Advertising Shits in Your Head

Strategies for Resistance

Vyvian Raoul

• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781771133869
• eBook ISBN:
  9781771133876
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

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 advertisements that control us.

With case studies from both sides of the Atlantic, this book showcases the ways in which small groups of activists are taking on corporations and states at their own game: propaganda.

This is a call-to-arts for a generation raised on ads. Beginning with a rich and detailed analysis of the pernicious hold advertising has on our lives, the book then moves on to offer practical solutions and guidance on how to subvert the ads. Using a combination of ethnographic research and theoretical analysis, Advertising Shits in Your Head investigates the claims made by subvertising practitioners and shows how they affect their practice.

PART 1

ADVERTISING SHITS IN YOUR HEAD

1

PR-OPAGANDA

“20th century advertising is the most powerful and sustained system of propaganda in human history and its cumulative cultural effects, unless quickly checked, will be responsible for destroying the world as we know it. As it achieves this it will be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of non-western peoples and will prevent the peoples of the world from achieving true happiness. Simply stated, our survival as a species is dependent upon minimizing the threat from advertising and the commercial culture that has spawned it.”¹

Sut Jhally

The modern subvertising movement has consumerism as its target. Many practitioners present their work as explicitly anti-capitalist and almost all object to outdoor advertising as a form of propaganda. Jordan Seiler of Public Ad Campaign notes how ingrained in our collective consciousness this system of propaganda has become, claiming that our acceptance is

“testament to how much advertising in general has actually infused itself into our lives and we consider it to be a medium that is inescapable and just inherently a part of the capitalist system”²

In the section of the Brandalism website titled “Why Brandalise?” the authors specifically cite the system of propaganda we euphemistically call public relations, which they claim advances unsustainable economic growth.³

But what does it mean to categorise outdoor advertising as propaganda?

BAD WORDS?

“Propaganda got to be a bad word because of the Germans using it, so what I did was to try and find some other word, so we found the words Counsel on Public Relations.” ⁴

Edward Bernays

Before public relations was called public relations, it was called propaganda. It is no small irony that propaganda got such a bad name from its wartime usage—in mobilising millions to the deadliest conflagration the world had seen—that the word itself had to be spun. The man responsible for effecting the name-change was Edward Bernays, the most famous practitioner of the industry he invented. But before he’d changed the name, Bernays wrote a book on the practice, entitled Propaganda, which was at once a beginner’s guide to public relations and propaganda for propaganda.

Although the name changed, public relations retains its essential definition: effort directed systematically toward gaining support for an opinion or a course of action. In Propaganda, Bernays explains: “The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organised effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine.”⁵ It only became a dirty word because the Germans used it, but it is exactly the same method. Bernays also used examples of how propaganda is necessary to bring about the changes in public opinion that allow, for example, dangerous chemicals in food to be outlawed.⁶ Propaganda is not inherently good or bad; it’s what you do with it that counts.⁷

Indeed, for Bernays, the conspicuous manipulation of the masses by means of propaganda was seen not just as inevitable and benign, but important and necessary. It is a claim that rests on the idea that the mass of people—the public—are dangerous when left to their own devices, but also that certain individuals—and only these individuals—are talented enough to guide the rest. Where subvertising activists posit outdoor advertising as undemocratic (in that there is no collective control over it), Bernays suggests that public relations are vital part of a democratic society. The meaning of the word “democracy” is highly contested, but in Bernays’s schema it almost eats itself:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of the country. We are governed, our minds moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must co-operate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.”⁸

For Bernays, a smoothly functioning society was one marshaled around consumption;⁹ he viewed the American way of life and the capitalist system of production as completely entwined. Though he occasionally uses examples of other ways that propaganda can be used, Bernays has a special place for propaganda that promotes what he claims to be the civilising influence of capitalism. He also argues that good advertising is not simply propaganda for an individual product, or even for an individual company, but for the entire system of consumption.¹⁰

Subvertisers claim that this conscious, conspicuous manipulation of the masses—essentially unchanged since Bernays—places the emphasis on passive consumption over active political participation.

THE EDGE OF APOCALYPSE

It is further claimed that a system that demands nothing more than unquestioned consumption may be taking a devastating toll in terms of environmental destruction. Subvertisers follow Sut Jhally (quoted at the start of this chapter) when they claim that advertising is fuel for a system of exponential growth and ever-increasing consumption on a finite planet. Brandalism performed their largest ad takeover to date—by installing over six hundred posters in bus stop advertising spaces—in protest at the corporate capture of the COP 21 climate talks in Paris. Bill Posters of Brandalism explains their targeting of the climate talks:

“We are taking their spaces back because we want to challenge the role advertising plays in promoting unsustainable consumerism. Because the advertising industry force feeds our desires for products created from fossil fuels, they are intimately connected to causing climate change. As is the case with the climate talks and their corporate sponsored events, outdoor advertising ensures that those with the most money are able to ensure that their voices get heard above all else.”¹¹

It’s not that propaganda, public relations, outdoor advertising, or the intersections of all three are inherently evil. It’s just that the system of production they have been so adept at promoting throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is responsible for economic crises, resource wars, widening inequality, and, perhaps most alarmingly, environmental destruction on a global scale.

Subvertisers can justifiably claim that propaganda may, once again, be marshaling millions to their deaths.

2

ADVERTISING SHITS IN YOUR HEAD

“Advertising shits all over and dominates our culture. It is a visceral, powerful form of pollution that not only affects our common public and cultural spaces, but also our deeply private intimate spaces. Advertisers want your ‘brain time’—to shit in your head without your knowledge. We want to stop them.”¹²

Bill Posters—Brandalism

VISUAL POLLUTION

A common theme amongst subvertising activists is to conceptualise advertising as a form of pollution. Bill Posters refers to it as pollution in his 2014 article “Advertising Shits in Your Head,”¹³ and Special Patrol Group’s second Ad Hack Manifesto claim is that advertising is “a form of visual and psychological pollution.” This echoes artist and subvertiser Darren Cullen’s sentiments in an interview about subvertising, when he called removing or replacing advertising “an act of tidying up.”¹⁴ When Sao Paolo Mayor Gilberto Kassab implemented the Clean City Law in 2007, it too labelled outdoor adverts a form of “visual pollution.”

It is certainly true that the average city dweller is confronted by what the industry terms out-of-home (OOH) advertising at a dazzling rate. The average commuter is exposed to more than 130 adverts featuring more than 80 different products in a 45-minute metropolitan transit journey; in an entire day, residents of a capital city are likely to see around 3,500 commercial messages.¹⁵

Subvertisers claim that—just as with other pollutants—the presence of advertising in the environment has harmful effects.

YOUR EYES READ THIS SILENTLY

Perhaps one reason a comparison with pollution is apt is the way that advertising can accumulate in the environment—a sort of commercial clutter. And it is as background environmental accumulation that advertising can be most harmful.

Some advertisers declare that the affect of advertising is benign,¹⁶ but also that it is a powerful form of persuasion: on one hand, nobody notices outdoor adverts anyway, and, on the other, it is a multi-billion-dollar industry that helps to influence our decisions.¹⁷ The reason it’s possible to claim that “99% of adverts make little or no impact”¹⁸ and still sell advertising at an ever-increasing rate is that it is precisely as background noise that adverts have their most powerful effect.

Advertising researcher Dr Robert Heath has proven that advertising works on a subconscious level, meaning it works on us without high levels of attention. He posits a “Low Attention Processing Model,” which shows that advertising has an effect on us even when we don’t actively notice it or aren’t able to consciously recall it.¹⁹ Furthermore, he has proven that advertising works on an emotional rather than an intellectual level, meaning that even those who are conscious of advertising’s false promises can still be affected through their feelings. The only way to avoid this subconscious affect is to avoid advertising altogether; as subvertisers and advertisers alike point out, that is almost impossible.

WORK MORE, SLEEP LESS

The advertising industry asserts that advertising merely redistributes consumption—from one product to another, a perpetual war...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction—Josh MacPhee
• Ad Hack Manifesto
• Part 1: Advertising Shits in Your Head
• Part 2: Strategies for Resistance
• Part 3: The Subvertisers
• International Subvertising Groups
• Photo Credits
• Bibliography
• Notes