In the summer of 2004, several local organizations collaborated on bringing Anne Elizabeth Moore to Grand Rapids while she was on tour with her first book Hey Kidz! Buy This Book: A Radical Primer on Corporate and Governmental Propaganda and Artistic Activism for Short People. Anne facilitated a workshop on zine making that included both youth and adult participants. A few of these zines were posted online and distributed in print, particularly those that dealt with the Presidential candidates.
In her new book, Unmarketable, Moore looks at the ways in which corporate advertising campaigns have utilized underground forms of expression to either recruit street artists or to target them. She begins this critique by looking at the type of branding developed by Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts called "lovemarks." Lovemarks is a strategy where the consumer doesn't just own a product but has an emotional bond with the product. Moore states that this type of marketing or branding, "It's a forged connection to authenticity, a borrowed veil of integrity, a disingenuous stab at honesty. Because, in the end, 'lovemarks' describes not an emotional connection but a financial transaction." A recent TV I saw underscores the author's point.
In December (2007), I saw a TV ad that looked like a re-enactment of the FTAA protest in Quebec City, Canada. There were quick video shots of both protestors and police in full riot gear, with clubs and shields. You see these two groups facing off and then one protestor breaks from the crowd and hits a cop with a white pillow. Soon, hundreds of protestors are swinging pillows at the cops with an occasional pillow bursting and feathers floating all about. There was even a shot of a catapult sending a pillow into the thick of the cops. Most of these shots were in slow motion and throughout the entire ad was music accompanied by someone singing in French. For anyone who was in Quebec City in 2001, these scenes were quite familiar, minus the pillows. At the very end of the ad, the camera pans up to the skyline and you see a short tag line for Absolut Vodka. So one of the most notorious alcohol brands wants to associate its vodka with the feeling of, the experience of an anti-globalization demonstration?
The examples that Moore gives ranges from a Star Wars movie campaign using posters and t-shirts, a street graffiti campaign that was actually a marketing campaign, getting street artists to sell for Toyota, and Nike's buyout of Converse and it's ongoing campaign to target the punk and DIY (Do It Yourself) scene. What makes Moore's book so interesting is not just the reporting she does on these corporate campaigns, rather it is her exploration of what this has done to Indymedia/artists and the idea of selling out. At one point in the book she provides some guidelines or talking points about what "selling out" means, but I think the strength of the book is that she does not judge or begin dishing out "sold out" labels to people. Instead Moore points out how corporate America has tried to use the same approach to their product campaigns that have been used by the punk/DIY scene for years, which is this idea of people trying to think and act independent of a branded life. Moore talks about conversations that she has with some street artists and Indymedia makers to find out how aware they were of being "used" by companies like Toyota. The author even shares her own dilemma of working for Starbucks. Moore was asked to organize a zine-making workshop at a street fair only to find out it was being paid for by Starbucks.
Unmarketable even offers an honest critique of the tactics and message of Rev. Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. Bill Talen, a street performer and activists who uses an evangelical preacher personal to implore people to not shop at Disney, Starbucks and Wal-Mart because they make money using exploitative labor. Moore thinks that the message of Rev. Billy is often too simplistic and somehow might even contribute to further promoting those brands, since his campaign targets those companies. Does corporate media coverage of his actions just provide more exposure for those companies? Is all attention, both negative and positive, in the end beneficial for these companies? And what if these companies were not using exploitative labor? Can we then buy Wal-Mart products? Moore doesn't offer answers to these questions, but as an artist and Indymedia maker she provides honest critiques and an incentive for all of us to engage in self-reflection on how we negotiate living in a world of hyper-marketing and consumerism.
Anne Elizabeth Moore, Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity, (The New Press, 2007).
