In 2011, India was rocked with the 2G scandal. Turns out, a few corrupt ministers had engaged in a clever manipulation of the first-come-first-serve spectrum licensing system to ensure that companies they were associated with were the first ones to get dibs on the frequency bandwidth that corresponded to 2G. The companies that bought the spectrum from the government then went and sold the spectrum to the real telecom companies for a healthy profit. Well, I recently followed up on the case and apparently they were innocent! I was shocked. What surprised me even more was how much this spectrum cost for people to buy. $8 Billion (and nearly $40B if you count secondary markets)!
You know what else is an electromagnetic frequency? Visible light i.e. color.
In walking around the city centers of Lima and Santiago, you’ll find them bereft of obnoxious displays of branding color typical of the modern city. The branding is very austere close to the historical centers and reflects the taste of the times. They also blend better with the historical buildings, churches and decor typical of the center of a city. In contrast, the color schemes of most cities are less about aesthetics and represent the capitulation of taste in the service of the attention-seeking actions of major brands.
Well, no more I say. This is an affront to our visual cortexes, and more importantly a lost revenue opportunity. Introducing the “Taxable Spectrum”.
Visible light generally has wavelengths from 400-700nm and while a simplistic solution would be to sell frequency ranges, I think that underrates the complexity of color (not to mention only gives us about 300 wavelengths to sell).
We should sell hex codes. With about 16 million hex codes to sell, I suspect each city can make a cool $1B. Only a company that owns a visible light license will be able to display their colored branding within city limits. Think about how much McDonalds will pay for their Golden Arches! Or Starbucks for their money green! For the bigger cities it could be a lot but it will be nothing to sneeze at for the smaller cities as well.
That said, I think this will also have the nice effect of clearing up the visual crud from our streets and introduce more uniform visual language. We could also have a few reserved colors so we don’t have issues of official signage getting confused with brand messaging.