Branding, Adbusting and Culture Jamming

We’ve got a talent problem. We’ve got too many brilliant marketers getting us to love stuff. Somehow they’ve gotten us to buy into this formula: bigger, better, shinier, more expensive stuff = self-esteem. Being the self-esteem seeking creatures that we are, we consume gratefully. The issue is that it’s not doing us much good.

In Small Is The New Big, Seth Godin points out exactly why the side effects of great branding is a problem that needs fixing, and why we should worry that (as he puts it) “the unintended consequences of excellent branding…is one of the great tragedies of [the marketing] profession”. He says -

I think when traditional marketers talk about “brand”, self-esteem value is what they mean. A true brand is something where the self esteem value far exceeds the utility. It might be Heinz ketchup or a Rolex watch or a Marlboro cigarette, but in each case there’s a truly emotional connection between the brand and the user….It might be Timberland boots downtown, or Prada bags uptown. Both are ridiculously overpriced for the utility they deliver, but it’s the story we tell ourselves that matters, the label, the image, the peace of mind.

The problem, of course, is that the values and the messages that are selling us the promise of peace of mind are also leading us astray, and there’s no way to market our way out of the problem. Or is there?

Culture Jammers: The Anti-Marketers

There are activists everywhere that believe they have the answer. They call themselves Culture Jammers. You might never have heard that term, but if you’ve ever seen one of the intentionally-shocking anti-tobacco commercials produced by thetruth.com, you’ve seen culture jamming in action. Using mass media to make ironic or satirical commentary about itself and using the original medium’s communication method is what culture jamming is all about. It’s the same medium, with the opposite message. Marketing is their weapon, truth is their product, and that self-esteem formula we’ve bought into is the target.

I’ll admit the term “culture jammer” is new to me. I had heard about websites like FUH2 (a site focused on destroying the Hummer brand by flipping Hummer owners the bird) and I’d seen thetruth.org commercials, but until today I had no idea how many organizations, artists and creatives were out there doing this. Alex Steffen at Worldchanging was kind enough to point me in the right direction this morning over email. A few of his suggestions on where to start opened the flood gates – A quick Google search produces a striking number of hits (“culture jammer” returns upwards of 13 million results). There are literally hundreds of groups out there trying to change the way we tell ourselves stories about everything we consume using the same medium and techniques that got us into this mess in the first place. Brilliant.

Culture Jamming Spoof Ads

So I did some digging (naturally). Of the hundreds of examples you can find quickly on the web, here are a few that grabbed my attention. These particular examples come from one of the most well known culture jamming groups out there, Adbusters. They go right for the throat (or the heart, lungs and manhood depending on how you look at it). Enjoy.