Does advertising work? Depends on whether those encountering the 139 billboards promoting CityBillboardTax.ca engineer empathy for the message from the Out-of-Home Marketing Association of Canada — tricky when the single-serving site is a charmless document outlining reasons to oppose the new sign-related legislation City Council will vote on next week: “The City of Toronto is the single largest beneficiary of revenue from the outdoor advertising industry,” concludes their view on the by-law. “OMAC members contribute $36.8 million in average annual revenue to the city through current lease agreements.” And why seek $8.6 million in tax revenue when they haven’t disclosed what they plan to do with it? OMAC argues that they contribute $28.4 million in annual revenue to private property owners, and donate $6 million in free space to local charities — but, this week, the charity is their own. “In a post-recession period of economic recovery, it simply does not make sense to put this economic contribution at risk into a law a flawed and poorly conceived by-law” [sic!]  The crusader who initiated so much illegal sign-busting, Rami Tabello, was on OMAC’s case about their numbers a month ago. Meanwhile, a more aesthetically pleasing argument can be found at BeautifulCity.ca: their petition asks to have the revenues steered to public space improvement, community resources, and artistic initiatives — maybe inspiring better work from the lobbyists reponsible for CityBillboardTax.ca. “I’m sorry, a professional MARKETING association launched this site?” tweeted Chris Tindal. “Maybe we need a tax on awfulness.”

UPDATE: OMAC evidently hired a web designer later that day to improve CityBillboardTax.ca.

Anticipation for the Leona Drive Project, where six modest Willowdale bungalows backing onto a ravine are leaving this mortal coil with the help of 20 avant-garde installations, effectively ends a quarter-century of skepticism surrounding salesman Mayor Mel Lastman’s concept of a lucrative Downtown North York. “It’s just amazing to me that anybody would think of doing some kind of art project down there,” 50-year neighbourhood resident Gwen Franklin told the Toronto Star. See what happens when the most scintillating nearby option for a night on the town is Jersey Boys? Suddenly, the inner suburbs are recognized for having stories, even though that’s what psychogeographer Shawn Micallef has been saying all along. Nine Leona Drive even gets its backstory told on the exhibition website: mindblowing to consider the space’s evolution from being part of a 1787 purchase by Lord Dorchester to a sale earlier this year to monster builder Hyatt Homes. Deena Pantalone, a member of the developer firm family last seen lying to Toronto Life about the origins of her dress, played a pivotal role in letting the dwellings transform for the next week. Friday night’s opening will have a shuttle bus from the Gladstone Hotel in order for suburban refugees to make nosebleed jokes. Quick, before the last examples standing of those post-WWII Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation builds are embedded in Douglas Coupland’s clock tower at the Shops on Don Mills.

The Leona Drive Project [official site]

Last month, the Toronto Star ran a correction for the headline “U2 blows roof off SkyDome,” making it clear to offended readers that the round thing with the roof is called the Rogers Centre — proof of the kind of coverage you can get after paying $25 million for a $600 million domed stadium. Scotiabank pay to get their name above the title of the annual Nuit Blanche, although online gripes about exploiting the captive all-night audience to hawk credit cards tempered after reaching a crescendo in 2007. Back then, public space activist Dave Meslin initially wondered why Toronto was the only market where a corporation is part of the identification, and promises to raise this point each year until he gets an explanation for this discrepancy — advocating that anyone mentioning the event in a public status update call it “BMO Nuit Blanche” instead. Nonetheless, short of Mayor David Miller, his re-tweeters, and a couple of suspect keeners, those 10 extra letters pertaining to the Bank of Nova Scotia were a tough sell to incorporate into 140 characters: the official event Twitter reduced it to @sbnuitblancheTO, and they didn’t deign try to push that as a hashtag this past Saturday night. But it is curious just how much energy the City of Toronto, terminally unable to put together a website that tells you what time a swimming pool is open, has for promoting sponsor-supported iPhone-ready interactive tools like the image-capturing GPS-optimized “Night Navigator”. (Poor saps without a mobile device were advised to get a paper map.) So, maybe Scotiabank should have been managing Toronto City Hall all along? More realistically, if attendees didn’t want debt-inducing product pitches leaking too close to the art, these kind of apps must represent some kind of future — mayor and mainstream media notwithstanding, few even want to call it by all three words. TD Canada Trust, meanwhile, have a different idea of commercial art: their current Pump It Up contest is using social media to gauge enthusiasm on campuses, awarding the school with the most avid Facebook clickers and Twitter boosters a concert with rapper k-os, band the Stills, and avowed music thief Girl Talk.

An inflated sculpture by artist Jeff Koons promises to subvert the interior of the Toronto Eaton Centre in a way not seen since the filming of The Silent Partner, all Saturday night as part of Nuit Blanche. How the 45-foot Rabbit Balloon — modelled after a Mylar sculpture Koons crafted in 1986, a couple years before the porcelain Michael Jackson and Bubbles — came to town was detailed in a National Post piece: Gregory Elgstrand first pitched the annual all-nighter’s staff two years ago about curating a crowd-drawing zone called All Tomorrow’s Parties, only to be turned down the first time around, but was given a $100,000-plus-artist-fees budget for 2009 — until his part of the downtown zone was cut in half. The idea of making the Koons silver rabbit the centerpiece of his curation was there from the start, though, after seeing its debut in the 2007 Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. The weekend Globe and Mail features an interview with the artist about the work’s origin — inflatable rabbits come from his rural upbringing in southcentral Pennsylvania, a front-lawn fixture for every home each Easter: “The things that become archetypes are the things that help us to survive,” he says. Koons himself has just opened a group retrospective at the Tate Modern in London called Pop Life: Art in a Material World . “I don’t believe that artists really are interested in money,” he told Bloomberg News this week. Nuit Blanche title sponsor Scotiabank knows most people who’d venture into a mall to see carrot-clenching Rabbit Balloon are going to feel otherwise — Koons’ much smaller stainless steel Balloon Flower (Magneta) sold for about $25 million last year.

UPDATE: Plenty of pics of Rabbit Balloon hovering over the Sears store [Flickr]