Culture Jamming: Ads Under Attack

Brandweek, July 10, 2000

Bill Gates and Microsoft aren't the only corporate giants suffering a backlash against their superbrands. Last month, computer hackers invaded Nike's Web site in the latest protest against the company's alleged sweatshop practices, redirecting visitors to a site concerned with "the growth of corporate power and the direction of globalization." Similar rants have been directed at McDonald's--from the student who waved a sign with the arch logo at the World Trade Organization protest in Seattle to the axe-wielding vandal--now a cultural hero--who tried to thwart the opening of a McDonald's in the tiny town of Millau, France.

For their brilliance at building their brands, the marketers behind the likes of Nike, McDonald's, Wal-Mart and Starbucks now find themselves at the center of journalist Naomi Klein's avowed "next big political movement" in No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies from Picador/St. Martin's Press. Reporting everywhere from university campuses to garment factories in Third World countries, Klein depicts the encroachment of big-name brands on our daily lives, and the array of in-your-face counter-measures this has provoked among consumer advocates.

One such measure is discussed in the chapter partially excerpted here: "culture jamming," the practice of parodying ads and hijacking billboards to drastically alter their messages. "Something not far from the surface of the public psyche is delighted to see the icons of corporate power subverted and mocked," Klein writes, offering up memorable examples of "adbusting" done to Absolut, Levi's, Ford, Exxon, Apple and others.

It's Sunday morning on the edge of New York's Alphabet City and Jorge Rodriguez de Gerada is perched at the top of a high ladder, ripping the paper off a cigarette billboard. Moments before, the billboard at the corner of Houston and Attorney sported a fun-loving Newport couple jostling over a pretzel. Now it showcases the haunting face of a child, which Rodriguez de Gerada has painted in rust. To finish it off, he pastes up a few hand-torn strips of the old Newport ad, which form a fluorescent green frame around the child's face.

When it's done, the installation looks as the 31-year-old artist had intended: as if years of cigarette, beer and car ads had been scraped away to reveal the rusted backing of the billboard. Burned into the metal is the real commodity of the advertising transaction. "After the ads are taken down," he says, "what is left is the impact on the children in the area, staring at these images."

Unlike some of the growing legion of New York guerrilla artists, Rodriguez de Gerada refuses to slink around at night like a vandal, choosing instead to make his statements in broad daylight. For that matter, he doesn't much like the phrase "guerrilla art," preferring "citizen art" instead. He wants the dialogue he has been having with the city's billboards for more than 10 years to be seen as a normal mode of discourse in a democratic society, not as some edgy vanguard act. While he paints and pastes, he wants kids to stop and watch--as they do on this sunny day, just as an old man offers to help support the ladder.

Rodriguez de Gerada is widely recognized as one of the most skilled and creative founders of culture jamming, the practice of parodying advertisements and hijacking billboards in order to drastically alter their messages. Streets are public spaces, adbusters argue, and since most residents can't afford to counter corporate messages by purchasing their own ads, they should have the right to talk back to images they never asked to see. In recent years, this argument has been bolstered by advertising's mounting aggressiveness in the public domain--painted and projected onto sidewalks; reaching around entire buildings and buses; into schools; onto basketball courts and on the Internet. At the same time, the proliferation of the quasi-public "town squares" of malls and superstores has created more and more spaces where commercial messages are the only ones permitted. Adding even greater urgency to their cause is the belief among many jammers that concentration of media ownership has successfully devalued the righ t to free speech by severing it from the right to be heard.

All at once, these forces are coalescing to create a climate of semiotic Robin Hoodism. A growing number of activists believe the time has come for the public to stop asking that some space be left unsponsored, and to begin seizing it back. Culture jamming baldly rejects the idea that marketing-because it buys its way into our public spaces-must be passively accepted as a one-way information flow.

The most sophisticated culture jams are not stand-alone ad parodies but interceptions-counter-messages that hack into a corporation's own method of communication to send a message starkly at odds with the one that was intended. The process forces the company to foot the bill for its own subversion, either literally because the company is the one that paid for the billboard, or figuratively because anytime people mess with a logo, they are tapping into the vast resources spent to make that logo meaningful. Kalle Lasn, editor of Vancouver-based Adbusters magazine, uses the martial art of jujitsu as a precise metaphor to explain the mechanics of the jam, "In one simple deft move you slap the giant on its back. We use the momentum of the enemy." It's an image borrowed from Saul Alinsky who, in his activist bible, Rules for Radicals, defines "mass political jujitsu" as "utilizing the power of one part of the power structure against another part...the superior strength of the Haves become their own undoing." So, b y rappelling off the side of a 30-by-90foot Levi's billboard (the largest in San Francisco) and pasting the face of serial killer Charles Manson over the image, a group of jammers attempts to leave a disruptive message about the labor practices employed to make Levi's jeans. In the statement it left on the scene, the Billboard Liberation Front said they chose Manson's face because the jeans were "Assembled by prisoners in China, sold to penal institutions in the Americas."