A small group of mavericks is culture-jamming the consumer society, writes Bruce Cohen
Grab your favourite spot in front of the television and watch closely for 15 minutes. Then, switch the set on – – but keep the sound off. Or pick up a magazine and in your mind write a parody of one of the advertisements.
You’ll be practising the art of culture jamming — mentally challenging the messages in the mass media.
For those of us who make a living out of media, the idea of culture jamming is an alien and unwelcome intrusion in our neatly packaged lives. Sucked in by the very hype we help create, we seldom take stock of the religion of consumption we all so actively market.
But out there on the edges of the “gimme” world is Adbusters, dedicated to the practice of un-advertising and anti-marketing.
With a war-chest of parody and airbrushes, and a small band of activists, the Canadian-based Media Foundation has since 1992 been screwing the advertising industry, the mass media and big corporations with an erratic, radically-chic and sometimes outrageous magazine that literally turns advertising on its head.
I used to subscribe to Adbusters, but it hardly ever arrived (part, I guess, of their un-marketing strategy), so I was pleased to find them again on the Internet in all their bitchin’ glory this week.
Adbusters are best-known for their parodies of the Absolut Vodka adverts (most of their campaigns are focused on attacking the marketing of alcohol, cigarettes, automobiles and junk food).
Over the years they have published a series of Absolut “sub-verts”, the most striking of which features a noose shaped in the outline of a vodka bottle with the punch-line: Absolut Hangover.
There’s also Absolut Nonsense, while Absolut on Ice features a corpse in a mortuary with copy that says: “A teenager sees 100 000 alcohol ads before reaching legal drinking age.”
Their Calvin Klein (“Swine”) Obsession advert make- overs are hilarious and cut deep into the mass culture stereotypes of sex and attraction. The punchline is “Bow to the Obsession”.
Adbusters have also re-engineered Ford’s swirling blue logo into “Fraud” and torn strips off the makers of Prozac and Big Macs.
But Adbusters is more than just hurling satiric barbs at the ad industry and the mass media. It’s the headquarters of a small activist movement tackling the worst excesses of the consumer society.
They organise an annual Buy Nothing Day, which has now spread from North America to Europe, and they promote culture-jamming campaigns against a range of mind- polluting commercials and environmentally unsound products. They fundraise to make and place their TV “uncommercials” and “subvertisements” in the mass media.
Their more radical allies practise billboard banditry, with “midnight editors” adding words and altering the messages on giant highway signs, sometimes with hilarious results. By sabotaging the ads, they argue, consumers are jolted into a critical awareness of the intent behind the original message.
What underlies Adbusters is Noam Chomsky’s powerful critique of contemporary society — the homogenisation, sedation and control exerted through the mass media — a process he calls Manufacturing Consent, a sort of voluntary, willing oppression.
The mission of Adbusters is to educate consumers about the sophisticated and manipulative marketing being hurled at them through newspapers, magazines, TV, radio and billboards, and the impact they have on shaping our society.
It’s the practice of “semiological guerrilla warfare”, a radical decoding of the messages contained in the mass media: We will take on the archetypal mind polluters — Marlboro, Budweiser, Benetton, McDonalds – – and beat them at their own game.
We will uncool their billion-dollar images with uncommercials … subvertisements … and anti-ads.
We will take control of the role that the tobacco, alcohol, fashion, cosmetics and fast food corporations play in our lives. We will hold their marketing strategies up to public scrutiny and set new agendas in their industries
We will culture jam the pop culture marketeers — MTV, Time-Warner, Sony — and bring their image factories to a sudden, shuddering halt.
On the rubble of the old media culture we will build a new one with a non-commercial heart and soul. (Adbusters Media Mission).
Adbusters may have the bite of an hysterical mosquito on the back of an elephant, but they hold up to us a mirror of the mass media at work. And the picture is darkly disturbing.
You can find Adbusters on the World Wide Web at http:// hoshi.cic.sfu.ca/adbusters/ or email them at [email protected].