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back at advertisers
Title of 'subvertisements' spoofs mainstream ads
By David Moore
Attention, consumers: Your mental environment is being polluted.
Weren't aware? Didn't even know that you had a mental environment?
Then maybe it's time you picked up a copy of Adbusters, the magazine whose self-appointed mission is to scour out the corporate-sponsored trash that fills our heads. Or something like that.
“My gut feeling is that there’s a mental environmental movement that will be every bit as important as the actual environmental movement 10 years ago,” says Kalle Lasn, Adbusters' editor in chief and founder.
“When people talk about the pollutions of the mental environment and its connection with mental health, everything will be up for grabs.”
Owing to its anti-consumerist philosophy, you won't find any advertisements in the 12-year-old title.
What you'll find instead are subvertisements, cannily executed parodies of well-known ad campaigns. One features a Nike "swoosh" under the word "sweatshop." Another shows Joe Camel, cartoon pitchbeast of Camel Cigarettes, undergoing chemotherapy.
The subvertisements constitute Adbusters' chief weapon in a form of warfare Lasn terms “culture jamming.”
“Culture was something slowly being stolen from us by advertisers and broadcasters and corporations,” he explains. “We wanted to start a culture jamming movement that would jam the existing consumer culture, but also, bit by bit, reclaim that culture and give it back to civil society.”
The result is a bimonthly title that is at once a cutting edge glossy magazine and a critique of same.
Lasn recognizes the paradox.
“The biggest project at Adbusters right now is to come up with a sort of noncommercial magazine language that is half graphic, half text, and really speaks to people and hits them in the guts and gives them epiphanies and changes minds,” he says.
Since the May/June issue of last year, Adbusters has been running with theme issues, each exploring a topic such as the Sept. 11 attacks or Prozac. The cover of the most recent issue tackles the postmodern condition by asking, “Why am I so cynical?”
The post-Sept. 11 issue, which featured a burned American flag on the cover, had 100 percent sell-through on newsstands, despite being pulled from many stores.
Another longtime project for Adbusters has been attempting to air commercials for the events it founded, such as Buy Nothing Day or TV Turnoff Week. For 10 years, the major networks have rejected the ads.
The only network to run Adbusters ads has been CNN Headline News, which did so three years ago only after coming under pressure from the investigation of a Wall Street Journal reporter.
Lasn says that Adbusters is preparing to launch a First Amendment legal action against the Big Three networks in the next couple of months.
“After 15 years of doing as they please, the networks think they own those airwaves,” Lasn says. “When I argue with them on the phone they say things like, ‘Why should I shoot myself in the foot by running your ad?’”
Lasn says that Adbusters gained readers after last fall's terrorist attacks as people were turned off by the way many companies transparently attempted to capitalize on the surge of patriotism that followed.
The magazine's circulation has risen to 90,000, an increase of 29 percent since last summer, with much of the gain coming from England and Australia.
The magazine is fueled by newsstand sales, despite a hefty cover price of $6.75 for a typical 120-page issue. Lasn says that about 80 percent of Adbusters’ revenue, which this year is on pace to break $2 million, comes from newsstand sales.
Far from being an idiosyncratic loner, Lasn sees Adbusters as a spawning ground for new ideas both politically and graphically.
“Many of the techniques we’ve developed will be adopted by other magazines, and many of our subvertising ideas have already been adopted by advertisers who have used culture jamming to sell their products,” Lasn says.
July 9, 2002© 2002 Media Life
-David Moore is a staff writer for Media Life.
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