial service over several months I provided readers with CEO names and phone numbers.

After a few dozen calls, the advertisers got the message. The billboard company (now Clear Channel) literally couldn’t give away the space. They tried. When the Oregon Zoo was offered free space and took it, we complained to Metro, which runs the zoo.

The Zoo ads came down and then the sign came down.

The bottom-line message is this: Businesses should be judged by the ways they advertise.

If ads are intrusive (Portland Trolley voice sponsorship ads for instance), if they offend (ever see a sexist ad?), if they blight the Commons (billboards or illegal signs on public roads, for example), if they slap their names on public institutions (buying naming rights — PGE Park and the Conoco-Phillips School of Geology and Geophysics), then we, the public, should openly and repeatedly vow to take our business elsewhere.

What's so "progressive" about billboards?

Portland Progressives may wonder what KPOJ-AM620, “Portland’s Progressive Radio Station,” is doing slathering its name on billboards around the city.

It so happens that the billboards and the radio station are owned by the same corporation, Clear Channel. That’s the very same outfit suing the city to make dozens of billboards even bigger.

I suggested here yesterday that, as taxpayers, we might save ourselves and our City big bucks if we snatch the billboard issue from the lawyers and publicly boycott Clear Channel advertisers who blight our landscape.

If you boycott KPOJ (with its ubiquitous three monkeys ad), you get a two-fer. You end up boycotting Clear Channel twice—as the station owner and as the billboard owner.

Ah, the perils of being a media conglomerate!

The downside: You have to forgo the insights and verve of talker Thom Hartmann for the duration…. Then again, he might just want to chat about his corporate "parent's" suing his adopted city.

How about it, Thom? Any thoughts about protecting "the Commons" from the folks who sign your check?

By the way, if you visit the Clear Channel site for buying billboard space in Portland you are treated some fascinating market statistics and a idyllic photo of a Portland notably and ironically unblighted by billboards.

Memo to Portland: Boycott billboard advertisers

The Oregonian featured a story today about Clear Channel's legal efforts to install bigger more intrusive billboards along Portland's Interstate corridors.

Back in the mid-90s, Hillsdale, Homestead and Bridlemile neighbors faced down Clear Channel (then it was AK Media) and won after the multi-media corporation had already installed a humongous sign at the corner of Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway and Shattuck, right across from Albertson's.

And, no, it didn't require a lawsuit like the one the City of Portland is enmeshed in.

All it took was the editor of the Southwest Community Connection (namely me) to print the phone numbers of the PR departments of the billboard advertisers as well at the number of the president of AK Media. (Yes, there are real flesh-and-blood, bad-publicity fearing people behind those slick corporate logos and intrusive signs.)

Each month, I urged readers to get on the phone, using my handy list of numbers, to call the advertisers (and the AK Media president) to say that this community was pledging to boycott all companies advertising on the billboard. My editorials vowed to run the phone numbers and the names of the offending and offensive advertisers until the sign came down.

Dozens responded conveying the word that advertising intrusion into our public "commons" would be counter-productive.

The advertisers got the message.

After the paid advertisers pulled out, AK Media was forced to give the space away to non-profits like the Portland Zoo. If you can't make money, at least you can go for the charitable tax write-off. Of course we got on the phones to Metro, which runs the Zoo, and Metro beat a retreat too.

Ultimately AK Media couldn't even give the space away, so the corporation finally took down the sign.

So why should the City of Portland using our money go to the expense of fighting Clear Channel's attorneys in court? Why don't we all just note who is advertising, post the phone numbers on-line, and then get on the phone or internet to say: "You know what, your advertising is going to bite you in your bottom...line."?

Memo to state lawmakers from a voter

Back on Dec. 6, I e-mailed three state legislators about concerns I want addressed.

Two, Sen. Ginny Burdick and Rep. Mary Nolan, represent me and probably you if you live in southwest Portland.

The third is Rep. Larry Galizio, D-Tigard, who happens to be a teaching colleague at PCC. Larry and I share many concerns about media's influence on us and our children.

In the past these three, all Democrats, had limited power to accomplish much, but now all are in the majority. In this session of the Legislature, they have real power.

That's one of the reasons I wrote them. I'd like some action, please.

I want the Legislature to set up a commission to implement media literacy education in our schools. Instituting a volunteer Media Literacy Commission would cost nothing.

I also wanted to know why the state isn't enforcing highway beautification on I-5 between Portland and Salem. Thumbing its nose at the public, Jobdango is using the public right of way as a free-fire zone for illegal billboards.

The result of my letter-writing? After a month, nothing. Not a word.

I'm sure that Salem legislators get a lot of mail, indeed they have set up a computer-generated system to invite it. Now they need a human system to deal with it, or at the very least acknowledge it.

It's time for these three, and no doubt others, to get back to basics: namely communicating with those who put them in office in the first place.