Subvertising

Rod Munday

Subvertising, is a cultural guerrilla movement of loosely affiliated artists, activists and other individuals who target advertising. Subvertising is part of a wider movement known as Culture Jamming, a term coined in 1984 by the band Negativland (fig. 1)

negativland
fig. 1

Jamming is CB slang for the illegal practice of interrupting radio broadcasts. It describes various kinds of media sabotage such as computer hacking, pirate radio stations camcorder counter surveillance groups and subvertising (Dery 1993, www).

It the early days the 'cultural jams' of the subvertiser consisted of scrawling an oppositional message in graffiti to the preferred reading of the advert (to use Stuart Hall's terms). For example in the 1980s, feminists graffiti artists sprayed "feed me" over the anorexic looking models that graced fashion ads. Jill Posner (1982) argues,

A billboard without graffiti is something quite outrageous, because billboards are not only grossly ugly but they also mislead and misinform the consumer with at the same time teasing use with the products they are promoting.

Billboards are claimed by subvertisers to be socially destabilising, because they exploit the weakness of certain demographics to oppose their messages. Poor neighbourhoods have a disproportionately large number of advertisements for tobacco, fast food, or alcohol products (Klein, 2000).

camel kid
fig. 2

The strategy of Camel cigarettes for example seems to be to entice very young consumers into smoking. The cartoon character of Joe Camel has an obvious appeal to children. For instance a 1991 study found that children in the US were as familiar with Joe Camel as they were with Mickey Mouse (Goldman and Papson 1996, 3). In Fig 2, this strategy is laid bare for all to see. Reversioning the character Joe Camel as a toddler calls attention to the real audience of consumers that the subvertisers claim Camel is targeting with its advertising.

Subvertising rejects the idea that the messages of advertisers should be allowed to be displayed in letters six feet high on billboards, while citizens are denied a right to reply. In the conversation between citizen and advertiser, they argue the rights of the former are skewed in favour of the latter because an advertisers can afford to buy their way into dominating public spaces. Where billboards proliferate, a commercial cacophony of voices has risen to such a pitch that no one can hear anyone else. Consequently free speech is meaningless in those spaces (Klein).

In recent years the subvertising aspect of cultural jamming has extended to print and even television advertising, with the rise of groups like Adbusters (fig. 3).

adbusters calvin klein spoof as
fig. 3

The growth in computers and easily affordable digital image manipulation programs like Photoshop has meant that the techniques of the subvertiser have grown more sophisticated. Allowing her or him more scope for turning the messages of the advertising agencies against themselves

banksy reworking of paris hilton album
fig. 4

For example the guerrilla artist Banksy recently reworked several thousand copies of Paris Hilton's debut album (fig 2) which were then sequestered back into record stores ostensibly to masquerade as the genuine product. Banksy only admitted to the tampering with the CDs once the 'hack' had been discovered. Presumably this means a number of unsuspecting record buyers were duped by Banksy, or pleasantly surprised by Ms. Hilton's confessional candidness. Either way it meets Posner’s criteria of a successful subvert, because it sticks in the mind and makes a sharp point within a humorous framework (Posner 1982)

According to Naomi Klein, the most sophisticated culture jams are an x-ray of the subconscious of an advertising campaign, uncovering not an opposite meaning but a deeper truth behind the layers of euphemisms, as figures 5, 6, and 7 illustrate.

Gordons gin subvert
fig. 5

SUV Saddam subver
fig. 6

apple subvert
fig. 7

The process is doubly subversive firstly because it forces the company to foot the bill for the defacing of its property - since the billboard space is already paid for. And secondly because the success of advertising is premised on the notion that generating positive visual associations adds value to the brand (Klein).

The added value is vastly important because as Goldman and Papson explain, in today's consumer goods markets, product standardization makes it imperative that products attach themselves to signs that carry an additional element of added value to differentiate them. A sign value establishes the relative value of a brand where the functional difference between products is minimal. For example the similarities between a trainer from Woolworth and a trainer from Nike are much greater than the differences, although Woolworth trainers do not have the slogan "Just do it" nor do they have stars like Michael Jordan and Wayne Rooney endorsing their product. The competition to build images that stand out in media markets is based on a process of routinely unhinging signifiers from signifieds so that new signifier-signified relationships can be fashioned. But this process of establishing new signifier/signified relationships is a delicate balance. The C.E.O. of Nike Phil Knight articulated the challenge in the following way:

There is a flip side to the emotions we generate… emotions imply their opposite and at the level we operate, the reaction is much more than a passing thought (quoted in Klein 200).

This semiotic balancing act explains partly the success of subvertising. The essential arbitrariness of the relationship between signifier and signifies as described by Saussure in the Cours de Linguistique gènèrale means that one a negative association is introduced it can soon become a connotation of a companies branding. For example McDonalds as a brand are as much associated with McSpotlight and Morgan Spurlock's film Super Size Me (2004) as they are with the Big Mac and Ronald McDonald. A successful subvert means that you will never look at a campaign in quite the same way again. Also after the public relations disaster that was the McSpotlight trial, where McDonald's tried to sue two London Greenpeace activists for liable, companies are also reluctant to get involved with litigation. For instance Pepsi only comment on a Negativeland song The Greatest Taste Around, which associated their brand with increasingly surreal negative imagery, was that it was a pretty good listen (quoted in Klein).

However, arbitrariness is a two way street and Subvertising has in recent year come under a number of attacks. The popularity of Adbusters, claimed by its founder Kalle Lasn to be able to "spark a paradigm shift in public consciousness" (Lasn quote in Klein). Is seen by others in the movement as a sell out. Klein describes the implicit emphasis that Adbusters places on social responsible advertising, by targeting cigarette, fast food and alcohol campaigns as a "slightly hipper version of a public service announcement". Also the group was the target of wide spread derision when they started selling in their catalogues calendars and tee shirts for 'Buy Nothing Day.'

world not for sale tee shirt
fig. 8

The latter phenomenon highlight a more far reaching dilemma facing subvertisers, which is the possibility that they are merely adding to the aggregate of consumerist images that proliferate in post-industrial capitalist culture. Fig. 8 shows a tee shirt for sale at www.fidelche.com a company that seem to embody the ironic slogan "rebellion is packaged."

Subvertisers as part of the same capitalist culture as those they protest are always vulnerable to the accusation that their work is merely another form of advertising. Goldman and Papson argue that for years, advertisers relied on a formula for joining the meaning of a brand-name product to the meaning of a socially charged image. However, in the 1970s, polling data registered rising consumer complaint about feeling "manipulated" and "insulted" by advertisements. In the late 1980s, advertisers responded with more authentic looking advertisements. However people grew increasingly tired of being positioned by the false promises of advertising so by the late 1980s, a new style of advertising emerged as advertisers began to indulge in self-reflective banter denying their own participation in the conventional advertising project, to win back the favour of disenchanted viewers. The advertising agency behind the Nike campaigns, Wieden & Kennedy, even asked Negativland to contribute a soundtrack to an advertisement for Miller Light beer. Mark Hosler of the group remarked.

They utterly failed to grasp that our entire work is essentially in opposition to everything they are connect to and it made me really depressed because I had thought that our aesthetic could be absorbed into marketing (Mark Hosler, quoted in Klein).

In the lecture we will be examining this paradox in more detail, with reference to historical example of other groups who rebelled against the system, for the Diggers of 1649, through to the Dadaists of the early twentieth century, the Situationists and Guy Debord, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin's Yippie movement both in the 1960s and Greenpeace. All of these groups have in one way or another influenced todays cultural jammers, and all have faced similar dilemma over accusations of 'selling out' and compromising their message. While this dialectical pattern is applicable to subvertising, it is also important to explore the reasons why subvertising is vulneralbe both to 'selling out' and also to being co-opted into the advertising mainstream, born out by the example of Negativland and Miller Light.

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