MOSCOW, October 19 (Itar-Tass) — Moscow city mayor Sergei Sobyanin has pledged to create a civilized advertising market in the Russian capital.
“In fact, Muscovites became hostages of the advertising business – hang any banners you like and wherever you want,” he told the Moscow city legislature on Wednesday summing up the results of his government’s work. “As a result all central streets were overloaded with junk ads, there were no skies seen, facades of hundreds of office and apartment buildings were covered by ads mounted on construction nettings.”
“The city government’s one more task is to free the city from excessive and obsessive ads,” he said.
The mayor recalled that his government has already banned to hang banners with ads on construction nettings and fences.
“A total of 2,000 banners and 50,000 kilometers of different illegally placed ads were removed. As a result, Moscow seems lighter and more spacious, many architectural sites opened their faces,” he said.
“We will take further consistent efforts to create a civilized market of outdoor advertising that will not deface, but will decorate the city,” Sobyanin said. “By the way, thanks to transparent procedures the auctions for advertising space yielded much bigger revenues than earlier. Ads in the Moscow Metro yield by 3.7 times more revenues and ads in the public transport network – by 7.5 times more.”