Anti-ad activists battle billboards - FR

AP , PARIS
Wednesday, Mar 10, 2004,Page 6

Suzanne, grandmotherly with neat snowy hair, prim gray anorak and white shirt fastened at the collar with a blue brooch, glanced furtively up and down the subway platform bustling with out-on-the-towners.

Slowly, the station emptied; the coast was clear. Spinning on her heels, a mischievous glint in her soft blue eyes, she whipped a red wax crayon from her handbag and, wielding it sword-like, scrawled her fury across a platform-wall advertising billboard for French home appliances retailer Darty.

"TOO MANY THINGS, NOT ENOUGH POETRY!" she wrote.

Pow! Thus was another blow struck in a fight raging in France against advertising. The attackers are a small, heterogeneous but determined band of campaigners for whom publicity is a plague. Their battlegrounds are the tunnels and platforms of Paris' subway, and bus stops in other towns. Their targets: companies that make capitalism tick.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2004/03/10/2003101890