Olympics usher in a big new age of advertising

Vancouver used to be a gloriously garish place, an urban jungle filled with hundreds of giant neon signs and billboards competing for your attention.
But that was way back in the 1950s. A civic beautification movement swept the city in the '60s and '70s, and almost all the garishness vanished, replaced by more "tasteful" stuff.
The Olympics offer a brief respite. Stand at the southeast corner of Georgia and Hornby and you might think you'd been transported to Times Square. The Hudson's Bay building is covered in four-storey-high portraits of Olympic athletes. One of the black towers at Georgia and Granville has become a big ad for Samsung cell-phones. The Hotel Georgia project is clad in the biggest Canadian flag you've ever seen.

The most impressive ad of all might be a skier flying into the sky down the eastern side of the 37-storey Royal Bank Tower at Burrard and Georgia. For a 37-storey ad, it's remarkably tasteful: the skier is the dominant image, the Royal Bank logo is relatively discreet at the top of the building.