This is Jörg Cieslok. He runs Titan Outdoor Canada. He is six and a half feet tall and has a thick German accent. He has a low opinion of "grassroots groups" like residents associations. He regularly calls up Rami to yell at him. He is more responsible for illegal billboards in Toronto than almost any other individual. He claims, under oath, to have lost $1 million due to sign bylaw enforcement. He threatened to......

zig Executive Creative Director Martin Beauvais, to The National Post about his company's totally repulsive bumvertising campaign for CFRB: "We didn’t pay [the homeless people] thousands or hundreds. We paid them the kind of money they would make on the street because it would have been wrong to do more than that. We paid them something decent." And: "I don’t think it’s exploitive at all because we’ve asked people if they wanted to do it......

Good advertising is meant to stop you in your tracks, but a new ad campaign for local radio station CFRB might leave you frozen in disbelief. This month, CFRB contracted ad agency zig to create a witty series of guerilla-style street ads (read: illegal) meant to highlight polarizing issues of urban life. "Is advertising out of control?" reads a CFRB flyer wheatpasted on a Queen West utility pole. A sign asking "Should cyclists have......

Take note, Mobile Moment: this is the kind of post that no amount of guerilla stickering will get you.......

While black background/brightly lettered signs on the city's roadsides aim to attract bargain hunters, the location and timing of a clearance sale announcement we discovered two nights ago may strike some as questionable—Wilson Avenue at Murray Road, directly south of the Sunrise Propane explosion site. Photo by Jamie Bradburn......

So we're, uh, pretty sure that Bell's behind those mystery "er" ads after all. A poster at RedFlagDeals leaked some second-phase ads yesterday—including one for the Samsung Instinct that proclaims it an "apple eater"—which have since been confirmed by a few Torontoist readers as the real deal. The second phase is being revealed all around the city now (one revealed one is near where the Don Valley Parkway and Gardiner Expressway meet; others are......

The latest ubiquitous mystery ad is "er." Though it has various configurations—billboards, (illegal) signs, and subway station placards—it always takes the same rough form: two blue letters in the same typeface, and some lone blue shape on the edge of an otherwise white canvas. It's no Obay as far as provocativeness goes, but it's nonetheless drumming up more than its fair share of interest. So, who's behind it all? Our money's on Bell. The......

And Torontoist was there to make a video of it. Context after the jump.......

Users of modern web browsers are getting used to not having to type in an entire URL to get to the page they want—most new browsers fill in the shorthand, so you can type in "Torontoist," for example, and don't have to worry about the .com suffix. Unless you're on Rogers, that is. Beginning yesterday (for us), Rogers users started getting a browser hijack for any failed DNS requests, which are usually due to......

Rami Tabello of IllegalSigns.ca has teamed up with the New York–based Anti-Advertising Agency to create IllegalBillboards.org. According to Tabello's announcement, "the idea is to set up a blank web site, which can now be used by New York-based activists to keep track of research into illegal billboards and scrutiny of Department of Buildings enforcement." Tabello has already started taking a look at illegal ads in New York City over the past few weeks.......

This is how today's AY    R arrived at subscribers' doorsteps. The wrap was last year's innovation. The beer "coaster" is a piece of paper stuck on like a post-it note. We wonder what 2009 will bring.......

fuck this grassroots gone corporate This post + this post = this post. Discuss. Photo taken at the northeast corner of Queen and Spadina by Jonathan Goldsbie.......

Spiral Beach have found themselves in a spot of trouble. As detailed a week and a half ago in both NOW and Eye, the band got hit with a $1470 bill [PDF] from EcoMedia Direct for putting up eight posters for last month's Opera House show on eight of the company's "SilverBox and Heritage Box Recycling Bins." Again, that's $1470 for eight small posters, like the one above made by Spiral Beach singer/keyboardist Maddy......

On Monday morning, Astral Media unveiled prototypes of its new line of "street furniture" at City Hall. On Wednesday, we took a look at the garbage bins. On Thursday, the advertising pillars. Yesterday, the transit shelters. Today, everything else. (Also check out Karen von Hahn's disparagement of the street furniture in the Globe.) A lot of people who otherwise hate what the Coordinated Street Furniture Program has wrought like the idea of the multi-publication structures......

On Monday morning, Astral Media unveiled prototypes of its new line of "street furniture" at City Hall. On Wednesday, we took a look at the garbage bins. On Thursday, we looked at the advertising pillars. This morning, the transit shelters. (Be sure also to read Christopher Hume's review, which makes our less-than-kind assessments look like raves.) The "Basic" shelter. (The blue "Toronto" ribbon was present for ceremonial cutting purposes only and is not part of......

On Monday morning, Astral Media unveiled prototypes of its new line of "street furniture" at City Hall. Torontoist was going to review all of the items at once but decided that some merited their own posts. Yesterday, we took a look at the garbage bins. Today we look at the advertising pillars. Friday, the transit shelters, and on Saturday everything else. (Be sure to read Spacing's coverage, too.) "Isn't two dollars a bit high for......

Poor Acura. In a Sunday Star article, "The Rise and Fall of the SUV," writer David Olive described how the public has fallen out of love with sports utility vehicles, naming fuel costs, environmental concerns, and market saturation as the chief reasons. Olive concludes that the cars are on their way out, and will stay only as "utilitarian" vehicles, "reverting to the original role as truly rugged beasts that are a prerequisite for researchers,......

Public relations is a tricky job, especially for the companies that operate illegal signs across Toronto. They've already got to deal with a site dedicated solely to putting an end to the practice, an increasingly aware and increasingly concerned populace, and those damned vandals who forgo legal means of dissent by dealing with the problem directly. So it comes as a bit of a surprise that Posterchild, a prominent member of (and advocate for)......

Street artist and former Torontoist contributor Fauxreel (which, contrary to what The Globe and Mail says, is not his real name; it's Dan Bergeron) received both a considerable amount of disdain and a considerable amount of cash recently (as well as some praise), when he designed and helped execute a nationwide corporate vandalism campaign on behalf of a well-known motorized vehicle brand. At the time, Torontoist attempted to contact "Mr. Reel" (as the Globe......

Photo of a Koodo mobile ad by Marc Lostracco. Two pending lawsuits challenge the constitutionality of certain aspects of the City of Toronto's sign by-law [PDF]. The first aspect is the by-law's less favourable treatment of signs mounted on walls (known as fascia signs, most commonly made of vinyl) versus signs painted on walls (known as murals). Murals may be placed more closely together, and it is generally easier to obtain planning permission to......

Toronto's urban street furniture collection of late has been messily schizophrenic and oft-criticized, but final prototypes from the Coordinated Street Furniture Program have just been unveiled, with installation slated for 2009. The furniture plan involved a private Request For Proposals (RFP) from three advertising conglomerates, who pitched their designs last year in the hopes of securing the lucrative 20-year monopoly with the City of Toronto. The covenant was awarded to Astral Media, much to......

Little-known fact: Third-party mobile signs, such as the one above for the U of T Career Centre, are illegal in Toronto (and the City recently hired a sort of bounty hunter to drive around in a truck, seizing and impounding them). Perhaps this is one of the reasons why. Photo taken by Jonathan Goldsbie early Thursday morning at the northwest corner of St. George and Harbord. The sign has since been removed.......

It looks like some ad pillars went on a diet this weekend. Last week, we pointed out that this advertisement had a rather embarrassing misspelling in gazillion-point type. Someone must be reading Torontoist, because the superfluously-vowelled poster was replaced by an error-free version over the weekend, just a couple of days after we shone our searchlight of publicity on it. Even The Fixer would have been hard-pressed to match our rapid turnaround. One commenter......

Is anyone else sick of those borderline-offensive Canadian Club ads they've been running in NOW lately? Based on the strange notion that thinking about your parents having sex will make you want to buy things, the whiskey's "Damn Right" campaign tries to create nostalgia for the fatherly masculinity of yesteryear. They use "vintage" photos and the grammatically invincible tagline "DAMN RIGHT YOUR DAD DRANK IT" as a rallying cry for some kind of boozy......

We're happy to report that the looser who sat behind you in Grade 12 English class just got a job as a copy writer. You always knew that he'd make his mark on the world in some way, didn't you? How exactly does such a glaring mistake make it through all of the design and approval stages that must be required before an ad like this is even printed? Interestingly, they managed to spell......

"Next stop, Quarter Pounder" is something you could be hearing on the subway in the future, as City Council agrees to look at selling station naming rights to corporations. However, TTC vice-chair Joe Mihevc calls the study a "waste of time" and says the idea should be rejected, presumably because he's polled all 1.5 million riders and knows that they'd rather pay higher fares than suffer the indignity of a subway stop named after......

Not content to let America have all the schadenfreude fun, Ashley Madison—Toronto-based online dating company intended for people looking to cheat on their spouses, whose slogan is "when monogamy becomes monotony" and who is responsible for TV ads like these—took out a full-page ad in today's New York Post. Addressed to Eliot Spitzer, the now–former New York Governor who was caught hiring prostitutes, the open letter (at right) slicks a thick coat of sleaze onto......

Photo by Jonathan Goldsbie. According to a December 2004 article in the Globe, Mike Harris is (or at least was at the time) the chairman of video advertising company Onestop; he got on board "in return for an equity stake" in the business. Presuming that he still has that stake (and why wouldn't he? he may be evil, but he's not stupid), Harris became a richer man two weeks ago, when the Toronto Transit......

With Rogers' plan to move Citytv, OMNI Television, and the Fan 590 to the southeast corner of Dundas Square, those familiar with the current streetfront studios on Queen Street have wondered if the former Olympic Spirit building will be opened up in a similar way. Though merely an preliminary concept rendering, Rogers and Quadrangle Architects seem to have grand designs for the space, currently dubbed Rogers Television City, as evident in this image supplementing......

Last February, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene released the NYC Condom, with packaging echoing the city's iconic subway signage and distributed for free by street teams in heavily-trafficked areas. In time for Valentine's Day this year, the rebranded LifeStyles condoms have been redesigned, accompanied by a multimedia campaign under the slogan "Get Some." But one of the campaign's new banner ads will look strangely familiar to Torontonians—it features a......