by Naomi Klein
But after a while, what began as a way to talk back to the ads starts to feel more like evidence of our total colonization by them, and especially because the ad industry is proving that it is capable of cutting off the culture jammers at the pass. Examples of pre-jammed ads include a 1997 Nike campaign that used the slogan “I am not/A target market/I am an athlete” and Sprite’s “Image Is Nothing” campaign, featuring a young black man saying that all his life he has been bombarded with media lies telling him that soft drinks will make him a better athlete or more attractive, until he realized that “image is nothing.” Diesel jeans, however, has gone furthest in incorporating the political content of adbusting’s anticorporate attacks. One of the most popular ways for artists and activists to highlight the inequalities of free-market globalization is by juxtaposing First World icons with Third World scenes: Marlboro Country in the war-torn rubble of Beirut (see image); an obviously malnourished Haitian girl wearing Mickey Mouse glasses; Dynasty playing on a TV set in an African hut; Indonesian students rioting in front of McDonald’s arches. The power of these visual critiques of happy one-worldism is precisely what the Diesel clothing company’s “Brand O” ad campaign attempts to co-opt. The campaign features ads within ads: a series of billboards flogging a fictional Brand O line of products in a nameless North Korean city. In one, a glamorous skinny blonde is pictured on the side of a bus that is overflowing with frail-looking workers. The ad is selling “Brand O Diet —There’s no limit to how thin you can get.” Another shows an Asian man huddled under a piece of cardboard. Above him towers a Ken and Barbie Brand O billboard.
Perhaps the point of no return came in 1997 when Mark Hosler of Negativland received a call from the ultra-hip ad agency Wieden & Kennedy asking if the band that coined the term “culture jamming” would do the soundtrack for a new Miller Genuine Draft commercial. The decision to turn down the re quest and the money was simple enough, but it still sent him spinning. “They utterly failed to grasp that our entire work is essentially in opposition to everything that they are connected to, and it made me really depressed be cause I had thought that our esthetic couldn’t be absorbed into marketing,” Hosler says.28 Another rude awakening came when Hosler first saw Sprite’s “Obey Your Thirst” campaign. “That commercial was a hair’s breadth away from a song on our [Dispepsi] record. It was surreal. It’s not just the fringe that’s getting absorbed now —that’s always happened. What’s getting absorbed now is the idea that there’s no opposition left, that any resistance is futile.”29
I’m not so sure. Yes, some marketers have found a way to distill culture jamming into a particularly edgy kind of nonlinear advertising, and there is no doubt that Madison Avenue’s embrace of the techniques of adbusting has succeeded in moving product off the superstore shelves. Since Diesel began its aggressively ironic “Reasons for Living” and “Brand O” campaigns in the U.S., sales have gone from $2 million to $23 million in four years,30 and the Sprite “Image Is Nothing” campaign is credited with a 35 percent rise in sales in just three years.31 That said, the success of these individual campaigns has done nothing to disarm the antimarketing rage that fueled adbusting in the first place. In fact, it may be having the opposite effect.
Ground Zero of the Cool Hunt
The prospect of young people turning against the hype of advertising and defining themselves against the big brands is a continuous threat coming from cool-hunting agencies like Sputnik, that infamous team of professional diary readers and generational snoops. “Intellectual crews,” as Sputnik calls thinking young people, are aware and resentful of how useful they are to the marketers:
They understand that mammoth corporations now seek their approval to continually deliver goods that will translate to megasales in the mainstream. Their stance of being intellectual says to each other, and to themselves, and most importantly to marketers —who spend innumerable dollars for in-your-face this-is-what-you-need advertisements — that they cannot be bought or fooled anymore by the hype. Being a head means that you won’t sell out and be told what to wear, what to buy, what to eat or how to speak by anyone (or anything) other than yourself.32
But while the Sputnik writers inform their corporate readers about the radical ideas on the street, they appear to think that though these ideas will dramatically influence how young people will party, dress and talk, they will magically have no effect whatsoever on how young people will behave as political beings.
After they sound the alarm, the hunters always reassure their readers that all this anticorporate stuff is actually a meaningless pose that can be worked around with a hipper, edgier campaign. In other words, anticorporate rage is no more meaningful a street trend than a mild preference for the color orange. The happy underlying premise of the cool hunters’ reports is that despite all the punk-rock talk, there is no belief that is a true belief and there are no rebels who cannot be tamed with an ad campaign or by a street promoter who really speaks to them. The unquestioned assumption is that there is no end point in this style cycle. There will always be new spaces to colonize — whether physical or mental —and there will always be an ad that will be able to penetrate the latest strain of consumer cynicism. Nothing new is taking place, the hunters tell each other: marketers have always extracted symbols and signs from the resistance movements of their day.
What they don’t say is that previous waves of youth resistance were focused primarily on such foes as “the establishment,” the government, the patriarchy and the military-industrial complex. Culture jamming is different —its rage encompasses the very type of marketing that the cool hunters and their clients are engaging in as they try to figure out how to use antimarketing rage to sell products. The big brands’ new ads must incorporate a youth cynicism not about products as status symbols, or about mass homogenization, but about multinational brands themselves as tireless culture vultures.
The admen and adwomen have met this new challenge without changing their course. They are busily hunting down and reselling the edge, just as they have always done, which is why Wieden & Kennedy thought there was nothing strange about asking Negativland to shill for Miller. After all, it was Wieden & Kennedy, a boutique ad agency based in Portland, Oregon, that made Nike a feminist sneaker. It was W&K who dreamed up the postindustrial alienation marketing plan for Coke’s OK Cola; W&K who gave the world the immortal plaid-clad assertion that the Subaru Impreza was “like punk rock;” and it was W&K who brought Miller Beer into the age of irony. Masters at pitting the individual against various incarnations of mass-market bogeymen, Wieden & Kennedy sold cars to people who hated car ads, shoes to people who loathed image, soft drinks to the Prozac Nation and, most of all, ads to people who were “not a target market.”
The agency was founded by two self-styled “beatnik artists,” Dan Wieden and David Kennedy, whose technique, it seems, for quieting their own nagging fears that they were selling out has consistently been to drag the ideas and icons of the counterculture with them into the ad world. A quick tour through the agency’s body of work is nothing short of a counterculture reunion —Woodstock meets the Beats meets Warhol’s Factory. After putting Lou Reed in a Honda spot in the mid-eighties, W&K used the Beatles anthem “Revolution” in one Nike commercial, then carted out John Lennon’s “Instant Karma” for another. They also paid proto-rock-and-roller Bo Diddley to do the “Bo Knows” Nike spots, and filmmaker Spike Lee to do an entire series of Air Jordan ads. W&K even got Jean-Luc Godard to direct a European Nike commercial. There were still more countercultural artifacts lying around: they stuck William Burroughs’s face in a mini-TV-set in another Nike commercial and designed a campaign, nixed by Subaru before it made it to air, that used Jack Kerouac’s On the Road as the voice-over text for an SVX commercial.
After making its name on the willingness of the avant-garde to set its price for the right mix of irony and dollars, W&K can hardly be blamed for thinking that culture jammers would also be thrilled to take part in the postmodern fun of a se
lf-aware ad campaign. But the backlash against the brands, of which culture jamming is only one part, isn’t about vague notions of alternativeness battling the mainstream. It has to do with the specific issues that have been the subject of this book so far: the loss of public space, corporate censorship and unethical labor practices, to name but three —issues less easily digested than tasty morsels like Girl Power and grunge.
Which is why Wieden & Kennedy hit a wall when they asked Negativland to mix for Miller, and why that was only the first in a string of defeats for the agency. The British political pop-band Chumbawamba turned down a $1.5 million contract that would have allowed Nike to use its hit song “Tubthumping” in a World Cup spot. Abstract notions about staying indie were not at issue (the band did allow the song to be used in the soundtrack for Home Alone 3); at the center of their rejection was Nike’s use of sweatshop labor. “It took everybody in the room under 30 seconds to say no,” said band member Alice Nutter.33 The political poet Martin Espada also got a call from one of Nike’s smaller agencies, inviting him to take part in the “Nike Poetry Slam.” If he accepted, he would be paid $2,500 and his poem would be read in a thirty-second commercial during the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano. Espada turned the agency down flat, offering up a host of reasons and ending with this one: “Ultimately, however, I am rejecting your offer as a protest against the brutal labor practices of the company. I will not associate myself with a company that engages in the well-documented exploitation of workers in sweatshops.”34 The rudest awakening came with Wieden & Kennedy’s cleverest of schemes: in May 1999, with labor scandals still hanging over the swoosh, the agency approached Ralph Nader —the consumer-rights movement’s most powerful leader and a folk hero for his attacks on multinational corporations —and asked him to do a Nike ad. The idea was simple: Nader would get $25,000 for holding up an Air 120 sneaker and saying, “Another shameless attempt by Nike to sell shoes.” A letter sent to Nader’s office from Nike headquarters explained that “what we are asking is for Ralph, as the country’s most prominent consumer advocate, to take a light-hearted jab at us. This is a very Nike-like thing to do in our ads.” Nader, never known for being light of heart, would only say, “Look at the gall of these guys.”35
It was indeed a very Nike-like thing to do. Ads co-opt out of reflex — they do so because consuming is what consumer culture does. Madison Avenue is generally not too picky about what it will swallow, it doesn’t avoid poison directed against itself but rather, as Wieden & Kennedy have shown, chomps down on whatever it finds along the path as it looks for the new “edge.” The scenario that it appears unwilling to consider is that its admen and adwomen, the perennial teenage followers, may finally be following their target market off a cliff.
Adbusting in the Thirties: “Become a Toucher Upper!”
Of course the ad industry has disarmed backlashes before — from women complaining of sexism, gays claiming invisibility, ethnic minorities tired of gross caricatures. And that’s not all. In the 1950s and again in the 1970s, Western consumers became obsessed with the idea that they were being fooled by advertisers through the covert use of subliminal techniques. In 1957, Vance Packard published the runaway best-seller The Hidden Persuaders, which shocked Americans with allegations that social scientists were packing advertisements with messages invisible to the human eye. The issue re-emerged in 1973, when Wilson Bryan Key published Subliminal Seduction, a study of the lascivious messages tucked away in ice cubes. Key was so transported by his discovery that he made such bold claims as “the subliminal promise to anyone buying Gilbey’s gin is simply a good old-fashioned sexualorgy.”36
But all these antimarketing spasms had one thing in common: they focused exclusively on the content and techniques of advertising. These critics didn’t want to be subliminally manipulated —and they did want African Americans in their cigarette ads and gays and lesbians selling jeans. Because the concerns were so specific, they were relatively easy for the ad world to address or absorb. For instance, the charge of hidden messages harbored in ice cubes, and other carefully cast shadows, spawned an irony-laden advertising subgenre that design historians Ellen Luton and J. Abbot Miller term “meta-subliminal” —ads that parody the charge that ads send secret messages. In 1990, Absolut Vodka launched the “Absolut Subliminal” campaign which showed a glass of vodka on the rocks with the word “absolut” clearly screened into the ice cubes. Seagram’s and Tanqueray gin followed with their own subliminal in-jokes, as did the cast of Saturday Night Live with the recurring character Subliminal Man.
The critiques of advertising that have traditionally come out of academe have been equally unthreatening, though for different reasons. Most such criticism focuses not on the effects of marketing on public space, cultural freedom and democracy, but rather on ads’ persuasive powers over seemingly clueless people. For the most part, marketing theory concentrates on the way ads implant false desires in the consuming public —making us buy things that are bad for us, pollute the planet or impoverish our souls. “Advertising,” as George Orwell once said, “is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.” When such is the theorist’s opinion of the public, it is no wonder that there is little potential for redemption in most media criticism: this sorry populace will never be in possession of the critical tools it needs to formulate a political response to marketing mania and media synergy.
The future is even bleaker for those academics who use advertising criticism for a thinly veiled attack on “consumer culture.” As James Twitchell writes in Adcult USA, most advertising criticism reeks of contempt for the people who “want —ugh! —things.”37 Such a theory can never hope to form the intellectual foundation of an actual resistance movement against the branded life, since genuine political empowerment cannot be reconciled with a belief system that regards the public as a bunch of ad-fed cattle, held captive under commercial culture’s hypnotic spell. What’s the point of going through the trouble of trying to knock down the fence? Everyone knows the branded cows will just stand there looking dumb and chewing cud.
Interestingly, the last time that there was a successful attack on the practice of advertising —rather than a disagreement on its content or techniques —was during the Great Depression. In the 1930s the very idea of the happy, stable consumer society portrayed in advertising provoked a wave of resentment from the millions of Americans who found themselves on the outside of the dream of prosperity. An anti-advertising movement emerged that attacked ads not for faulty imagery but as the most public face of a deeply faulty economic system. People weren’t incensed by the pictures in the ads, but rather by the cruelty of the obviously false promise that they represented —the lie of the American Dream that the happy consumer lifestyle was accessible to all. In the late twenties, and through the thirties, the frivolous promises of the ad world made for stomach-wrenching juxtapositions with the casualties of economic collapse, setting the stage for an unparalleled wave of consumer activism.
There was a short-lived magazine published in New York called The Ballyhoo, a sort of Depression-era Adbusters. In the wake of the 1929 stock-market crash, The Ballyhoo arrived as a cynical new voice, viciously mocking the “creative psychiatry” of cigarette and mouthwash ads, as well as the outright quackery used to sell all kinds of potions and lotions.38 The Ballyhoo was an instant success, reaching a circulation of more than 1.5 million in 1931. James Rorty, a 1920s Mad Ave adman turned revolutionary socialist, explained the new magazine’s appeal: “Whereas the stock in trade of the ordinary mass or class consumer magazine is reader-confidence in advertising, the stock in trade of Ballyhoo was reader-disgust with advertising, and with high-pressure salesmanship in general…. Ballyhoo, in turn, parasites on the grotesque, bloated body of advertising.”39
Ballyhoo’s culture jams include “Scramel” cigarettes (“they’re so fresh they’re insulting”), or the line of “69 different Zilch creams: What the well greased girls will wear. Absolutely indispensable (Ask any dispensary).”
The editors encouraged readers to move beyond their snickers and go out and bust bothersome billboards themselves. A fake ad for the “Twitch Toucher Upper School” shows a drawing of a woman who has just painted a mustache on a glamorous cigarette model. The caption reads, “Become a Toucher Upper!” and goes on to say: “If you long to mess up advertisement: if your heart cries out to paint pipes in the mouths of beautiful ladies, try this 10-second test NOW! Our graduates make their marks all over the world! Good Toucher Uppers are always in demand” (see image on page 278). The magazine also created fake products to skewer the hypocrisy of the Hoover administration, like the “Lady Pipperal Bedsheet De Luxe” — made extra long to snugly fit on park benches when you become homeless. Or the “smilette” —two hooks that clamp on to either side of the mouth and force a happy expression. “Smile away the Depression! Smile us into Prosperity!”
The hard-core culture jammers of the era were not the Ballyhoo humorists, however, but photographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke-White. These political documentarians latched on to the hypocrisies of ad campaigns such as the National Association of Manufacturers’ “There’s No Way Like the American Way” by highlighting the harsh visual contrasts between the ads and the surrounding landscape. A popular technique was photographing billboards with slogans like “World’s Highest Standard of Living” in their actual habitat: hanging surreally over breadlines and tenements. The manic grinning models piled into the family sedan were clearly blind to the tattered masses and squalid conditions below. The photographers of the era also scrupulously documented the fragility of the capitalist system by picturing fallen businessmen holding up “Will Work for Food” signs in the shadow of looming Coke billboards and peeling hoardings.
