Urban Spam - are we overreacting?

So it seems that people are starting to fight back against intrusive, non-relevant and/or plain old stupid ambient marketing pieces. But are they really like that? Isn’t this a little bit of an overreaction? Not all ambient media is spam and the people who treat it like that seem more and more like the activists everyone despises to me. There is a reason why graffiti is considered vandalism and ambient media isn’t.

To make my point clearer, here’s a guerilla stunt that I liked. For me it’s not urban spam. Some of the people that passed by it overreacted, some even went as far as being violent towards the ad. For those people that stunt was, in fact, urban spam. Who’s to say who’s right and who’s not?

I must admit, I like urban art more than graffiti. And some of the ambient media ads qualify as urban art that I’d hate being destroyed. I do like the two movies, I do like the attitude. I just don’t like actions not thinked trough. Of course there is the risk to be over-flooded by crap ambient media. But, admit it, fighting against it with even more spam isn’t the right solution. Don’t ask me what the solution would be, I have no idea. Maybe agencies coming up with good, relevant ideas? Maybe clients with some urban culture in their veins?

What would you prefer to see every morning? A bad ad which you can ignore or a vandalized bad ad which you can’t ignore anymore? I would like to hear your opinions on the matter. Here, here and here you can find out more on the subject.