1. Bijan, Bijan Jewelry featuring Bo Derek, (advertisement courtesy of Bijan), ca 1990
AD NAUSEUM. Last time we ended with a film clip from John Berger’s The Language of Advertising that illustrated aspects of commodity fetishism and that demystified advertising showing how it holds out promises of the good life in inverse proportion to a present state of alienation. Berger reviewed how the publicity machine plays upon basic human emotions like fear and vanity, how it plays upon our inadequacies. The world of advertising constructs a dream world of fantasies that holds out the promises of success, personal transformation, grace and prestige.
Now I want to show you another short segment from the same video that underscores the most important promise of advertising --glamour or what Berger defines at the state of being envied.

2. Guess Jeans, Model in Leather Jacket, ca. 2000
As Sturken and Cartwright stress: “The idea of glamour is central to advertising, both in the use of well-known celebrities to sell products and the depiction of models who appear to be happy, without flaws, and satisfied.” (p. 213) However, because it is a desiring machine that must ceaselessly replicate itself and thereby keep the system of consuming desires in motion the fantasies that are constructed by advertising can never be fulfilled. This is exactly what I mean by the wordplay in the title of today’s lecture “Ad Nauseum” – the queasy feeling that the ads will keep on coming and that there will be so many that they will make you nauseous.

3. Unknown Artist, Lucy Kissing Ricky, (billboard courtesy of Apple, Times Square NY, NY), ca. 2000
The continuing relevance of the idea of the perpetual unfulfillment in advertising is echoed in the quotation from Taylor and Saarinen’s analysis of computer upgrades that are mentioned in the last lecture. “The logic of desire is illogical. Enough is never enough and more never satisfies. Who really doubts that some day there will be Word 99.9?” or Mac OS 99 in conjunction with the image above.

4. Unknown Photographer, We Declare Independence from Corporate Rule, Arvada, Colorado, (courtesy of Adbusters Website), July 4th, 2002
LOGOPHILIA: THE BRANDED WORLD. Once upon a time, we lived in a world where companies produced products for our consumption and these products were advertised. But in the 1980’s, something happened. Corporations began to sell their brands rather than their products and advertising become one means (along with others such as sponsorship and logo licensing) to convey brands as the core meaning of the modern corporation. And for every brand, a logo must be created. Logos are the registered trademarks of various products usually owned by large corporations and actively protected against copyright infringement.

5. Unknown Photographer, Adbusters Protesting in Boston, MA, (courtesy of Adbusters Website), July 4th, 2002
The world of marketing talks about the importance of brand recognition – the idea that it is very important to find a way to distinguish your product and make it recognizable in the marketplace. Sometimes an eye-catching logo or an advertising slogan or a memorable icon is the best way to accomplish this. In this regard, it is obvious how visual culture enters the picture when we talk about the graphic design of a logo that can become a marker of identification that signifies status or hipness.

6. Nike Corporation, You Became Significant to Yourself, ca. 2000
Your textbook reviews the most successful corporate campaign of branding in recent years. This is Nike’s development of the curved slash logo which “became near universal signifiers of hip urban youth culture.” (p. 229) It is a post-modern streamlined appropriation of the wings of the Greek goddess of Victory Nike. The Nike slash or what Naomi Klein refers to as “the swoosh” became a point of identification for a consumer culture hungry for speed and success in sports (which has been incredibly corporatised in the same period).

7. Nike Corporation, The Best on Earth, The Best on Mars, Don’t be Stupid, Stay in School, ca. 1990
This product was marketed especially to inner-city black youths in a line of basketball shoes endorsed by the game’s superstar Michael Jordan (Air Jordans). It should be noted that Jordan would later jump ship in order to become his own brand. The brand and its logo became a metaphor for how these youths too could become athletes and fly out of the poverty and the ghetto (just like Mike). The CEO of Nike Phil Knight was one of the first to offer the formula of success being to sell “Brands not Products.”

8. Unknown Photographer, Jordan Announces his Comeback with Logos, 2001
But we see here that the successful Jordan was the spokesperson for not just one but four brands including a telecommunications company, an energy drink, and an underwear manufacturer.

9. Nike Corporation, Nike Retail Figures, Nike Town, Portland, OR, ca
The ultimate palace of corporate branding was the creation of their chain of stores, Nike Town – more than just a department store but a total environment to market the Nike brand as a trendy, quality sports style. You enter Nike town and you now belong to the community of those who have Nike consumption in common.

10. American Express, Are You a Card Member
American Express, Are You a Card Member? Featuring Lisa Leslie, (no date.
The Nike Town marketing strategy is allied to S and C’s idea that advertisements sell a concept of belonging to a enviable and elite group (p. 218) Here you see how American Express is using the female version of Michael Jordan, the Los Angeles woman’s basketball player, Lisa Leslie as the cover star who urges you to become a member of this credit card company. Of course, there is a question to ask here and it is similar to the question that Edith Bunker raised in All in the Family when she said that blacks had now become lawyers and doctors – on TV. The fact that Lisa Leslie (a woman of color) is advertising American Express may mean that the advertisers are being sensitive to racial awareness but it doesn’t change the fact that the overwhelming majority of this elite credit card are still white.

11. Bruce Mau, No Logo (by Naomi Klein) Book Cover, 2000
NO LOGO. You are discussing the first two chapters of this book in your tutorials today. It is obvious that our textbook was written before the success of NO LOGO or one can safely assume that it would be included in Chapter 6. Toronto based activist Naomi Klein has taken the world by storm with this book. NO LOGO has become a mantra for those who are involved in an anti-corporatist agenda, those who are against the branded world and who believe that it has had the quality of our life. Let us recall that the subtitle of the book that seeks to cross out the corporate logo –- “Taking aim at the Brand Bullies.”

12. Unknown Photographer, Nike Activist Poster Fighting Child Labour Laws, ca 2001
In Chapter 16 “A Tale of Three Logos: The Swoosh, the Shell and the Arches,” Klein reviews the rise of the international anti-Nike movement. The opposition to Nike revolved around two fronts. On the one hand, the so-called sweatshop scandals
Accusing Nike of exploiting the international labor market of paying workers slave wages in Vietnam and Indonesia to bring down labor and production costs of their shoes to 5 dollars and then selling them in the Western world for dollars US.

13. Unknown Photographer, Nike Protests at the EU Summit in Copenhagen, 2002
Secondly, the marketing of the shoes among inner-city black youth for these exorbitant was harshly criticized. Cases were brought forward where inner-city youths were caught stealing or selling drugs to get the money to buy Nike sneakers and to share in the status that comes with its branding. In light of their labor practices and marketing schemes, the anti-Nike movement took the Nike slogan “Just Do It” and appropriated it as “Justice, Do it, Nike.”
In the recent Documentary, The Corporation (2003) by Mark Achtbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan, Naomi Klein is one of the featured guests in the segment of the film on the rise of Branding.

14. Unknown Photographer, Road Trip to Boston “the Shirts”, (courtesy of Molson Canadian website) March 2003
Klein’s analysis of branding and its bullying gives us another way to think about my Toronto Maple Leaf case study. I spoke about the invasion of the space of advertising into the space of the sporting event so that it had no longer an independent existence of its own. Klein discusses something similar in her discussion of the new paradigm (“the age of the brandasaurus”) where there is no room for unmarketed space. “An understanding is beginning to emerge that fashion designers, running shoe companies, media outlets, cartoon characters, and celebrities of all kinds are all more or less in the same business: the business of marketing their brands.” (P. 59) In this campaign, the hockey game is being used as an extension of a beer brand (or two) and a marketing slogan cast in the language of nationalism. “I am Canadian.”

15. Mastercard and Molson, I Am Canadian Credit Card, 2002
The Molson campaign illustrates an important point in your textbook. To recall S and C on p “Hence the ideological function of many advertisements takes the form of speaking a language of patriotism and nationalism, in order to equate the act of purchasing a product with a practice of citizenship.”

16. Unknown Artist, Every Year Hundreds of People are Killed With a Frying Pan, (advertisement courtesy of the Ad Council of United States), 1990
ANTI-AD PRACTICES. The commercial ad designed to sell products and in the service of commodity culture has been countered by “anti-ad” practices. These can be classified according to a few basic categories. The first category is the public service announcement (the so-called PSA) which uses the strategies of commercial advertising in order to promote a public good. Sometimes the public service message is designed to stop you from buying or using a certain product. The PSA acts as a kind of antidote to consuming desires. From the perspective of the PSA, maybe this should be called “repelling desires.” Yet, they mimic or parody the conventions of advertising to achieve this repelling effect. As S and C point out on page 210, “the effect of these ads is to play off the conventions of advertising’s mix of text and image, in which advertising copy usually guides the viewer on how to read the image.”
The Ad Council of the United States is the sponsor of this PSA that warns people to watch their diet and not to eat greasy foods. Rather than the frying pan serving as the enticement for the consumption of some delicious dish, the PSA literally and figuratively hits us over the head with a frying pan as the text reads: “Every year thousands of people are killed with a Frying Pan.”

17. David Bailey, It Takes 40 Dumb Animals to Make a Fur Coat, (reproduced with permission of Respect for Animals), no date
With the LYNX ad, we might do a double take. At first glance, one thinks that this is an advertisement for a hip brand of clothing called LYNX and that a hip fashion model is dragging her fur down the catwalk. The blood on the tracks could be a shock effect -- a way to get our attention. But if I read the ad copy, then the message become clear and I see that LYNX is not DKNY but a coalition fighting the fur trade and that the ad is saying that the one who wears this coat has blood on his or her hands and in his or her path. She may look glamorous (Berger’s point again), she may appear hip and cool and be nice and warm, but nonetheless the ethical demand is that she is a dummy to wear a coat that killed 40 animals and that makes her an accessory to cruelty to animals. Thus, the ad has a specific political and environmental agenda.

18. Adbusters, The True Colours of Benetton, (spoof advertisement from the Adbusters Website), no date.
The second category is discussed in the final section of Chapter 6 and it deals with the production of blatantly oppositional and resistant messages to the dominant advertising culture. This relates to those artists and counter-cultural collectives who use advertising to offer a critique of commodity culture. Sturken and Cartwright refer to this practice as “culture jamming” – a term derived from radio broadcasting that involves the jamming (distorting or interrupting) of someone’s signal. (The computer equivalent of this is the phenomenon of hacking.

19. BUGA UP, Our Bugaup is Here,, ca 1975.
ANTI-ADVERTISING CASE STUDY: BUGA UP. What I would like to do now is to review and illustrate the culture jams of an important group of anti-ad activists who are discussion in your text book –the Australian collective BUGA UP (which stands for Billboard Utilizing Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions and pronounced “bugger up” which is slang for screwing things up).

20. BUGA UP, Sump Oil, ca 1975
The introduction of the term Graffitists illustrates this collective used graffitti as their favored technique of culture jamming. This is clearly seen in the example for BUGA UP in your textbook on page 232 where Southern Comfort alcohol became SUMP OIL and where their logo appears on the sides of the ad and where they have strategically placed it on the bottles.

21. BUGA UP, It’s a Bore, ca 1975
In the essay “The Art of Billboard Utilizing: Above-Ground Organization of Australia’s Underground Billboard Activists”, Peter King tells the story of BUGA UP. In 1973, the group was formed by three people remaining anonymous to avoid police recrimination. One was an artist outraged by the “rape of the visual environment with billboards, one was a student studying media and advertising (no different than you) and the third was an ex-smoker concerned about the growing number of children who smoked. This last special interest gives a personal context to one famous project where the name of the powerful Marlboro brand was rearranged to the “It’s a bore.” Kings tells the amazing anecdote that two graffitists spend an hour and half refacing the billboard in broad daylight and that the crowd that gathered in the street was so intrigued by the show to call the police.

22. BUGA UP, The Chauvinist Charade, ca 1975
BUGA UP concentrated their attacks on unhealthy promotions, including ads for unhealthy products and ads which promoted products in an unhealthy way (such as sexist stereotypes). This latter agenda at the heart of the Chauvinist Charade anti-ad which offers a critique of “autoeroticism” – the use of sexy babes (here cheerleaders) to sell cars. In this ad, the brand name of the car has been completely covered, the original lettering was traced for size and typeface and the replacement word was painted at home on prepasted wallpaper.

23. BUGA UP, Masturbation Fantasy # 133, ca 1975
Another image exposing how erotic desires drive advertising directed to males in beer ads Shake Hands a Cold Gold KB acquired a dangerous supplement and commentary “Masturbation Fantasy #133. This one is discussed in your book but not illustrated.

24. BUGA UP, We Are Witless Nits, ca 1975.
At first, the media was fascinated with BUGA UP’s activities and gave them free publicity, but as time went on and with advertisers threatening the withdrawal of business if the glorification of BUGA UP continued, the logic of commodity capitalism got the better of the TV networks. This turn of events perhaps explains the jamming of this advertisement for the nightly news. The original slogan read: EYEWITNESS NEWS. ALWAYS FIRST.” BUGA UP’s version reads “We are Witless NITS: ALWAYS ARE. The Broadcasters were defaced and transformed into clowns and this was reinforced in the text : with clowns Mandy and Andy. The defacement was a satirical comment on how TV news is packaged and sold as a circus of celebrity and sensation.

25. BUGA UP, Smile While You’ve Still got Teeth, Ca 1975
As was to be expected, the antics of BUGA and other billboard graffitists in Australia led to legal actions – over 40 cases in the 1970’s where the activists usually pleaded not guilty in order to have reaffirm their belief that their actions were morally justified even if the law wan not able to distinguish their actions from vandalism. (as in an image as Smile While You’ve Still Got Teeth.) Sometimes they were set free by a liberal judge, but 3 out 4 cases were judged guilty with penalties ranging from reprimand to minor fines. However, as King concludes, “From this point of view, civil disobedience has proved to be an extremely cost-effective way of raising public consciousness.”