Whisky Ad Masquerading as Street Art

Murals or marketing? New York's walls spark debate. In Williamsburg, which is a part of Brooklyn, and across New York City, massive hand painted murals are turning brick walls into advertisements. Companies like Colossal Media lease walls and deploy trained painters to create photorealistic ads for brands like Gucci and Haagen. Dazs supporters say it keeps alive a craft tradition while providing artists with steady jobs, benefits, and even 401k plans. Detractors argue it's nothing more than visual pollution that displaces true street art. The market is booming. Outdoor advertising revenues hit a record $9.1 billion in 2024. And as real estate prices rise, landlords see murals as another revenue stream. For now, New Yorkers are left to debate whether these works beautify the city or simply speak, sell it off. Okay, so what's the real message here? In places like New York, they are painting the sides of walls with beautiful paintings that are also advertisements. Guess what? Grow up. All artists have done that. Michelangelo did commissioned works. If it's a way for you to make money as an artist and your own creativity can flow as well, I view that as a win win. I hope you do too. Let's dig a little bit deeper here. I, I love spending time in Brooklyn. I used to live in Brooklyn. Another place that has a lot of this is the Wynwood section of Miami, which is not that far away from where I live now. And I do venture there from time to time. To me, it's just so much more interesting than a plain brick wall or a plain glass wall for people to get upset about. This makes me think, wow, there's so many problems in the world. There's so much death to destruction, evisceration of basic civil rights in America. And this is what you get upset about. Artwork, artists getting paid. Because this is not just a digital image that is enlarged and spray painted on plastic and then someone just comes and peels the plastic off and puts it on a wall. No, these are actual artists, sometimes graffiti artists, former graffiti artists who want to figure out how to pay rent. So they're now painting, making a living, and they are creating works of beauty. Does it glamorize things like, you know, liquor that maybe people don't need to drink more of? Yeah, I'm not saying it's 100% positive, but if you're going to have advertisements and you are in a world where there is freedom of speech and capitalism, why not make the ads beautiful now? I was shocked to see that this company, Colossal Media, that kind of started this Whole craze and specialized in it. They're able to lease prime walls with these paintings for $30,000 a month. I mean, this is a real business here. Again, the whole out of home ad revenue. The billboard industry hit $9.1 billion in 2024. Gucci, Louis Vuitton, other long term clients of this one company. But there are those who say this is just visual pollution. Okay, I mean, I get it. I certainly know that there are many people who make billboards and highways. They want to be able to drive and see nothing but trees. But you know what, it's kind of nice to know if is there a restaurant you can pull over to with your family that isn't just McDonald's? I might not know without the billboard sometimes. So I'm not one of those who is absolutist that we got to get rid of all billboards and bill and ads, right? To have communication. That's the nature of capitalism. That is the nature of not just democracy. There's a lot of ads in China last time I went there. It is a function of any kind of market system. You have to be able to advertise. And if here people are looking for new ways of doing it, creative ways of doing it, different ways, then I say power to them. Can it be overdone? Can it be excessive? Sure. My other real message here for you is so often it's tempting to say, well, I can't be an artist. I don't want to be the classic starving artist. So I have to go to medical school or law school or engineering school to please my parents and ever make any money. It's just not true. If you're creative and you're constantly looking at here's a skill set I have and here's a new way of doing it in a way that perhaps hasn't been done before. You can make money. You can. In fact, not always, but you can. So here are a lot of artists making a living, paying their bills, honing their craft, and thank goodness that they didn't take a lot of parental advice saying don't become an artist, become an engineer. Because a lot of these engineers now coming right out of school aren't getting any jobs because good old AI is taking the jobs from them.