Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity

published	2007 by New Press
binding	Paperback
isbn	1595581685 (isbn13: 9781595581686)
pages	208
description	A writer and activist investigates corporate America's inroads into—and alliances with—the cultural underground. "There's an industry around you that works, whether you agree with it or not."...more [close] A writer and activist investigates corporate America's inroads into—and alliances with—the cultural underground. "There's an industry around you that works, whether you agree with it or not."—Alec Bourgeois, Dischord Records label manager For years the do-it-yourself (DIY)/punk underground has worked against the logic of mass production and creative uniformity, disseminating radical ideas and directly making and trading goods and services. But what happens when the underground becomes just another market? What happens when the very tools that the artists and activists have used to build word of mouth are coopted by corporate America? What happens to cultural resistance when it becomes just another marketing platform? Unmarketable examines the corrosive effects of corporate infiltration of the underground. Activist and author Anne Elizabeth Moore takes a critical look at the savvy advertising agencies, corporate marketing teams, and branding experts who use DIY techniques to reach a youth market—and at members of the underground who have helped forward corporate agendas through their own artistic, and occasionally activist, projects. Covering everything from Adbusters to Tylenol's indie-star-studded Ouch! campaign, Unmarketable is a lively, funny, and much-needed look at what's happening to the underground and what it means for activism, commerce, and integrity in a world dominated by corporations. [close]
date added	02-04-07 edit book

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Greg rated it:

01/29/08

bookshelves: politics, punk

Read in January, 2008

This is a strange book. It's mainly an expose of new advances that corporate marketing has used to exploit DIY and underground markets, which is kind of a silly idea since these markets are traditionally not exactly filled with excess money to spend on products. It shows examples from a wide variety of corporations who have used 'anti-marketing', to help strength their own brands. Basically a lot of this book can be summed up in the cliche that there is no bad press, if you can get mentioned,...more This is a strange book. It's mainly an expose of new advances that corporate marketing has used to exploit DIY and underground markets, which is kind of a silly idea since these markets are traditionally not exactly filled with excess money to spend on products. It shows examples from a wide variety of corporations who have used 'anti-marketing', to help strength their own brands. Basically a lot of this book can be summed up in the cliche that there is no bad press, if you can get mentioned, or thought of it's good, no matter if it's in a positive or negative context. So for example when Negativland makes a record sampling a quite popular soft drink manufacturer , even though it is being done in a satirical (or political if that's your way of looking at things like this, which is my personal bent on things like this) it is still working as unpaid advertising for the the good folks who make acidic sugar water. Or when a shoe company appropriates famous imagery from a Minor Threat album cover, even though it sends Ian Mackaye into a fit of self-righteous rage and drawing a backlash from the fans of the seminal anti-corporate band, it's still good advertising. It got people who might normally not have noticed the shoe company to think about it.
That's the basic premise of the book, that advertising these days is using subversive forms to turn the critique of their products back into marketing. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone with any kind of background in the theories of the Situationist International (SI). The SI stated almost forty years ago that the dominant paradigm (the spectacle, the system, the man, the corporate world, whatever you want to think of it as) will ingest even the most radical acts and incorporate them into self. That's the power of the system. 60's radicals? You're being used for all kind of nefarious ends. Punk rock? You're the soundtrack to a whole wide profit margin of the early to mid 90's, and now you sell everything via pre and 'hipster'-ish marketing. Crass? You're now for sale at an especially vapid mall store. The Situationists themselves? You're aesthetic can be found in marketing everywhere now. And now it's happening to the self-righteous holdouts of the 90's DIY community, to the zinesters and comic book artists, and whoever else you want to hold this community as encompassing. And it's not that the system wants these underpaid people's money, but they want to tap into the integrity that's implicitly been attached to them. (If you don't think this is a goal, then look at the number of say hipsters in a large urban population like New York, and really look at them with their awful co-opted and not so ironic fashions, their punk rock studded belts, their shoes that look sort of underground, but are produced by an especially awful company, and when you keep looking you'll notice that on a lot of them there is something wrong, the ripped clothes look too neatly ripped, their are still vestiges of their non-hipster self there even amongst their calculated looks, you realize that even with the permanent tattoos and everything else their is something terribly inauthentic about them. They have attempted to buy and produce their integrity, and what makes so many people hate them so much is that they are trying to buy something that isn't for sale (excuse the mini-rant)).
Like the hipsters and their rampant consumerism, even if it's in 'cool' things the marketing world is attempting to create more spaces for 'cool' purchases, and they don't mind if it's being bought ironically, or sincerly, they are still getting the money. Or in advertising they are still creating an impression, which makes you think of the company in question.
The question of the book comes down to what can we do about this?
Now, this book isn't for everyone. In advertising speak, this book is aimed at someone like myself. Someone who spent a good portion of the 90's worrying about issues like selling-out, and making zines, and going to cheap DIY shows and caring about how to make a transition into adulthood with out giving up on core principles. Most people don't think of things like this normally, and most people wouldn't find what is being talked about in this book as being especially evil. To tell the truth I don't find it very surprising, anyone with any sense of history will realize that eventually the underground is mined for it's integrity. It happened in the early 90's with the onset of grunge, when labels fell over themselves trying to pick up bands, produce 'zine' like advertisements, and set themselves up as an 'alternative' to their own mainstream culture. Now it's moved up a notch, and become more transparent. As this book points out even radical acts like the Rev. Billy picketing a store still brings more attention to the store, crowds gather around, and the brand of the store is more firmly entrenched in the spectator's mind. The same is said of the whole agenda of Adbusters.
The book doesn't answer the question of what can be done about this. And I think it's a shame. The author missed one big component of this whole picture, you have to let yourself know about these things, you have to concern yourself with the products for them to make an imprint on you. You need to connect with the media for the message to hit you, and this is impossible in a certain extent in our world of ad's and billboards, and graffiti being used to push commodities onto us. I actually didn't know about any of these ad campaigns before reading the book. And ironically the book did more to make me aware of these companies that I lately give no thought to, then it did to open my eyes to any theories or ideas that I didn't already know. In this way this book acted as the same unwilling advertising tool that the author is arguing against.
So, as I read this book I thought, in my not caring about these companies, not giving them a thought, not buying their products, not conciously trying to be anything more than the person that I have created by living as closely to my principles for the past 15 years or whatever it's been, I have been missed by these types of marketing, and in a lot of ways by marketing in general (the one wonderful side of having little or no extra money to spend on things, except for books and movies, I'm not perfect, no one probably is). My younger self would hate me for saying this, but one way to personally get around the effects of the marketing world is a certain 'transcendent' apathy. Not just a blind apathy but one based on a defeatist resignation and a turning away from the world that one finds repulsive. Now this doesn't fix anything though, but in my case it worked in that I wasn't affected by any of these ad campaigns because I didn't even know they existed.
The other thing that the author misses is the second part of the basic tenet of the SI. Since even the most radical act will be made part of the spectacle, the goal of the artist (in whatever medium, even living can be an art to the SI) is to constantly change, to keep moving, allow the spectacle to eat up the corpses of the past, while creating ever new and more difficult art that can momentarily open up spaces of resistance. Since the advertising world (to represent the spectacle here), is always changing, and ingesting new ideas, recruiting from the ranks of the underground, the goal if you don't want you're way of life to be co-opted is to keep changing and growing. On a non-personal level this can involve the creation of more radical situations that may even eventually threaten the structure of the system if it tries to ingest it. I have no idea what this kind of situation will be, but to date none of the actions done against the companies in mocking them or re-appropriating their logo's has really done any good, or I should say have continued doing any good. The people who are going to react in the positive revolutionary way to these aims have already done so, and now a magazine like Adbusters, has lived beyond it's usefulness, and become a commodity itself, creating a norm that can be easily digested and consumed. The key is change. Change and rejection.

All names of offending corporations were deliberately omitted. ...less

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