An Introduction to Subvertisement

By Mike K.

Even though the average population considers it hypocritical, corporations say it infringes their rights, and some people prone to legal battles or protests and petitions disagree. Advertising against advertising is the best way to stop the marketing of unwanted products and/or services and spread an awareness of company’s ills, because of the nature of advertising, memetics, an already created power and recognition, and a captive audience. This kind of advertising, called subvertising, is actually a parody of an already created advertisement that takes hold and control of the power established by the advertisement it copies. Some people may look at it and laugh as if it's just a small societal joke. Some are in denial or disbelief at the blatant presentation of the opposite of their every day life. But, looked at from an advertising, memetical, and detouring point of view, it is the best way to change the common or expected idea presented, to the one you wish to present or surface. The act of subvertisement on any given advertisement is a crafty art form that emulates the look and feel that the original tries to portray, making it cost effective, and ultimately effective. Given the overwhelming circumstance of a culture built on consumerism, and bound on all sides by commercials; subvertising can be seen, felt and understood anywhere and by anyone therein. Another major concept that will be explored is Memetics. Memes are like mental genes that are passed from one person to the next through visual, audio, or imitation. They are also ideas or counter-ideas that spread throughout entire societies. Detournement is an idea in itself, and one of the major concepts of subvertisement. The idea is to Shock people out of everyday life, imposing thought and concern on the world around you. Subvertising fights fire with fire on the same market for ideas, memes, and trends till the demand for the opposition no longer exits. Destroy the demand, and you’ll have no more supply.

You’ve probably seen a decent sized group of protesters standing out front of a local business. It could be McDonalds, or Costco, or the GAP. They yell all at once from the parking lot or side walk waiving picket signs in discontent and anger. As you walk or drive by you think about how many people are seeing it, which are probably 50, maybe 100 locals. Or perhaps in another situation a petition was set in front of you along with a person pushing a pen in your face telling you to sign it. If you question, your asked again to just sign it. Where does the petition go, who really sees it, and is it effective? In my small hometown, the local government itself put out a petition asking weather or not we build a new library, or a new jail. Asking around, nobody in their right minds wanted the jail. Less than a year later we had a brand new prison three blocks from my high school. It’s never effective.

Subvertising is usually (but not always) a parody of an expected every day life advertisement situation. It, as an informative message, is the Joe Chemo of Joe Camel, the Absolut Nonesense of Absolut Vodka, and American Excess of American Express. Subvertising works because, it is in fact, advertising. It is the leverage point by which to pry at the corporation’s weakness. It works as advertising works; it steals how advertising works. The study of subvertisement itself is the study of advertisement. Corporations are spending billions of dollars a year on advertising alone. Their money has gone into the inner workings of advertisement and persuasion: How it works, what it does, and how it can be most effective, to whom, and when. Advertising agencies have got it pinned. Wherever you go you probably can’t not find or run into an advertisement. Bathroom stalls, Billboards, T-shirts, sponsored sports and events. The Internet, now allowing advertisers more ability to pinpoint consumers. Zip codes labeling group-types of people in order to arrange advertisements for billboards, TV, phone, radio, Direct Marketing, and mail. They build logos and trademarks that target certain audiences and age groups. Advertisements are crafted to be aesthetic, appealing, and perfect.

It has all gone to build a society based around it. Subvertisers hit the same size audience as advertisers. After all an "average consumer sees over 3,000 commercial messages a day" (Adcult and Inventing Desire, inside flap). Where there is an advertisment there is a possibility for a subvertisement. How does it work, does it read well? It, being a parody, already contains the ingredience necessary to be readable, credible, and effective under what the advertisement that is being subvertised has already created. Utilizing the same look, the same text, the same media, audience and type, subvertisement is most realistic. Not knowing who or what has done the subvertisement, the subjected audience cannot judge or question, rather fear that it is backed by an existing force of real and conceint people out side him/her and their television set. Subvertising has the power to turn peoples trust for a brand, product, or service a full 180 degrees. What happens when a long lasting relationship between a person/people and a product and/or corporation is destroyed?

Where economists consider an ideas success in terms of how much money it makes. Memetics, on the other hand, measure its success by how much population it accumulates. In Meme Machine, Blackmore, a senior lecturer in Psychology at the University of the West of England, Bristol says, "Meme" by definition is "An element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation" (viii). Memes range from catchy tunes that you can’t get out of your head to superstitions like opening an umbrella indoors. It's stories or urban myths that spread throughout the entire world. In this case you could imagine that the targeted meme units could be "alcohol helps problems" or "excess is success." Meme (rhymes with beam) being Subvertisement’s biggest fighting aspect will be looked into thoroughly. Why? She also states that a more realistic way of taking on someone’s memes would be to copy their actions, to write down what they say, to join a group they belong to (174). Subvertising uses this concept of "joining the group they belong to" in that it is advertising, and as part of that group uses the tools of advertising therein such as billboards, direct marketing techniques, and catch phrases. Being in this group as a subvertiser or Subvertising Agency you could have the upper hand since advertising agencies exploit their memetical power to gain population or popularity in order to gain money.

"In the early 1990s, seventeen-year-old Demetrick James Walker was sentenced to life in prison for killing a sixteen-year-old. The reason for the slaying: Demetrick so wanted a pair of $125 Nike Air Jordans like the ones he had seen on TV that he put a .22-calibur pistol to the head of Johnny Bates, pulled the trigger, and walked off with a new pair of high-tops" (Pratkanis 1). With memes this strong, what if you were to turn the tables? Using subvertisement to convince people in the extreme opposing direction, until Nike couldn’t survive.

The human species is different from other animals in that it can imitate and mimic ones ideas and habits very well and usually in a subconceince or unknowing matter. Advertising establishes an idea or a meme, Subvertisement changes that meme and sends it in the other direction. "Research in social psychology, marketing, and advertising shows that people are more often persuaded by others who are perceived as powerful or famous" (Blackmore 141). People also look up to companies that are powerful and brand names or logos that are popular. Subvertisement changes peoples perspective on these items or ideas, giving them discontent with the opposition. It changes the idea the person has towards the (target) product, service or advertisement. Then memetically by word of mouth and imitation it spreads throughout the masses. It is often seen as a generous action and is mimetically accepted willfully (or un-willfully through imitation) for the fact that it doesn’t ask for money. The source idea within a subvertisement could then create or build from itself. "Thought contagions have an impact on thought creation as new ideas that seem spontaneously created often derive from preexisting ideas. Frequently, this happens by either altering, building upon, or fusing earlier notions …Thought contagions therefore shape creative output at the population level" (Lynch 10). Memetics are a very important and directly linked to subvertisement

Then there is the power of subvertising to a captive audience. You are affected by what you see and hear. "If alcohol advertising does not get people to drink, why does the industry spend $1.1 billion a year on it" (Jacobson 174). Many of the things that come to you on a day-by-day basis are expected and, in time, become passive and subliminal. Subvertisments create a detournement in everyday life, pulling the viewer from what they expected to see. This shock in everyday life has a high effect on the person, employing concern and thought (then thought contagion). These detournments cause small mind explosions that change shape in society. Kalle Lasn, founder of Adbusters, and the Media Foundation calls a well-conceived and produced social marketing television message a "mindbomb" because of how it explodes in the collective psyche, sending out shock waves of cognitive dissonance. "An effective TV subvertisement (or uncommercial) is so unlike what surrounds it on the commercial-TV mindscape that it immediately grabs the attention of viewers. It breaks their media consumer trance and momentarily challenges their whole world outlook" (133).

Whether you like it or not advertising is everywhere. The average American consumer sees over 3,000 commercial messages each day. The world behind this $125 billion a year effort is the high stakes ad industry. They have geared for an influence that has given such things as "…Nike appearing to be the official shoe of the Olympics, when Converse had paid for the right to make that claim" (Stabiner 48). The creation of advertising can be known as industrial art. With so much money involved in this field, artist from all around specialize in creating industrial and commercial art. They have pin pointed consumer and consumer groups. Stanley C. Hollander, a professor of marketing and the author of Was There a Pepsi Generation Before Pepsi Discovered It? Says that marketers targeted youth as a distinct market more than a hundred years ago with advertising, contests and games, special promotions, and direct mail. Over time the studies of these tools have been proven effective or ineffective and then are more polished through practice. As far as the money invested. From 1935 to 1994, U.S. expenditures on media advertising soared almost eightfold, from $19 billion to $148 billion (adjusted for inflation). Consumer spending continues to rise, showing that they are in fact very effective. Since subvertising is advertising, any subvertisement in the same style, location, and type of an advertisement should hit the same audience, and with just as much strength if not harder. Kalle Lasn suggests, "Suppose you don’t have the money to launch a real print ad campaign. What you can do is mimic the million-dollar look and feel of your opponent’s campaign, thereby detourning their own carefully worked out, button-pushing memes in your favor. They spend millions building their corporate cool, and you keep stealing their electricity" (132). The book Marketing Madness recognizes subvertising as advertising, and also a powerful way to combat it or demarket products in a full twelve page final chapter called "Call To Action" that the author Michael F. Jacobson (founder of the Center for the Study of Commercialism) uses as a conclusion. Almost the entire chapter being about subvertisement, he starts off with a picture of the "Barfboro" van, created in trial to the Philip Morris Marlboro van that toured around the country. What was this van spreading? An antismoking meme, which crushed the smoking one.

"The next revolution – World War III – will be, as Marshall Mcluhan predicted, ‘a guerilla information war’ fought not in the sky or on the streets, not in the forests or around international fishing boundaries on the high seas, but in newspapers and magazines, on the radio, on TV and in cyberspace. It will be a dirty, no-holds-barred propaganda war of competing worldviews and alternative visions of the future." (123)

People are capable of imitation and so can copy from one another’s ideas. These influential bugs in society are called memes, a term first coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 in his book The Selfish Gene, and is now officially defined in the Oxford English Dictionary. There are also numerous books and web pages devoted to memetics. When you imitate someone or something else, something is passed on. This thing can be passed on again and again. It might be an idea, a way of living, an instruction, a behavior, a warning, a piece of information, etc.. Advertisers know this and exploit it at will. Although it is hard to single out a meme in its exact context or unit, some examples of advertising memes would be: "Smoking is cool.", "Nike shoes help you jump higher," "Alcohol gets you women." A billboard showing a discontent couple on one side, and a loving hugging couple holding a bottle of wine in the other attempted to spread the idea that alcohol helps fix and stabilize relationships. Statistics show the opposite, but a rise in the statistic itself proves the memetic and its effectiveness. Some of these memetics are more subliminal or possibly less intentional such as a shift in society where "anorexia is natural" and "insomnia is unnatural." Although memes (like genes) are hard to determine where the unit starts and ends, Susan Blackmore states that memes can only be looked at as a unit, and most commonly from the memes point of view; "…working only to get themselves copied. We humans, because of our powers of imitation, have become just the physical 'hosts' needed for memes to get around" (8). Knowing this we can now understand that an advertisements core memetic is a unit that travels from host to host. This unit copies itself through all those that are subjected to the advertisement, and then from there it spreads from person to person weather actually understood or just pure absent minded imitation. These memetical units have what is called a leverage point. This leverage point is the counteraction of the original action, and in this case, its subvertisement. Subvertisment spreads a meme in same manner that an advertisement would. The people that are subjected to it understand it and can spread it easily simply because it is a meme that is already pre-existent within themselves and society. The impact of a genuine counter memetic can instantly steal its enemy’s meme (idea) and replace it with itself. One of the largest examples concerning advertising is the tobacco company. Phillip Morris Cos. spread as many memes with their advertising as possible. Later subvertising would counter act the memes, pinpointing particular units including health, hygiene, "coolness", and sex appeal. When these counter memes started to spread, people started to have a false sense of believe in the product (even if they knew nothing about the actual facts). Once these memes, that have been built over years have been destroyed, it is nearly impossible for Phillip Morris Cos. To get them back. The smoking ads continue to get less and less and anti-smoking ones become more frequent and expand to different mediums such as the Barfboro van did.

Barfboro is a subvertisment that has put the word Barf in with Marlboro. It’s witty, and the word "barfboro" itself rolls off the tongue harshly yet fittingly. This form of subvertisment has an element that is known as Detournement. Detournement can be seen as an extension of some of the principles that are used in humor. I chuckle inside as it reminds me of a story my dad told me about when him and his sister first tried smoking a cigarette. Even though it holds its own and has an effect, have I actually seen anybody barf after or during cigarette smoking? People seem to enjoy them and even though non-smokers may find sitting around smokers disgusting, they don’t really puke. Guy Debord who helped define detournment in the early 50's, states:

"Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can serve in making new combinations. The discoveries of modern poetry regarding the analogical structure of images demonstrates that when two objects are brought together, no matter how far apart their original contexts may be, a relationship is always formed. The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the bringing together of two independent expressions, supersedes the original elements and produces a synthetic organization of greater efficacy. Anything can be used." (Athena.english.vt.edu)

His idea of detournement in subvertisement was to go beyond mere parody, to a combination that really makes you think. Situationalists consider detournement a "perspective-jarring turnabout in everyday life." "Literally a ‘turning around,’ detournment involved rerouting spectaclular images, environments, ambiences and events to reverse or subvert their meaning, thus reclaiming them" (Lasn 103). Detourning itself is responsible for riots in Paris on May of 1968 which then spread to places like New York, Tokyo, Mexico City, and out to the world.

It’s hard to determine the actual success of subvertisement. Some of them work over a long period of time. A successful subvertisement campaign called TV Turn Off Week was started in 1994 and has since annually (April 22 – 28^th) had millions of people in over 25 countries around the world taking a break from TV. Some of these people will host rallies and smash televisions. Since the launch of another campaign called Buy Nothing Day (November 23^rd) about 80 years ago, people all over the world made a pact with themselves to join in on the anti-consumer 24 hour fast on America’s biggest shopping day of the year. This subvertising would later spawn others to subvertise creating a "NO SHOP" shop in 1998 that was an actual real life store parody that you could walk into, shop around, and walk out with a bag of nothing and a receipt for it. During that day people walked down the street caring an abundance of shopping bags wearing pig masks. In Seattle people held a Credit Card Cut up stand out side of the mall where people cut up their credit cards. The subvertisement for Buy Nothing Day (BND) has been aired by CNN since 1996, but refused by several broadcast companies including CBS. Issues such as global warming and ozone depletion were not talked about by the World Trade Organization (WTO) until people covered billboards and aired TV subvertisements with the theme "The Big Question". The big question was "Is economic progress killing the planet?" that for the first time the WTO ministers where forced to face because of its surfacing through subvertising, including the TV ad called G8:Ecocide aired on CNN. Subvertisement has worked in several areas. It has helped stop the positive outlook on cigarettes and tobacco and helped ban tobacco ads from TV in 1971 after the FCC forced broadcasters to air cigarette subvertisements with opposing viewpoints in the late 60’s. There have been a campaign called "Obsession" that tries to bust fashion ads that depict skinny and nearly bare women. The target has been primarily Calvin Klein that has had to tone down its ads. Absolut Vodka has gone under scrutiny for advertising in schools and teen magazines. Many subvertisments have come up concerning Absolut Vodka who has since had to pull out of several advertising areas.

More and more Americans are fighting back against false or unwanted ads. There are other possible ways to de-market a particular product, or deteriorate a targeted corporation. Legal battles are one of which are still fought today. They are very costly and usually bring up touchy subjects such as "ethics" in a corporation. Luisiana vs the Tobacco Industry ended up awarding $575 million to over 200 lawyers. The lawyers got regular pay as well as a % for anything coming from the tobacco industry, and today, the average lawyer makes $150 per hour. In Washington State citizens concerned with booze ads demanded a hearing with the state liquor control board. The citizens presented examples of harmful ads and proposed to allow only black-and-white alcohol ads without slogans or models. The board only approved a watered-down version of the proposal. These battles are hard considering that early in American history corporations were given the same rights as citizens.

"Well before the advent of "personhood," corporations had already been granted the privilege of limited liability -- a key component of their immense legal power. What cemented the corporate position more than anything else, however, was the 1886 US Supreme Court ruling in a railbed dispute titled Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad. The ruling held that a private corporation was a "natural person" entitled to all the rights and privileges of a human being." (www.adbusters.org)

Boycotting (an effect of subvertising) cannot work without a cause, such that subvertising provides. The heart of boycotters that try to spread their awareness are usually protestors, whose words do not spread quickly and largely throughout their community (or nationally), and are usually altered by any sort of media. Sad, but true, people understand and listen to the words of a recognizable subvertisement or news medium, before their own neighbor or peer. Subvertising is advertising, and when you subvertise there is a chance you may infringe on a corporations trademark. There are tons of laws regarding what you can get away with and what you can’t, what’s legal and what’s illegal and the consequences. Subvertisements ride the line of keeping what’s readable as a subvertisement, yet not blatantly copying a trademark. To keep up with standards of advertising can be pricey. That’s why today you mostly see organized groups subvertising. You can work out cost effective subvertisements, especially on the web, but when it comes to materials such as paper and ink it can get costly. I in no way, have addressed legal issues, and the cost thereof, but don’t feel that it is all that necessary. Something that I also found interesting is the fact that memes come with variation. Stories are rarely told exactly the same way twice therefore copying is not always perfect. Stories for instance have spread throughout countries, and because of the changes while spreading become "urban myth." Even though the fact remains that the story doesn’t have to remain true in order to carry a successful meme, and that it is a rare occurrence, could this infect the spread of a subvertisement? I intended this paper for is to give power and light to the subject of subvertisement, and ultimately its effectiveness in the field, a subject that has been touched less on than I’d like to see. I feel subvertisment looked at from the selected aspects mentioned, especially the memetical one, holds it superior to any other form. Subvertisement must be seen differently, and it itself acts differently depending on what particular advertisement or corporation is targeted. In this sense, some of the body of the paper may be skewed or inapplicable. Although I still feel the major points of the paper applies well enough to get the idea.