Sponsored Graffiti Messages in the Future?

Public spaces can also be a medium for a public forum. Of course, advertisers know this, and have always known this. That's why we have billboards and pretty much any space that's not serving a purpose gets sold off as ad space.

In the 90s, some cheeky individuals would subvert these ads and via some visual manipulations of the ad itself, they would change the message the ad was trying to convey. This is known as "ad busting".

Since the advent of stencil graffiti, it's been possible to impart subtle messages in graffiti. The more you make the viewer think, the more they feel rewarded when they "get it". If you make the viewer feel good in that way, they're more likely to support the message they've "decoded".

Is there a place for graffiti to be sponsored in some way in the future? No doubt that ad agencies are all trying to win "street cred" (always a sad thought, isn't it?) - and so you could see a time when graffiti is commissioned by ad agencies to be done by local artists in council-approved areas (where the graffiti laws do not apply).

I could see backlash to this, but it would be interesting to see how it plays out.