Adbusters

Those Canucks are an insecure bunch. Fed up with Mountie gags and an ascending “Eh?” affixed to sentences to distinguish them from their brasher, more boisterous North American neighbours, Vancouver-based Adbusters have a throbbing spleen to vent. Extending far beyond paltry linguistic discrepancies, their acerbic anti-corporate campaign seeks to hijack, bastardise and amend the written and visual language of corporate culture, endowing it with a fresh and trenchant Bush-bashing syntax. Knowing that it’s impossible to bring the machine to its knees, they are fighting a variety of cheeky guerrilla campaigns in the dense canopies of the capitalist jungle, headed up by the appropriately titled, non-profit, glossy corporate conundrum, Adbusters magazine.
Through the manipulation and subversion of the media landscape they ultimately pursue the public and corporate acceptance of social, environmental and cultural responsibility. The best bit is, we’re all invited to get involved.
Unsurprisingly, the corporate big boys are none too chuffed. With dummies flying, Nike CEO Phil Knight pulled the plug on an Adbusters campaign to flog their buy-at-cost Blackspot sneaker. With the tagline “unswoosh Nike”, the folk at Adbusters had secured a billboard to promote the footwear right opposite the Nike plant at Beaverton, Oregon. Replete with red dot on its toe to aim at Mr. Knight’s posterior, the Blackspot hopes to appeal to the blue collars behind Beaverton’s doors. After Adbusters had secured and signed the contract with Viacom, the billboard providers, they thought they were home and dry. Funny then, that Viacom get a call from Phil Knight’s lawyers advising that it would not be in their best interests to honour the contract. Or else.
That they didn’t get the contract comes a distant second to the throwing of another spanner into the corporate cogs. As the old adage goes “any publicity is good publicity” and it is perhaps this mantra that seems so curiously incongruous in the Adbusters vernacular. Just as much a product of the system it so voraciously seeks to depose, the network of culture jammers are making a stand, and succeeding. Whilst the multinational Goliaths have yet to face their David, the corporate playground seems much more fun with Adbusters around. You can buy your slice of anarchy for just four pounds. It looks great, and not an ad in sight.

www.adbusters.org

Staff

© Substance Magazine 2005