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Admobile: A (sore) sight
for sore eyes

I was shocked when nobody took me up on having "Honolulu Lite" tattooed on their forehead, an idea I got from a woman who rented out her forehead for advertising on eBay. Of course, I was only willing to pay $3.98 for the forehead space, while the eBay woman got something like 10 grand.

Advertising is a tough business, especially in Hawaii, where against a backdrop of spectacular mountains, beaches and ocean, most forms of print advertising look particularly grotesque and offensive.

The Outdoor Circle, Hawaii's front-line armored division against advertising eyesores, has a great commercial running on TV showing what it would be like if the sides of Diamond Head and other landmarks suddenly became billboards. A quick trip to the mainland is all it takes to appreciate Hawaii's relative lack of offensive signage. Or a quick trip to Hawaii by tourists to make them realize how immune they've become to the billboard blight back home.

Local businesses have learned to keep signs small, cute and tasteful. Hawaii residents like small, cute and tasteful signs. The "Welcome to Haleiwa" sign was so small, cute and tasteful it was stolen about 14 times.

Hawaii residents shot down planes dragging advertising banners over Waikiki. Well, they didn't actually shoot down the planes, just the idea. Who wants to see giant flying billboards blotting out the sun, surf and sand?

Highway signs are illegal, except for those big flashing buggers that say, "The Pali Tunnels are Closed for Your Inconvenience." Honolulu residents even hated those huge green federally mandated freeways signs advising you which highways lead where. Only in Hawaii: We'd rather be lost then have our views blocked.

An anti-abortion group got the idea of posting enormous, disgusting photos of aborted fetuses on the sides of vans. The van-ertisements were so disgusting that even pro-lifers gagged. It was a bad idea, something like if anti-death penalty groups slapped enormous photos of smoking, electrocuted corpses on the sides of lunch wagons.

Taking moving billboards to the next level is a company called Admobile Hawaii, which rents out space on rolling, computerized billboards. It might be a good idea for someplace like Newark, N.J., but it goes against the Hawaii resident's basic genetic propensity against "in your face" commercial advertising.

To its credit, Admobile is trying not to be the most offensive thing on wheels. It has no giant photos of dead infants, for instance. It accepts no tobacco, political or porno ads. (Political and porno might be repetitive.) It gives away ad space to charities.

But it is in the business of billboards, the only difference is that the billboards don't sit on the sides of the roads, but actually travel on the roads themselves. Why Admobile thought this would be less offensive than stationary billboards, I'm not sure. ("Mom, that Zippy's billboard is still following us! And it's gaining!")

In fact, the only difference between a billboard-type advertisement being pulled by a truck and one pulled by an airplane is altitude.

So Admobile is getting all the negative heat of the flying-banner business and rolling fetus-mobile combined. Despite Admobile's admirable community consciousness, you know that if it makes money, copycat rolling-ad companies will follow and they won't have the scruples Admobile has.

I'm all for free enterprise, hence my "Honolulu Lite" forehead tattoo proposal. But that doesn't mean a private business (or an activist community group) should impinge on Hawaii's natural beauty to make a few financial or moral points. Island residents have shown that when assaulted with such eyesores, they will kill (figuratively) the messenger and won't buy the product.