Here’s a riddle: what’s black and white and read all over? No, the answer is not The Spectator. It is the seemingly endless amount of flyers and advertisements that litter the hallways of Stuyvesant.

Every day pages and pages of plain black text on plain white paper are printed out and taped to the walls of our school, only to end up going unnoticed, crumpled on the floor, stuck inside the escalators, or thrown in the trash by a custodian.

It’s a vicious cycle. Students create advertisements and want them to be seen by as many people as possible, so they make many, many copies. The increasing quantity of ads that are exactly the same means other ads get less space, and thus, less attention. As a response, their creators print out even more, and the cycle continues until the library’s printer breaks.

True, the point of an advertisement is to get the message to stick in people’s heads. But doing so by pestering them is a lazy and unacceptable method. For a message to be truly memorable, the advertisement itself must be creative and convincing.

Black text on white paper hardly draws attention, especially when an ad is drowning in a sea of similarly composed flyers. Adding color is a simple way of making flyers more visually attractive, as long as it’s not neon. Bright colors may attract the eye, but too bright and nobody will be able to read your ad before it starts causing major damage to their retinas.

Creative and unique advertisements not only stand out more, but they also save a lot of paper. The hallways and stairwells of Stuyvesant are a mess because of ripped and crumpled flyers. A lot of them are poorly taped to the wall and fall easily. These flyers, when posted around the escalators, can squeeze into cracks and cause a jam. Even harder to clean up are the small pieces of paper left behind when a student tears a flyer off the wall.

This paper problem seems to be caused by a flaw in the way we think about advertising at Stuyvesant: the audience is spread out over 10 floors, and it seems necessary to make vast amounts of flyers. But sacrificing quality for quantity is never a solution. Make an ad creative enough, and people will see it. Fail to securely tape it to the wall, and people won’t. Here’s another riddle: If a flyer falls in the hallway and nobody is there to see it, does the message get across? The answer: it doesn’t.