Footing the bill, so that it might fit

The boffins in the British monitoring and technical surveillance arm GCHQ are supposed to be smarter than the average Joe and, hence, recruitment methods have to be commensurately clever — and perhaps discreet too. Whether those two imperatives are served by ‘reverse stencilling’ recruitment advertisement on pavements in those London areas rich in potential GCHQ talent is not all that apparent. After all, the condition of pavement surfaces, the weather and even the ambient pedestrian traffic usually determine whether a pedestrian looks down. Empty pavements with visible ads would be as pointless as the opposite, unless potential spies have been deemed to have a penchant for looking at their feet when perambulating no matter what.

However, the idea of using ubiquitous city space to advertise certainly is a smart innovation. Not only are they usually free of charge — at least until municipal corporations wake up to their moneymaking potential — pavements are also city surfaces that do not attract the ire of anti-graffiti authorities unlike walls and pillars. Indeed, the city authorities should have even less of a problem with ‘reverse graffiti’ advertisements as the stencil designs come out when pressure washers wipe out street dirt to create the slogan — which would obviate any permanent ‘defacement’.