Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 ::: Re-erections

“Would you please stop referring to my clients as the bottom dwellers of the industry?” So said Stanley Makuch, solicitor for Strategic Media when he called us last year to complain. Then, in the background of the phone call you could hear SM’s Mitch Armata tell Stanley to ask IllegalSigns.ca to remove a photograph of Daniel Pitoscia from this web site. “The photograph is libelous,” said Makuch, confirming what we thought all along.

Astral Media has removed about 7 illegal vinyl signs from the Entertainment District over the past year and abandoned the leases with the property owner.Well that’s just a business opportunity for Mitch Armata and Daniel Pitoscia, the principles of Strategic Media.

Mitch and Dan are buying up the abandoned leases and planning to re-erect the illegal vinyl signs, most of which we should expect to see by the end of the summer.

340 Adelaide Street, which we looked at in this Audit, is an example of a site that was abandoned by Astral Media, then re-erected by Mitch and Dan just a few weeks ago:

The sign was down for over a year. We should expect these re-erections in about 4 other locations that the SM boys recently picked up.

Strategic Media is not the only company that is picking up abandoned Astral Media leases. Titan recently acquired Astral’s lease at 165 Avenue Road which we wrote about back in May. That sign has a third party mural permit for a painted sign. 340 Adelaide has a first party mural permit.