Comments on: The flyering/postering issue

By: Chris BrumNotes

Chris BrumNotes — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 10:13:28 +0000

This was always part of the thinking behind Brum Notes, giving
independent events without a huge advertising budget an opportunity to showcase themselves to more people, and we are working on ways of expanding that content and giving promoters of different events more coverage.

But I agree flyers and posters are iconic in themselves and give a real feeling that something is going on in an area. I understand venues not wanting to cross promote, but those that do display flyers from other places (eg Fighting Cocks) give themselves more of a buzz.

By: Russ L

Russ L — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 17:37:10 +0000

It would also help if certain club & gig promoters (obviously I won’t name them beyond the fact that I’m talking about Dave Juste) didn’t have their minions remove/tear down posters and flyers for gigs that are happening on the same date as events they’re putting on themselves.

That’d probably help a lot.

By: Chris Unitt

Chris Unitt — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 22:33:54 +0000

And a good rant it was too.

I’d say that music seems to play faster and looser with these things, so the only posters/flyers you see are for club nights and gigs. What about theatre, dance, exhibitions and the like? It’s the absence of space to show off all the theatre/dance/exhibitions/etc that vexes me. Other cities manage it.

Re para 2, I once heard someone say that posters are just for the people who like to know that they live in a place where that sort of thing goes on (there’s value in that, I reckon).

And I could quite frequently strangle the MAC’s website. I find this helps a little http://macarts.co.uk/page/3589/calendar (events and dates but no descriptions).

By: Stephen Boisvert

Stephen Boisvert — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 22:08:34 +0000

I wish it was just an issue of no postering space but I still see plenty of posters and handouts. The problem is maybe I am too old a geezer to figure out what half of them are advertising. Some promotional group I have never heard of is promoting a night with a name I don’t understand featuring bands I haven’t heard of and couldn’t even guess the musical genre they belong to. Yet I am still open to new things. I went to SecretWars and thought it was brilliant. But I only heard about it through blogs. Even if I saw the poster I would have just thought it was some sort of meaningless nominative bombast and ignored it.

These things really only serve to remind people who are friends of the promoters or the band when the event they already knew about is happening.

But it could be worse. They could do their show listings like the MAC website and not have visible dates.

/rant

By: james

james — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 15:28:26 +0000

This seems a perennial problem – why can’t TimeOut do a Brum issue… why cant we have electronic posterboards that rotate ads and thus keep the cost down? (note there is one now at 5 ways but smaller ones could be put in buses like in the airport shuttle-bus)… lets brainstorm low-cost / innovative ways of doing this… I’d be happy to facilitate a Design Thinking workshop on this FoC…

James

By: Tessa

Tessa — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 14:13:27 +0000

Flyers and posters are the best way by far to get a feel for any city’s cultural scene. You can arrive in a place you’ve never been, walk out of the station and within ten minutes, you’ll see enough guerrilla posted material to fill you in on the real vibe of a city. In Birmingham, were it not for all those who flout the POST NO BILLS laws, those passing through Brum for the first time would end up at a loss for entertainment beyond the vortex of Broad Street, and the really unhelpful faces behind the Tourist Information counter. So keep it up posterers, despite BCC’s blindness to its own city’s vibrant cultural underground (Big City Culture anyone?), posters and flyers do get seen. As long as, that is, you don’t happen to be posting in areas where one or two venues run a poster mafia, and pull down what’s been put up by what they shortsightedly see as “the competition”. Grow up kids, you know who you are.