Adbusting BtoB
October 4th, 2007 by Hugh KennedyAdbusters is a curious experience, if you’ve never picked up this ‘culturejammer’ journal at your local Whole Paycheck. Presented in a magazine format, it contains no ads whatsoever, though if you visit their Vancouver-based Web site you can pick up a nice anti-sweatshop, cruelty-free, pro-grassroots travel mug for your plug-in hybrid. The stories, such as they are, are more like editorials or rants, usually over doctored photographs of capitalist porn (i.e., advertising). I can’t help thinking after a dozen pages, ‘Where have you gone, Tom Frank and The Baffler?’
That said, the most current Adbusters interested me because they actually interviewed an advertising person, Bob Garfield. As they say, keep your enemies close. Bob’s sing-song voice on NPR sometimes sends my hand to the radio dial to switch on Sirius (one of our creative directors has sworn off NPR altogether because he can’t stand any of the NPR announcers’ voices), but in print he’s usually quite sensible, as he is here, resisting the interviewer’s push to trash consumer culture and the advertising tradition:
“You may think that my TiVo is excessive. But in most of Central Asia they think chairs are excessive. Do you have any kind of moral standing to tell them they’re wrong? It’s difficult enough to find objective moralities in questions like child rearing and even murder, much less what constitutes excessive consumption. Even if you factor the fact that finite resources are used and often squandered to make consumer goods, who’s to decide what is someone’s triviality? I really like my TiVo and I don’t want Adbusters or anyone else to get rid of it….I don’t think I should tell other people what they should value…[And] I don’t think advertising is fundamentally sinister or evil, but too much of it is a sort of pestilence.”
I have to say, creating marketing programs for companies that make machines that unravel the mysteries of life, or make computing cheaper and more efficient, or make storing information seamless, or reposition dead drugs, doesn’t exactly feel like stirring up a pot of pestilence for the world each day. On the other hand, are we just so far upstream of the negative consumerist effects we set in motion that BtoB lives with a hurricane fence around it, blameless and in its own way, brazen?
As advertisers, and especially as BtoB advertisers, I think the responsibility falls to all of us to build authentic work, create programs that educate rather than obfuscate, and never let our clients or ourselves get away with sloppy thinking. Sloppy thinking is what’s gotten our country to the point where it teeters today, after all.