Should outdoor media owners take political advertising?

Media Week asked the question and got contrasting answers:

A Liberal Democrat billboard poster from 2012

The recent furore over UKIP’s campaign highlights that doing so is not without its risks…The posters have been defaced at sites in London’s Vauxhall and Liverpool, with pictures of the graffitied and spray-painted sites appearing on social media and in the press. Some are not surprised by this reaction.

“Any ad for UKIP was going to be controversial,” Tim Bleakley, the chief executive of the outdoor media owner Ocean, says. “A risk you take in running advertising like that is people will take offence. Posters are a powerful medium. If people don’t like them, they will do something about it.”

Bleakley says Ocean, which runs 30 prominent outdoor sites across the UK, refuses to run any political advertising. He says he worries that political advertising could detract from the messages of blue-chip clients, and that running material for one political party could lead to extremely controversial groups, such as the British National Party, demanding the same…

Clear Channel, which runs the sites in Vauxhall and Liverpool where the UKIP posters were defaced, says it took the decision to run the campaign after careful evaluation. “They are a major political party, and we don’t see our role as being to censor,” a spokesman says.

The company has also run posters for the BNP. “We consider every campaign on its merits. Our preference is not to censor. However, we would balance this against the specific creative and the potential impact on the communities we operate in,” the spokesman adds.