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News :: |
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Adbusters' "Unbrand America" airs today on CNN (9-22) (english) |
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by Adbusters
(No verified email address) |
22 Sep 2003
Modified: 25 Sep 2003 |
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CNN- Monday, September 22, around 4:30 EST. |
It's a go: Adbusters'
Unbrand America TV Spot is poised to hit the airwaves. We've wrangled a
30-second chunk of national airtime. More than half a million tubes, all ours.
Watch it- with everyone else tuned to CNN- Monday, September 22, around 4:30
EST.
To get this far has been serious work. For months we've been stonewalled. Sure,
we shopped our Black Spot to the usual suspects at NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX. We even
tried MTV. "We don't deal in free speech," chorused the networks.
Check out all the sorry details here.
Sadly, the response was expected. In the land of the free, the business of
censorship is booming.
Well, Adbusters isn't buying in. Keep your eyes peeled over the next few months.
Plans are in the works for a big pushback. The agenda: Media Democracy.
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.
This is the mark of the people who want the Kyoto Protocol for the
environment, who want the International Criminal Court for greater
justice, who want a world where all nations, including the U.S.A., are
free of weapons of mass destruction, and who pledge
to take their country back.
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See also:
http://www.unbrandamerica.org/
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Hypocritical Hogwash (english) |
by Goju
(No verified email address) |
25 Sep 2003
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Imagine a world without McDonald’s, Nike, or Kraft Foods. A world where the budget-conscious and time-strapped have nowhere to grab a quick bite, where almost no one drives a car, where television is extinct. Sound pretty bleak? This is the utopian vision of the Adbusters Media Foundation.
“We will wreck this world,” Kalle Lasn declares in his book Culture Jam: How to Reverse America's Suicidal Consumer Binge -- and Why We Must. That, quite simply, is the goal of the Vancouver-based organization he founded and runs. A self-described group of “anarchists” and “neo-Luddites,” Adbusters are not merely environmentalists, animal-rights activists, anti-technology activists, or neo-Prohibitionists. They are all these things and more.
"What makes you think you have the right to drive around with a ton of metal wrapped around you, the right to twist a tap and get hot water, the right to flick a switch and get your house warmed up?"
— From the September/October 2003 issue of Adbusters magazine
Adbusters may try to discourage buying, but obviously not when it comes to its own wares. Lasn has claimed that the magazine “is trying to sell ideas rather than products.” A look at its order form tells another story.
The slick glossy has a cover price of $7.95 -- more than twice the price of People, Vogue, or GQ. The Adbusters website features a plethora of products for sale, including videos, posters, calendars, postcards, books, and even a 3x5-foot “corporate” flag -- the American flag with the stars replaced by corporate logos. In 2002, Adbusters suggested substituting its version for the real Stars and Stripes on July 4 in front of stores, schools, and embassies.
Lasn himself is a tangle of contradictions. His book is filled with references to and metaphors of the popular culture he decries. He mines what he claims is a “soulless” culture to express his most important thoughts and feelings.
He has called the automobile “arguably the most destructive product we humans have ever produced.” Yet he cheerfully drives a Toyota, as he writes in Culture Jam: “The love of convenience, the time I save, the speed and the power, and the lack of viable alternatives trump my hate more often than not.” In typically elitist fashion, what is “convenience” for Lasn is brainwashing for the masses.
A reporter from the Sydney Sun Herald asked Lasn whether he ever eats at McDonald’s. He admitted he did and explained, “People ask me this all the time -- it’s very embarrassing -- but I’m just a walking, talking contradiction. I'm not pure, and I don't feel like I want to be all that pure.” Why Americans must be purer than Kalle Lasn is something he has refused to explain. |
