IN 1922 a mob ran amok in central Joburg with the aim of painting the town red. Literally. Despite the earnest ambitions on which it was based, the communist revolt failed. But in August 2002, some 80 years after this historic failure, a strikingly different attempt was made to paint the town red.

This time, stern city officials and po-faced company bosses supported the rebellion. After all, recent history had proved that revolutions were merely an exercise in change management. Besides, the city needed a revamp after more than a decade of neglect.

Whether viewed as an audacious outdoor branding exercise or another manifestation of "creeping ad expansion", as Naomi Klein, author of No Logo, put it, cellphone network Cell C’s "For the City" campaign — which invited 35 artists to produce artworks for display throughout the inner city — left a mark. It saw buildings reinvented as branding props, their walls painted a searing red.

A few weeks ago I decided to revisit one of these locations, a derelict, seven-storey office block adjacent to Nelson Mandela Bridge in Braamfontein. Located on Juta Street, the building is nowhere near as showy as Ponte City with its huge, flashing Vodacom sign, and far smaller than Hillbrow’s re-christened 270m Telkom Joburg Tower, recently livened up with a dash of blue neon. My interest in meeting the building’s owner, Shion Lee, was prompted by the cool response of another property owner. "I don’t want to open a can of worms," I was told by a company spokesman after asking about the huge, flashing sign on their roof. Lee was equally cautious, quizzing me about the responsiveness of other property owners.

Very good, I lied.

Admittedly I had posed an awkward question: "To what extent are all those flashing lights hovering over the inner city at night, all those neglected buildings wrapped-up to look like Christmas gifts, just a form of visual pollution?" It is not a question that concerns Lee much. His worries are more practical and focused on maximising the strategic benefit of his building following the August 2002 revolution.

He leads me to his Kombi, next to the dishevelled block. A crash course in inner-city economics follows. Lee starts by showing me a photograph of his building taken in 2003. It is covered in an arty wrap credited to Ruth Motau, an image of a young boy joyously letting loose a seismic shout. In many ways Motau’s work animated the optimism of the R38-million Nelson Mandela Bridge, a structure that has reconfigured the manner in which the city’s centre connects with its northern suburbs.

Not coincidentally, this bridge has also changed the way Lee looks at his vacant office block, which he bought "about 10 years ago", allegedly for less than R1-million. Then he had no inkling that this landlocked bridge would turn 60 Juta Street into a tiny gold mine of sorts. Lee shows me a photocopied sheet tabulating the country’s top 100 advertisers. According to this list, in 2001 Cell C had an advertising budget of R55-million, with competitors MTN and Vodacom spending R87-million and R124-million respectively. By 2003, a year after Cell C painted Joburg red, it had upped its annual budget to R175-million, R5-million more than MTN and only marginally less than Vodacom.

Lee turns to the next page in his handbook on how to become an inner-city millionaire, forensically linking these abstracted statistics. The page is an advertising rate card from Primedia Outdoor, a company specialising in the letting of outdoor advertising. One of its hoardings is suspended from the side of an eight-storey building one block from Lee’s. Using the card as a prompt, he engages me in a guessing game.

"How much would you pay per month for a big advertising billboard?" he asks.

"How big is a big billboard?"

"A little bit bigger than a Metro bus, 4.5x18m?"

"I don’t know."

"R370 per square metre."

"Eish, that’s R30000."

I look at his building, wondering how many Metro buses could fit across it. More than a dozen, it turns out — or six times the legal limit. "How much do you charge for it?" I ask.

"Take a guess."

I calculate. "The price of a cupboard-sized flat in Cape Town without a sea view?"

"Not quite, fella. Make that five centuries worth of subscriptions to your paper."

Charging less than half the industry standard for outdoor advertising, Lee nets about R180000 a month for the whole caboodle. If he did buy the building for less than R1-million, it would mean he has paid it off six times over in the past three years. Lesson concluded. By any reckoning Lee is on to a winning business plan which, in a city founded on the principles of avaricious speculation and overnight wealth creation, has aroused keen interest.

During his state-of-the-city review in January, mayor Amos Masondo said approval had been given to 115 of the 453 outdoor advertising sign and cell mast applications last year.

"I think the city is suffering gravely from urban pollution," says Neil Fraser, an urban consultant and champion of the regeneration of the inner city. His view underscores something Stephen Mulholland remarked on a few years ago in this paper: "A sort of anarchy is being loosed on our country which threatens to festoon our roads and suburbs with environmentally destructive signs and massive, garish billboards."

I put this to Coca-Cola, which recently trumped all claimants to the colour red after the launch of its four-sided, freestanding LED display on Marble Towers. The 12m-high sign projects an animated message over the city in the company’s red-and-white colours. Company spokesman Delia Maloney is surprised that this sign should offend anyone.

It is not the first time Coca-Cola has ventured into the city. In 1996 it put a huge neon sign on top of Joburg’s tallest block of flats, Ponte City. But the fact that Ponte’s name became more synonymous with another kind of coke may have been the reason for the company’s premature exit from its 54-storey perch. Maloney puts it down to the "general denigration and degradation of the building."

Vodacom was quick to snap up the space.

"Doesn’t the pulsing green neon freak out the residents?" I ask Danie Cilliers, Ponte’s building manager. The former policeman says not but, then again, most of Ponte’s rooftop penthouses are vacant. A tour of these forlorn apartments also suggests that the lights, housed in protective beading, are the least of the distractions. Where once the penthouse apartments offered unimpeded views of the Highveld sky, a 15m-high, 6.4-tonne frame propping up the flashing Vodacom sign now mars the scene.

Economics suggest that the modest rental returns on these apartments are nothing compared to the revenues to be earned from outdoor advertising.

But there is another view. Alfonso Botha, director of Urban Ocean, a property development company involved in gentrification schemes in the inner city, captures something of Joburg’s prevailing Zeitgeist. "Cities are about noise, light, energy," he says. Besides Corner House, a former bank retrofitted as plush yuppie lofts, his company has recently acquired Penmore Towers on Rissik Street. This was followed by an application for a large rooftop billboard and advertising wrap.

"Redeveloping a city requires various steps," he says. "In the beginning it is like a person who has been in an accident; you have to check the vital signs." He adds: "The first phase for us is to get as much signage as possible and then you start controlling it after the phase of repair."

The vast revenues this first phase will generate for Botha suggests there is more to his city initiatives than fashionable living. Not that this is bad. The profits are legitimately earned; it is just that the proliferation of lights and hoardings underline a difficult problem. How do you rescue a crumbling inner city without turning it, or the optimism of the democracy it wants to symbolise, into a carnival of flashing lights?

"The upturn in the city’s fortunes and the rash of billboards are probably synonymous with one another to a certain degree, but that is because we have fairly laissez-faire laws about these things," says Fraser. "I think a lot of property owners support it because it brings large chunks of money. When people can afford to put up hoardings right around their buildings and not let them, there is something wrong. I don’t think an unmanaged rash of billboards is indicative of anything but bad management."

Which is not to say outdoor advertising is not being managed in Joburg. It is, principally through local council by-law #7170/2001, which came into effect in December 2001, imposing defined tariffs on outdoor advertising — a visual pollution tax, if you will. The by-law distinguishes between signs such as Coca-Cola’s and businesses advertising themselves. In the latter case they pay the council R50/m², while third-party advertising bigger than 4.5m is subject to a rate of R110/m². Using Lee’s building as an example, the council have pocketed R132000 in tax.

Nthatisi Modingoane, a spokesman for the City of Johannesburg, says: "About 15% of the rental income generated from the . . . sign is paid to Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA) as a contribution to any urban renewal initiative in the inner city." What he means to say is that while painting the town red, marketers are also helping fund projects such as Constitution Hill and Newtown, both JDA initiatives. Aside from funding change, the council also uses paid advertising to hide the acne scars and blemishes of a city under construction.

This win-win situation is not without failings. Naomi Klein, commenting on the takeover of advertising in cities, says: "Branding becomes troubling . . . when the balance tips dramatically in favour of the sponsoring brand, stripping the hosting culture of its inherent value and treating it as little more than a promotional tool."

Of course, Coca-Cola’s adventures on top of Ponte and Marble Towers (the sign blew over on Monday) prove the converse is equally true. So much for posh leftist theory. Shortly after Cell C launched its red revolution, I went around asking people what they thought of the new billboards. One city resident, Dan Malete, who I met across the street from Ruth Motau's giant wrap, offered an uncomplicated response. "That boy is screaming but not from pain; it’s a cry of happiness. I like it a lot."

Post Note:
PropertyAuctions.co.za will be selling 60 Juta - the building featured in this article - online on http://www.propertyauctions.co.za/ over the period 4 October to 4 November 2005. For more information contact us on (011) 441-0111.