Adbusters

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Adbusters, operated by the registered Adbusters Media Foundation, is a Vancouver-based Canadian non-profit anti-consumerist, pro-environment activist collective centered around its eponymous alternative magazine, recognized globally for pioneering creative anti-advertising interventions and catalyzing major grassroots social movements.

Key moments

1989Founded by activists Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
1992Launched the first annual Buy Nothing Day, a global public action encouraging participants to opt out of all unnecessary consumer spending for 24 hours
1990sPopularized the "culture jamming" activist tactic, which uses satirical edits of corporate ads and public pranks to critique manipulative marketing and overconsumption
2011Published a viral public call for protest against corporate influence over U.S. democracy that directly sparked the Occupy Wall Street movement based at New York City's Zuccotti Park

Unique Counter-Institutional Operational Model

Adbusters avoided the formal, mainstream advocacy group playbook for most of its history, building its influence almost entirely through accessible, art-forward provocations rather than traditional lobbying or large grant funding. This allowed it to build a cross-border community of artists, pranksters, students and casual activists who did not identify with conventional political organizing, creating a loose but high-impact global network outside of formal institutional control.

Unmatched Grassroots Movement Spillover Legacy

While many of Adbusters' own recurring campaigns stayed within niche counterculture circles, its 2011 call for a Wall Street occupation unexpectedly scaled into a worldwide protest movement that pushed systemic economic inequality to the top of mainstream public discourse for years afterward. This outcome proved that small, tightly framed media provocations from independent activist media could generate far broader social change than many far better funded formal advocacy organizations were able to achieve in the same period.

The Adbusters Media Foundation is a Canadian-based not-for-profit, pro-environment[1] organization founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in Vancouver, British Columbia. Adbusters 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."[2]

As anti-capitalist or opposed to capitalism,[3] it publishes the reader-supported, advertising-free Adbusters, an activist magazine devoted to challenging consumerism. The magazine has an international circulation peaking at 120,000 in the late 2000s[4] with circulation of 60,000[5] in 2022. Past and present contributors to the magazine include Jonathan Barnbrook, Morris Berman, Brendan Connell, Simon Critchley, David Graeber, Michael Hardt, Chris Hedges, Bill McKibben, Jim Munroe, David Orrell, Douglas Rushkoff, Matt Taibbi, Slavoj Žižek, and others.

Adbusters has launched numerous international campaigns, including Buy Nothing Day, TV Turnoff Week and Occupy Wall Street,[6] and is known for their "subvertisements" that spoof popular advertisements. In English, Adbusters has bi-monthly American, Canadian, Australian, UK and International editions of each issue. Adbusters's sister organizations include Résistance à l'Aggression Publicitaire[7] and Casseurs de Pub[8] in France, Adbusters Norge in Norway, Adbusters Sverige in Sweden and Culture Jammers in Japan.[9][10]

History

Adbusters was founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz, a duo of award-winning documentary filmmakers living in Vancouver. Since the early 1980s, Lasn had been making films that explored the spiritual and cultural lessons the West could learn from the Japanese experience with capitalism.

In 1988, the British Columbia Council of Forest Industries, the "voice" of the logging industry, was facing tremendous public pressure from a growing environmentalist movement. The logging industry fought back with a television ad campaign called "Forests Forever."[11] It was an early example of greenwashing: shots of happy children, workers and animals with a kindly, trustworthy sounding narrator who assured the public that the logging industry was protecting the forest.

Lasn and Shmalz, outraged by the use of the public airwaves to deliver what they felt was deceptive anti-environmentalist propaganda, responded by producing the "Talking Rainforest"[12] anti-ad in which an old-growth tree explains to a sapling that "a tree farm is not a forest." But the duo proved to be unable to buy airtime on the same stations that had aired the forest-industry ad. According to a former Adbusters employee, "The CBC's reaction to the proposed television commercial created the real flash point for the Media Foundation. It seemed that Lasn and Schmaltz's commercial was too controversial to air on the CBC. An environmental message that challenged the large forestry companies was considered 'advocacy advertising' and was disallowed, even though the 'informational' messages that glorified

Mental environmentalism

The subtitle of Adbusters magazine is "The Journal of the Mental Environment."

In a 1996 interview, Kalle Lasn explained the foundation's goal: What we're trying to do is pioneer a new form of social activism using all the power of the mass media to sell ideas, rather than products. We're motivated by a kind of 'greenthink' that comes from the environmental movement and isn't mired in the old ideology of the left and right. Instead, we take the environmental ethic into the mental ethic, trying to clean up the toxic areas of our minds.

You can't recycle and be a good environmental citizen, then watch four hours of television and get consumption messages pumped at you.[15]

Issues

Anti-advertising

Adbusters describes itself as anti-advertising: it blames advertising for playing a central role in creating and maintaining consumer culture. This argument is based on the premise that the advertising industry goes to great effort and expense to associate desire and identity with commodities. Adbusters believes that advertising has unjustly "colonized" public, discursive and psychic spaces, by appearing in movies, sports and even schools, so as to permeate modern culture. Adbusters's stated goals include combating the negative effects of advertising and empowering its readers to regain control of culture, encouraging them to ask "Are we consumers and citizens?"[16]

Since Adbusters concludes that advertising conditions people to look to external sources, to define their own personal identities, the magazine advocates a "natural and authentic self apart from the consumer society". The magazine aims to provoke anti-consumerist feelings. By juxtaposing text and images, the magazine attempts to create a means of raising awareness and getting its message out to people that is both aesthetically pleasing and entertaining.[17]

Activism also takes many other forms such as corporate boycotts and 'art as protest', often incorporating humor. This includes billboard modifications, google bombing, flash mobs

Campaigns

Culture jamming

Culture jamming is the primary means through which Adbusters challenges consumerism.[22] The magazine was described by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter in their book The Rebel Sell as "the flagship publication of the culture jamming movement."[23] Culture jamming is heavily influenced by the Situationist International and the tactic of détournement. The goal is to interrupt the normal consumerist experience in order to reveal the underlying ideology of an advertisement, media message, or consumer artifact. Adbusters believe large corporations control mainstream media and the flow of information, and culture jamming aims to challenge this as a form of protest. The term "jam" contains more than one meaning, including improvising, by re-situating an image or idea already in existence, and interrupting, by attempting to stop the workings of a machine.[24]

Criticisms

Criminal Mischief

The foundation has been criticized for solicitating dangerous criminal mischief by escalating their methods to deflate "SUV tires in an effort to fight climate change."[40]

Commercial style

The foundation has been criticized for having a style and form that are too similar to the media and commercial product that Adbusters attack, that its high gloss design makes the magazine too expensive, and that a style over substance approach is used to mask sub-par content.[41]

Heath and Potter posit that the more alternative or subversive the foundation 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 the foundation promotes; thus they see the foundation as promoting capitalist values.[23]

Awards

In 1999, Adbusters won the award for National Magazine of the Year in Canada.[49]

External links

Academic and news sites

Interview with Kalle Lasn

References

"About". Adbusters Media Foundation. Retrieved 3 October 2011.^
"About Adbusters ." Adbusters Media Foundation. Retrieved 19 December 2010.^
Eric Pfanner. Fighting guerrilla graffiti, The New York Times, 15 March 2004^

Blackspot Shoes campaign

In 2004, the foundation began selling vegan, indie shoes. The name and logo are "open-source";[27] in other words, unencumbered by private trademarks.[28] Attached to each pair was a "Rethink the Cool" leaflet, inviting wearers to join a movement, and two spots – one for drawing their own logos and another on the toe for "kicking corporate ass."[29]

There are three versions of the Blackspot Sneaker. The V1 is designed to resemble the Nike-owned Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars (Nike bought Converse in 2003).[30] There is also a V1 in "fiery red."

The V2 is designed by Canadian shoe designer John Fluevog. It is made 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.[31] The sale of more than twenty-five thousand pairs[32] through an alternative distribution network is an example of Western consumer activism marketing.[32]

Adbusters describes its goals vis-à-vis Blackspot as follows:

"Blackspot shoes is our experiment with grassroots capitalism. After spending many years railing against the practices of megacorporations like McDonalds, Starbucks and Nike, we wanted to prove that running an ethical, environmentally responsible business is possible ... and that taking market share away from megacorporations is better than whining about them.[33]"

Reception

Heath and Potter's The Rebel Sell, which is critical of Adbusters, claimed that the blackspot shoe's existence proves that "no rational person could possibly believe that there is any tension between 'mainstream' and 'alternative' culture."[23]

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."[34]

issn
title	Adbusters
frequency	Bi-monthly
language	English
editor	Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz
editor title	Founder
firstdate	1989
country	Canada
website	Adbusters.org

Adbusters

WorldBrand briefing

Unique Counter-Institutional Operational Model

Unmatched Grassroots Movement Spillover Legacy

History

Mental environmentalism

Issues

Anti-advertising

Campaigns

Culture jamming

Criticisms

Criminal Mischief

Commercial style

Awards

See also

External links

Academic and news sites

References

Media Carta

Legal action

Blackspot Shoes campaign

Reception

Reception

Occupy Wall Street

Legal issues

Alleged antisemitism

Ineffective activism