As a consumer who hates the commercialization of public space, the creeping of logos onto our clothing, the placement of products in our entertainment and the corporatization of our imaginations, I assume I am just the sort of person whom “Unbrand America” is aimed at. This campaign — which emanates from Adbusters — seems to involve the placing of a big black blotch on ads and logos everywhere (there’s a gallery of examples here).
The Web site offers this explanatory text:
In the coming months a black spot will pop up everywhere . . . on store windows and newspaper boxes, on gas pumps and supermarket shelves. Open a magazine or newspaper – it’s there. It’s on TV. It stains the logos and smears the nerve centers of the world’s biggest, dirtiest corporations. This is the mark of the people who don’t approve of Bush’s plan to control the world, who don’t want countries “liberated” without UN backing, who can’t stand anymore neo-con bravado shoved down their throats. |
But there’s a problem here. The idea is to oppose mindless Pavlovian responses to ultrasimplified graphical logo representations of objects of consumerist desire, right? So why is the campaign based around … an ultrasimplified graphical logo representation of opposition to consumerism? Does Adbusters really think the answer to the logo-fication of the world is to introduce a logo for the anti-logo-ites? Why would one want to protest the omnipresence of advertising campaigns by, in essence, creating a new advertising campaign? Why should we “unbrand America” by creating a new anti-brand brand?
If you oppose mindless Pavlovian responses, you manifest that opposition by thinking, and perhaps acting on that thinking — not by trying to counter mindlessness of a corporate species with mindlessness of a leftist species.
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