This blog is a resource for ad takeover artists and information about contemporary advertising issues in public space. If you have content you would like to share, please send us an email.
Eduardo Moises Penalver & Sonia Kaytal Property Outlaws: How Squatters, Pirates, and Protesters Improve the Law of Ownership
Barbara Ehrenreich Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
Lewis Hyde The Gift, Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World
Geoffrey Miller Spent: Sex, Evolution, & Consumer Behavior
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Advertising Shits In Your Head, US Edition.
Our good friends at PM Press have put together an American version of thier best selling "Advertising Shits In Your Head" UK publication. With Interviews, tutorials and insightful knowledge about advertising and its pernicious influence, ASIYH is a fantastic read and a great present for young minds and public space activists. If you can help support the Kickstarter campaign please do what you can to insure this publication makes it to press.
Advertising Shits in Your Head calls ads what they are—a powerful means of control through manipulation—and highlights how people across the world are fighting back. It diagnoses the problem and offers practical tips for a DIY remedy. Faced with an ad-saturated world, activists are fighting back, equipped with stencils, printers, high-visibility vests, and utility tools. Their aim is to subvert the ads that control us. More [HERE]
Our good friends at Dog Section Press just released a short documentary on the radical subvertising that has been happening in London for the past few years. It is a fantastic look at some of the politics and actions of a unique group of activists trying to change the conversation on how we co-curate our shared public spaces. Give it a watch and let us know what you think.
Our friends in Norway are launching a Subvertising campaign to coincide with their national Holiday. There is an open call for submissions and I highly suggest you try to support them if you can. If you are paying attention to the work of advertising, you will notice the growing list of groups and projects aimed at tackling the commercial abuse of our shared public spaces and the lack of civic dialogue afforded to those spaces because of the monopoly commercial media has on them. It is wonderful to see one more group added to the list and I look forward to seeing their project in action.
Vi kan bedre (We can do better)
250 artworks - 5 cities - 1 day
Summary
Vi kan bedre (We can do better) is a nationwide day of action that will see 250 adverts replaced with art in five major cities across Norway on May 17th.
What?
A utopian art project that aims to stimulate conversation about what ´we can do better´ to uphold the values celebrated on Norway´s National Day.
The coordinated day of action follows the time-honored traditions of ´subvertising ´ (subverting advertising), ad-hacking, culture jamming and more as a means of reclaiming the city as a co-created space.
We believe the time has come to celebrate the values we share as Norwegians while revealing the self-interested forces undermining them and are calling upon all proud Norwegian's to practice what they preach by supporting this campaign.
Why?
We believe that the visual realm in public space belongs to everyone, not just the businesses and organisations that can afford to rent our attention. We believe that public space should be a forum for dialogue, debate and the exchange of ideas, not least on May 17th.
Inequality, pollution, climate change, mass extinction; all these problems are caused by the processes of consumer capitalism, which is fuelled by advertising.
Whether it's the recently approved copper mine in Kvalsund in the Arctic Circle; the dumping of mine waste in Repparfjord on the coast of the Barents Sea; or the overall increase in oil and gas production - set to hit a new peak level in 2023 - the changes we are witnessing to both the natural environment and civil society concern us all.
When?
Advertisers calculate the value of a campaign based on the number of people (or eyeballs) that see it. As such, there´s no more valuable day for outdoor advertising than 17th May, when whole cities and communities take to the streets for a day of parades and celebrations to mark Norway's independence.
How?
Artists, activists, designers, illustrators, photographers, writers, poets from all backgrounds are invited to submit their artwork through an online submission process administrated via our dedicated website: www.vikanbedre.com
Our crowdfunding campaign aims to raise 35,249kr to cover the cost of professionally printing and distributing 250 large-format prints to 5 Norwegian cities where they will be installed by our teams prior to May 17th.
Pictures of the installed artworks will be uploaded to social media using the hashtag #vikanbedre as well as circulated to all of our backers via email.
Each artwork will also be made available for download, for free, after the action on May 17th via our dedicated website: www.vikanbedre.com
Who?
Vi kan bedre (We can do better)is a not-for-profit platform created by a dedicated group of volunteers made up of artists, activists and environmentalists who love the country of Norway and what it represents.
Activists of the far-right "Identitarian Movement" have plundered billboards of Wall AG in Berlin. They exchanged existing advertising with their own posters at several locations. This warns the movement observed by the constitutional protection, among other things, from a suspected infiltration. The action was carried out according to the Identity movement in other German cities. More [HERE]
I am excited to be working with a huge group of activists and artists around the world on an upcoming project that I hope PublicAdCampaign readers will get involved with. Long story short is a global network of anti-advertising activists have come together to form a transnational partnership called the Subvertisers International. This umbrella organization is spearheading a global call to action between March 22nd and March 25th 2017. The goal is to create a yearly anti-advertising event that will galvanize peoples commitment to the anti-advertising movement in all its forms. Download the Public Call for participation [HERE]
Wonderful little article on a new publication that I am super proud to be a part of called "Advertising Shits in Your Head" get a copy [HERE] It is only 4$
Vyvian Raoul brings us three exclusive interviews with the subvertising artists featured in a new book on the contemporary subvertising movement, Advertising Shits In Your Head. More [HERE]
Thomas Dekeyser wrote a nice blog post on Robert Montgomery's work that I think does a good job of navigating his desire for subvertising work to always be illegal in order to retain the most powerful critique of capitalism and the systems that help to perpetuate it. Montgomery's work isnt always illegal and yet it is incredibly powerful so parsing these two thing out isn't easy when you want to see the world in black and white. Well worth a read as Dekeyser is becoming one of my favorite thinkers on this topic.
Last week I went to hear Robert Montgomery speak at The Art Conference. I’ve been reaching out to him for a while now, trying to arrange a conversation, without luck, so I was excited to finally hear one of my favourite subvertising practitioners elaborate on his practice and related politics. More [HERE]
I just found Difusor through a friend and I couldn't be happier with their views on public advertising and how we should go about dealing with it. I have always promoted the complete removal of outdoor advertising by artists. Simple rearrangements and critical commentary not only leave the brand recognizable but often reinforce the advertisements original goal by drawing your attention to the advertisement with even more force.
ADVERTISING
For us, as for many other people, massive outdoor advertising is a problem: promotes excessive and careless consumption , it’s ugly, obscene and visually pollute the environment and spirits.
As a problem to us, we want to find a solution.
SUBVERTISING
Subvertising is a technique that seeks to subvert, or at least question the message.
However, we believe that its real effectiveness is null or even counterproductive for the goal that has been created. Perhaps the message subverted ad questioning but also reinforces the brand. Generating controversy is a key factor in most campaigns, and is a largely explained strategy in marketing bibliography.
Therefore, we believe that subvertising is marketing 2.0, that made by users without wanting to, without knowing it, without charge, and on, believing that it is a critical tool. As has happened in several campaigns, subvertising itself is part of a guerrilla marketing campaign . Street marketing is a technique used mostly in central Europe and it works like this:
Companies launch the street marketing campaign.
They wait for the reaction of the target, which normally consists of “subversive” alterations in the advertising format.
Reaction is incorporated as part of the campaign, launching the second and final phase of ads, which include the “subversive” changes obtained.
What happened?
They have turned off the most critical and creative direct answer.
They have incorporated the target (young, urban and creative) to the brand dynamics .
AD BUFFING
We believe that one way to do subvertising is not doing it at all, not using their language, not to using their logos. Buffing is a concept created for the cleanup in the railway system in New York in the early times of graffiti. From there it was extended, indicating any action to clear graffiti.
We present below three examples of how doing it:
Option 1: trash container
This is the best place for advertising.
Option 2: billboards
If the posters are glued properly, the option would be as follows:
Option 3: eyetracking
You can always be creative. Eye tracking is a term that refers to the process that evaluates the point where the gaze is fixed or the movement of the eye. This process is used in research on visual systems in psychology, in cognitive linguistics and in product design. In this case, the hot zones are the most significant for the design concerning its effectiveness to communicate. Where there was relevant information for the ad is where we have put more effort into covering.
A few weeks ago I spoke to a class of Parsons students studying, "applied disciplines that are fundamentally engaged with society and culture within the art context", as the program description describes. I talked about PublicAdCampaign and installed a project so that they could see alternative media projects in action. This was right around when the whole PosterBoy thing was getting a lot of press, and we discussed his, or their work as well. Turns out the students created projects which critically engaged the PosterBoy concept and this happens to be one of them. We were asked to come back to the class to critique and discuss the student projects and this happened to be one of my favorites. There were many more letters from a wide variety of advertisements. Some were funnier than others but I thought in general, they gave the ads a pathetic and cynical quality that I like to associate with advertising in general. Well done.
Is an unlikely bromance in the air? Has Paul Rudd reached out to Poster Boy with specifics about how he wants theI Love You, Man ad campaign altered? This letter was spotted on the downtown 6 platform at 51st Street. The actor does like to take on fake names (at a recent Virgin Megastore appearance he went under "Fred Rudd"), so giving himself a musical moniker of "Raul" does fit his M.O. However, this is probably just the work of a crazy Rudd fan, or some sort of plan by Dreamworks to enliven their boring posters.
The Bubble Project has been taking back our streets since 2005. Today, Wooster Collective announced, "..the second book in our "Books We Love" series is Ji Lee's Talk Back: The Bubble Project which came out from Mark Batty publisher in 2006." In the posting, Wooster includes Ji Lee's Manifesto which is a very concise argument for the need for open participation in our public discourse. Very insightful.
I guess the cat's out of the bag on this one so I might as well post it here too. This interactive piece was done by Joe Bernstien, and Ben Piven on the fine art of Subvertising. In it I install another weaving piece and Steve Lambert gives a brief explanation of his Ad Art Firefox hack. Thanks again to both of those guys for taking interest in our projects.
