NO LOGO

Naomi Klein

Culture Jamming

Culture jamming - the practice of parodying advertisements and hijacking billboards in order to drastically alter their messages

Reasons for this practice:

• reaction to commercial advertising
• part of a community discussion about the politics of public space
• reject the idea that marketing must be passively accepted as a one‑way information flow
• “a new tool for packaging anticorporate salvos”

A good jam becomes an extreme form of truth in advertising.

A good jam “is an X‑ray of the subconscious of a campaign, uncovering not an opposite meaning but the deeper truth hiding beneath the layers of advertising euphemisms.”

Low & High Tech

Low tech: “skulling”; billboard alteration; the black spot campaign

Hi tech: messages are designed to mesh with their targets, borrowing visual legitimacy from advertising itself using Madison Avenue's aesthetics against itself

Resurgence

There is a market for it

The "expansion of chains like Starbucks and the aggressive branding of companies like Nike have created a climate ripe for anticorporate attacks.” 

"People resent the destruction of culture and its replacement with these mass‑produced corporate logos and slogans. It represents a kind of cultural fascism."

Cooptation

Marketers have begun to co-opt

Directly commercialized

Incorporated the methods into their own advertising product

However, per Klein, the movement which culture jamming reflects will not be co-opted