Hoardings can now touch the sky — on 74 roads

Hoardings can now touch the sky — on 74 roads

The Times of India

Bangalore: Tall and taller until it scrapes a bit of sky. That’s the new watchword for hoardings in the city. A new resolution of the Appeal Committee of the BCC says no height restrictions on hoardings.

Ever since the advertising by-laws came into place circa 1965, the rule was — size of a hoarding shall not exceed 24 feet by 12 feet.

Doing away with the antiquated by-law, the new one will apply to 74 demarcated roads in the city, which have been designated as Zone D. Under this umbrella banner, roads that are typically not the swish advertiser’s favourite for innovative hoardings, have been included. Sample a few — Pottery Road, Banaswadi Road, Chord Road, Vijaynagar Circle, Palace Road (Sindhu Hotel to Underbridge), and Kammanahalli.

This is what advertisement by-law 10 (3) reads: In respect of Zone D, the size of the hoardings shall not exceed 40 feet by 20 feet and no height restrictions shall apply.

An advertiser who got wind of this relaxation has already approached the BCC with a proposal for having a 100 feet ad, covering the entire Public Utility Building and extending beyond it!

BCC commissioner K. Jothiramalingam explains the rationale behind such a move: “Everybody wants to put up hoardings on M.G. Road, Brigade Road, Residency Road which is already heavily populated. We will soon have restrictions like no-hoarding zones. So when we impose restrictions on a particular area, we also thought we should have relaxations elsewhere. It will decongest hoarding-heavy areas and is an additional motivation for advertisers to move out to new roads.’’

The incentive is a loaded one — move out of traditional prime roads where hoardings vie for maximum eye-balls and travel to non-commercial areas where the imagination has no length.

ELSEWHERE IN THE WORLD


The largest hoarding in the world — A gigantic car advert, 132 metres by 24 metres — has a Guinness record for being the largest at the old Fort Dunlop tyre factory next to M6 Birmingham, London.
West Asia’s largest single piece hoarding — located on Sheikh Zayed Road — is a 1,440-kg visual measuring 200 metres by 12.4 metres.