Heather and Stevie's Article #2 Fridays class 2/29

Off Campus magazine: August 2007
Alison Coleman
Learn to love the bomb

Even wars have brands now. The “War on Terror”, “Operation Desert Storm”, “Operation Infinite Justice”. We live in a culture of metaphors, where the feeling is the message, and where one third of the world’s wealth is reportedly located in people’s heads - as brands.But it’s not all one-way traffic. Today’s advertisers face the most hostile customers since the Spinning Jenny kicked off the Industrial Revolution. “Give us our brains back,” chant anarchists outside global leader forums, and Mum and Dad at home applaud. We’ve grown up with popular culture, and we’re aching for relief from the unrelenting march of slogans.“Signs, signs, everywhere there’s signs / Mucking up the scenery, breakin’ my mind Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign,” sang Tesla (the band, not the inventor).Adbusters, the global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to “advance the new social activist movement of the information age” put it this way: “Corporations are in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the land we walk on. They are in the food, the clothes, the cars, the speed, the music, the cool, the hype, the sex.”Yes, I agree wholeheartedly, and feel deep concern, even though I’ve worked at the heart of the evil advertising beast. I’ve read a couple of books lately which have explored both sides of the design story. Adbusters’ latest publication - Design Anarchy - a huge tome in the tradition of the Phaidon art series - deliberately avoids any kind of design aesthetic in its page design (which, in itself, gives the whole thing a ‘look’) and I found it jarring and unpleasant. Surely you can go to work every day to topple existing power structures and still be permitted to lay out a page elegantly?A stark contrast was provided by the book written by a former creative director for one of Australia’s most successful advertising agencies. It’s a collection of entertaining one-liners by a man with no soul. He crows about Nike’s anti culture-jamming strategy, but makes no comment on the sweat shop revelations which inspired the original negative publicity. “Sweat shops,” he exults, “became old news.” Yup. Social justice campaigners and community groups don’t usually have the advertising budgets to combat huge multinationals on an ongoing basis.Murray Bookchin, the great anarchist thinker who died last year, wrote: “The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capitalism.” I don’t think we’re going to get our spirits, or our brains, back any time soon. To paraphrase Bookchin, speaking of limiting advertising under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as speaking of limits to warfare under a warrior society.I started off intending to write an angel’s advocacy of advertising, based on the simple premise that I believe today’s best ads are a form of modern art, and the more self-centred reason that I’ve worked in the industry, on and off, for years. I love the creativity, wit and subversive talent which go into good advertising. I once worked for an agency which produced a spoof ad of our biggest client’s product. It was hilarious until, in the daily chaos, it went to the client in place of the real thing for approval. Inevitably, our adbusting for beginners was ruthlessly crushed underfoot by management, although it was probably one of the most purely creative pieces of work we’d produced that year. Design Anarchy tells me I could be among the first up against the wall when the revolution comes, along with all the other sad would-be artists who became graphic designers, prostituting their ability in order to sell spaghetti and bank loans.However, I don’t think that advertising agency staff are really the best target when you’re advocating a radical change in 21st century thinking. Advertising agencies are, rather, an inevitable symptom of the capitalist free market economy in which we find ourselves. My advice - if you’re serious about change, Jack - is to strike at the root of the beanstalk, and the giant will come tumbling down. Does that sound a little… violent? Well, perhaps we can persuade people to love the idea by giving the whole concept the right brand - “Battle for a Real World”, perhaps?Sound stupid? It’s not. Strong emotion has become the living, beating heart of the brand. “Today’s brandscape is commodified and saturated to hell,” our own expatriate son, Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, told a conference in April 2005. According to him, the time of “lovemarks” has arrived - creating ‘consumer loyalty beyond reason’ by creating an emotional connection between customers and brand.A month earlier, Roberts had been invited to the US to advise the Pentagon how to spin the war on terror. His advice? “Call the struggle the “Fight for a Better World.” We can, apparently, even learn to love war.