You’d think a city would make life hell on venue owners and fine advertisers for making them spend thousands of employee man hours cleaning up advertisements pasted onto walls of buildings, benches, etc. Punishment is only effective with the subject notices and can tie back to the cause-effect relationship. Tracking down, fining, and hearing appeals of “who is responsible” takes time as well. This… This is so simple its elegant!

Glasgow’s clean-up squads are tackling illegal bill posters with a little creative vandalism of their own…. the city’s litter wardens are cancelling illegal ad sites by pasting up stickers over unlicensed ads.

A few seconds with a paintbrush is enough to render the ad useless until a clean-up team arrives to tackle the site. They have already had an impact on some rogue promoters who have been inundated with complaints from music fans. People who have bought tickets to some of this summers big gigs have complained, thinking that an event, rather than the advert, had been cancelled.

The source said: “If people start phoning concert promoters complaining that they thought the gig had been cancelled, then the promoters have no-one but themselves to blame for having the posters put up in the first place.”