Adbusters

Adbusters Media Foundation is a not-for-profit, anti-consumerist organization founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The foundation describes itself as "a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age."

The foundation publishes the reader-supported Adbusters (ISSN 0847-9097), an activist magazine with a circulation of 120,000 devoted to numerous political and social causes, many of which are anti-consumerist in nature. Adbusters has also launched numerous international social marketing campaigns, including Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week, and is known for their "subvertisements" that spoof popular advertisements.

Adbusters' sister organizations include Résistance à l'Aggression Publicitaire and Casseurs de Pub in France, Adbusters Norge in Norway, Adbusters Sverige in Sweden and Culture Jammers in Japan.

Issues

Targeting advertising

Adbusters is anti-consumerist; this is a movement that cites advertising as a central force in creating and subsequently shaping consumer culture. This position holds that the advertising industry goes to great effort and expense to associate desire and identity with commodities. Adbusters believes that ads have permeated modern cultures—appearing in movies, sports and even schools—and have unjustly "colonized" public, discursive and psychic spaces. Adbusters' goals include combating the negative effects of advertising and empowering its readers to regain control of culture, encouraging them to ask "Are we consumers or citizens?".

To counter the belief that advertising focuses on looking toward external rewards for a sense of self, Adbusters recognizes a “natural and authentic self apart from the consumer society”. The magazine aims to provide a forum for instilling an anti-consumerist mindset in its readers by means of reclaiming the public spaces advertising has come to occupy. By juxtaposing text and images, the magazine attempts to creates a means of raising awareness and getting its message out to people that is both aesthetically pleasing and entertaining.

Media Carta

File:Adbusters NY Billboard.jpg

New York City billboard

vector version of the American Corporate Flag.

Media Carta is a charter challenging the distribution of information to the people, intending to "make the public airwaves truly public, and not just a corporate domain". Over 30,000 people have signed the document voicing their desire to reclaim the public space. On September 13, 2004, Adbusters filed a lawsuit against six major Canadian television broadcasters (including CanWest Global, Bell Globemedia, CHUM Ltd., and the CBC) for refusing to air Adbusters videos in the television commercial spots that Adbusters attempted to purchase. Most broadcasters refused the commercials fearing the ads would upset other advertisers as well as violated business principles by “contaminating the purity of media environments designed exclusively for communicating commercial messages”. The lawsuit claims that Adbusters' freedom of expression was unjustly limited by the refusals. Adbusters believes the public deserves a right to be presented with viewpoints that differ from the standard. Under Section 3 of the Broadcasting Act, television is a public space allowing ordinary citizens to possess the same rights as advertising agencies and corporations to purchase 30 seconds of airtime from major broadcasters. There has been talk that if Adbusters wins in Canadian court, they will file similar lawsuits against major U.S. broadcasters that also refused the advertisements. CNN in America is the only network that has allowed several of Adbusters’ commercials to run.

On April 3, 2009, the British Columbia Court of Appeal unanimously overturned a BC Supreme Court ruling that previously dismissed the case in February 2008. The court granted Adbusters the ability to legally go after the major corporations that originally refused to air their anti-car ad “Autosaurus”, specifically the Canadian Broadcasting Company and CanWest Global. The ruling represents a big victory for Adbusters, but it is the first step of their intended goal, essentially opening the door for future legal action against the media conglomerates. Co-founder Lasn declared the ruling a success and said, “After 20 years of legal struggle, the courts have finally given us permission to take on the media corporations and hold them up to public scrutiny.”

Culture jamming

Culture jamming is the primary means through which Adbusters fights consumerism in an attempt to return agency to the individual. The magazine has been described as "the flagship publication of the culture jamming movement". Culture jammers attempt to expose the underlying meaning of an advertisement. By reorganizing media to lend it new meaning, culture jamming aims to create a large contrast between the corporate image and the real consequences of corporate behavior. It is a form of protest, so the culture jammer attempts to be as public as possible in order to stir up enough trouble to garner the issue real attention. Culture jamming is intended to be a means of allowing the people to take advantage of their right to ‘free speech’ and to call into question what the media tells them to think or believe. The term ‘jam’ contains more than one meaning, including improvising, by resituating an image or idea already in existence, and interrupting, by attempting to stop the workings of a machine. A "culture jammer" is a person who "disrupts the status quo of corporate influence."

The organization’s activism links grassroots efforts with environmental and social concerns, hoping followers will “reconstruct [their] self through nonconsumption strategies”. Adbusters is particularly well-known for their culture jamming campaigns, and the magazine often features photographs of politically-motivated billboard or advertisement vandalism sent in by readers. The campaigns attempt to remove people from the “isolated reality of consumer comforts”. In April 2009 Adbusters declared a ‘Digital Detox’ week, encouraging citizens to spend seven days “unplugged” without any of electronic devices such as video game systems and computers. The "One Flag" competition encouraged readers to create a flag that symbolized "global citizenship", void of language or commonly known symbols. Activism also takes many other forms such as corporate boycotts and ‘art as protest’, often incorporating humor. This includes clever billboard modifications, google bombing, flash mobs and fake parking tickets for SUVs. A popular example of cultural jamming is the distortion of Tiger Woods’ smile in to the form of the Nike swoosh, calling viewers to question how they view Woods’ persona as a product. Adbusters calls it "trickle up" activism, and encourages its readers to do these activities by honoring culture jamming work in the magazine. In the September/October 2001 "Graphic Anarchy" issue, Adbusters were culture jammed themselves in a manner of speaking: they hailed the work of Swiss graphic designer Ernst Bettler as "one of the greatest design interventions on record", unaware that Bettler's story was an elaborate hoax.

Adbusters' 'brand' of culture jamming has its roots in the activities of the situationists and in particular their concept of detournement. This involves the "turning around" of received messages so that they communicate meanings at variance with their original intention. Situationists posit that consumerism promulgates “a limitless artificiality”, blurring the lines of reality and detracting from the essence of human experience. In the 'culture jamming' purview, detournement means taking symbols, logos and slogans that are considered to be the vehicles upon which the "dominant discourse" of "late capitalism" is communicated and changing them - frequently in significant but minor ways - to subvert the "monologue of the ruling order" [Debord].

Blackspot campaign

In 2004, the organization began selling shoes which were designed to resemble the Nike-owned Chuck Taylor All-Stars. The name and logo are "open-source"; in other words, unencumbered by trademarks. The campaign has been called hypocritical as AdBusters is using the same marketing technique which it denounces other companies for using.

The shoes are made primarily from organic hemp and recycled car tires. After an extensive search for anti-sweatshop manufacturers around the world, Adbusters found a small union shop in Portugal. The successful sale of more than twenty-five thousand pairs through an indie distribution network – despite the much higher than average production costs – is intended to demonstrate the hollowness of claims that business necessity sometimes requires the use of sweatshops.

Reception

Heath and Potter's The Rebel Sell suggested that the shoe's existence proves that "no rational person could possibly believe that there is any tension between 'mainstream' and 'alternative' culture." The campaign is an ongoing experiment in alternative branding.

In the June 2008 cover story of BusinessWeek Small Business Magazine, the Blackspot campaign was among three profiled in a piece focusing on "antipreneurs." Two advertising executives were asked to review the campaign for the article's "Ask the Experts" sidebar. Brian Martin of Brand Connections and Dave Weaver of TM Advertising both gave the campaign favorable reviews.

Martin noted that Blackspot was effectively telling consumers, "We know we are marketing to you, and you are as good as we are at this, and your opinion matters," while Weaver stated that "This is not a call to sales of the shoe so much as it is a call to participate in the community of Adbusters by buying the shoe."

Criticisms

Commercial style

Adbusters has been criticized for having a style and form that are similar to the media and commercial product that it attacks, that its high gloss design makes the magazine too expensive, and that a style over substance approach is used to mask sub-par content.

Heath and Potter posit that the more alternative or subversive Adbusters feels, the more appealing the Blackspot sneaker will become to the mainstream market. They believe consumers seek exclusivity and social distinction and have argued that the mainstream market seeks the very same brand of individuality that Adbusters promotes; thus they see Adbusters as promoting values antithetical to its cause, values that are, in fact, beneficial to capitalism. This view has, in turn, been criticized by other anti-consumerist activists; Naomi Klein has argued that the current generation is different, being uncompromising and learning from (what she sees) as corporate tricks of the past, saying "Although this is what companies have always done -- they've sought out the edge, they've marketed it and sold it back, they've done it with feminism and anti-establishment agendas -- I think there's something fundamentally different about an anti-corporate movement that's reacting so strongly against that very impulse to co-opt."

Accusations of anti-Semitism

Adbusters drew accusations of antisemitism after running an article that identified many supporters of the Iraq War and the Bush Administration as Jewish and questioned why its potential implications for U.S. Middle East policy were not a subject of debate. A list of fifty prominent conservatives was presented, with dots next to the names of those who are Jewish. The criterion by which the fifty conservatives were selected was not established in the article.

Ineffective activism

Some critics claim that culture jamming does little to incite real difference. Others declare the movement an easy way for upper and middle class citizens to feel empowered by engaging in activism that bears no personal cost, such as the campaign “Buy Nothing Day”. These critics feel a need for “resistance against the causes of capitalist exploitation, not its symptoms”.

Co-founder Kalle Lasn responds to such criticism by emphasizing the importance of calling attention to the issue itself and the inability to fully extract any enterprise from consumer politics. He believes that by targeting the worst player in a particular industry, Adbusters can make an example of them and potentially change the action of other players.

See also

• Ad creep
• Indymedia
• Downhill Battle
• Free Culture
• No Logo
• Geez Magazine
• StayFree! Magazine

References

• http://depts.washington.edu/gcp/pdf/culturejamsandmemewarfare.pdf, "Culture Jams and Meme Warfare: Kalle Lasn, Adbusters, and media activism", Wendi Pickerel, Helena Jorgensen, and Lance Bennett, April 19, 2002.
• http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Adbusters-Media-Foundation-971292.html, "Adbusters Wins Legal Victory in Ongoing Case Against the CBC and CanWest", www.marketwire.com, April 6, 2009.
• http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090406.wads0406/BNStory/National/home, Fiona Morrow, "Adbusters wints right to sue broadcasters over TV ads", theglobeandmail.com, April 6, 2009.

External links

• Official site
  • Japan
  • Norway
  • Sweden
  • Italy: Adbusters | Subvertising.org | Subvertising.noblogs.org
  • Australia
  • Finland

Academic and news sites

• Interview with Kalle Lasn - Founder of Adbusters
• Culture Jammers find magic button for peace and quiet Sun Herald (April 13, 2005) Daniel Dasey.
• Activism for the Mind: Reclaiming Our Cerebral Commons, Kalle Lasn with Natasha Mitchell, ABC Radio National, All in the Mind March 12, 2005.