One more reason to hate those flat-panel ad screens

An elevator LCD by Framedia (a Focus Media company).

Flat-panel screens serving up advertisements have been a fixture of elevator vestibules for the past few years. Recently, simple LCD displays have moved into the elevators themselves, showing passengers a new ad every five seconds or so.

Beijing’s Mirror discovered one problem with these panels as Beijing’s weather moves toward the summer heat:

…in the elevator carriage, an LCD panel ad measuring 50cm by 80cm was affixed to two walls. In the hall of building A, the reporter’s hand-held thermometer read a temperature of 25 degrees Celcius. When the reporter entered the elevator there was an immediate feeling of heat. In the less than two square meter space, two LCD panels played facing each other. Though there was only a single person in the elevator, the reporter’s thermometer had reached 32 degrees.

The problem will solve itself once air conditioning gets switched on in the city. In the meantime, Mirror tells property owners that they have the right to demand that advertising be taken down.

Of course, they’ll want to be careful how they go about it. An ad company sued an owners’ association and the building’s property manager for taking down its elevator advertisments. The agency claims that the property manager broke a contract; the property manager counter-sued, claiming that it had been tricked into signing by the owners’ association.

The Beijing Daily Messenger notes that this dispute involves issues that will have to be resolved on a national scale before 1 October when the new Private Property Law goes into effect: who determines whether to put up ads, the building management, the property owners, or some other entity? How is agreement solicited – do all owners have to voice an opinion, or can the owners’ association speak for them? And how should the revenue be divided?

Xiamen Daily reported on Wednesday that new regulations require the agreement of a majority of property owners before advertising can be put up in residential buildings in that city:

Elevator advertising can add to the income of property owners, and can also reduce the dull atmosphere inside the elevator carriage. But problems have arisen, mostly centered around the fact that there is not a clear standard for elevator advertising income, use of profit is not openly revealed – some property management companies have even taken the entire amount for themselves. According to regulations currently in force, division and use of elevator advertising profit should be determined by an assembly of property owners or according to the Property Management Contract. A typical method is for the property management company to receive a small portion to cover costs and administrative fees, while the property owners collectively receive the majority, which is mainly used for home renovation.

Wouldn’t it be simpler just to leave advertising out of elevators? Fewer bureaucratic headaches, and we’d all be 6 to 8 degrees cooler.