Is an ad for a gentlemen’s club (a euphemism for strip club) perched on a taxi offensive, even if it doesn’t show a woman’s body? Some people believe it is. City Room received an e-mail message from a concerned father who was alarmed by the number of taxi-top advertisements he had seen promoting New York strip clubs, like Flash Dancers and New York Dolls.
“It strikes me as grossly inappropriate,” said Alex Yanos, a father of three children — ages 5, 7 and 9 — who lives in Harlem. “The cabs are everywhere. As a parent, that means they are constantly in small children’s faces.”
They ask questions, he said. “Everyone is curious: ‘What is that girl doing, Mommy? What are they trying to sell?’”
The clubs are adults-only in audience, and in their marketing on the Web. The site for New York Dolls, which claims to be “the only place in the city where you can watch our beautiful adult entertainers while you check your favorite stock quotes,” warns:
This site contains explicit sexual material. Please do not enter this site unless you are of legal age. The material on this site is NOT suitable for children. If you are younger than 18 years old, or if you are offended by nudity, please exit. NOW!!!
The Flash Dancers site has no warning, though it features many scantily clad women. (City Room would link to the sites, but we are a family-friendly blog.)
An advertisement for the New York Dolls gentlemen’s club was spotted on a taxi on the Upper East Side on Wednesday. Taxi-top ads were introduced in 1975 over much opposition (even from the mayor at the time, Abraham D. Beame). Eventually the lighted signs came to be seen as a safety item. Since then, other taxi parts have become ad spots, including hub caps [pdf] and the back seat.
Allan J. Fromberg, a spokesman for the Taxi and Limousine Commission, said the group did not have any general policy regulating ad content. “Our role has historically been to ensure the engineering and safety of the harness unit that holds the ads,” he said.
The group does, however, “have the ability to remove items that, as termed in local law, ‘are offensive to public morals,’ ” Mr. Fromberg added.
While Clear Channel Outdoor is the dominant taxi-top advertising company in New York, the bulk of the gentlemen’s clubs’ ads are placed by Show Media, an outdoor advertising company, which handles ads for about 2,000 taxicabs.
Clear Channel has a policy against ads for gentleman’s clubs, online gambling and tobacco (which are generally banned, anyway, in New York and elsewhere). One executive noted that ads for gentlemen’s clubs on taxis were “bad for the medium.”
Show Media was started by Laurence Hallier, an entrepreneur, in 1998, and now sells ads in New York and Los Angeles. (A previous incarnation with the same name, which started with Las Vegas billboards, was sold to Clear Channel.)
An employee in Show Media’s New York office said the company had no comment on the complaints.
There have been debates over risque taxi ads before — from those for Calvin Klein underwear to an ad for Georgi Vodka, which was pulled by the CBS Outdoor Advertising for Metropolitan Transportation Authority properties (the ad stayed on taxis). Some of those ads were arguably more revealing than these.
Neil Greenbaum, who heads All Taxi Management, put the strip club ads in context.
“We get fewer complaints about the Flash Dance ads than we would on other provocative ads,” said Mr. Greenbaum, whose cabs feature some of the strip club ads. The Flash Dancers ads show a woman above her shoulders.
Drivers have raised concerns in the past, sometimes based on their religious convictions. “Some of the drivers took exception to provocative ads, and I don’t believe they find this provocative,” he said. “I wouldn’t have put them on my cabs if I had found them provocative.”