18 September, 2009

Told 'em where to go

I'm partly responsible for publishing a map of my employer's campus location relative to the city and surrounding transport network.  Naturally, it features useful landmarks such as road junctions, watercourses and a few prominent buildings.

Today we were contacted by an advertising agency wanting us to amend the map, adding clients' premises as 'landmarks'.

I suppose I'd give them points for ingenuity, but penalise them far more for attempting to hijack and distort a purely functional document. How useful would it be to direct potential visitors to "... go straight on at the traffic lights; keep going straight on past the [insert pub name here] 10 m later...", particularly if that pub isn't visually distinct from neighbouring shopfronts?

Thankfully, we always reject all commercial advertising; it would have been challenging to rationalise why I consider the suggestion offensive whilst remaining professionally polite.