CIFS | The struggle to win the attention and sympathy of the consumers is tougher than ever before. But where management gurus and marketing chiefs speak in pleasant terms about "conquering mind space" through the use of branding, the Canadian activist Kalle Lasn is more brutally frank: "I call it mindfucking".
Kalle Lasn speaks in headlines and images like an advertising executive. That is no coincidence. The Estonian born Canadian worked as the director of a Japanese advertising agency during the sixties, but he got fed up with the trade's ethical neutrality and switched sides. Kalle Lasn is no longer creating ad campaigns for the business community. Today he - along with other so-called Culture Jammers - is creating campaigns against the big companies and their brands.
He is primarily known as the author of the book Culture Jam and the editor of Adbusters Magazine. See also the box below. These are publications that, along with Naomi Klein's widely renowned book, No Logo, have contributed to giving voice to a new generation of anti-business activists.
The movement really achieved visibility towards the end of the nineties. It happened, among other things, in connection with critical media campaigns against multinational companies that were accused of a lack of ethics, and with the violent demonstrations in 1999 in the streets of Seattle during the World Trade Organisation's summit meeting.
According to Kalle Lasn, this was just a foretaste of the cultural struggle of a new age, a struggle that will play out on the market between activists and the business community. The Culture Jammers' goal is to reduce the great symbolic power that the companies have in today's society - partly due to their massive marketing programs and use of branding aimed at the consumers.
Kalle Lasn speaks in headlines and images like an advertising executive. That is no coincidence. The Estonian born Canadian worked as the director of a Japanese advertising agency during the sixties, but he got fed up with the trade's ethical neutrality and switched sides. Kalle Lasn is no longer creating ad campaigns for the business community. Today he - along with other so-called Culture Jammers - is creating campaigns against the big companies and their brands.
He is primarily known as the author of the book Culture Jam and the editor of Adbusters Magazine. See also the box below. These are publications that, along with Naomi Klein's widely renowned book, No Logo, have contributed to giving voice to a new generation of anti-business activists.
The movement really achieved visibility towards the end of the nineties. It happened, among other things, in connection with critical media campaigns against multinational companies that were accused of a lack of ethics, and with the violent demonstrations in 1999 in the streets of Seattle during the World Trade Organisation's summit meeting.
According to Kalle Lasn, this was just a foretaste of the cultural struggle of a new age, a struggle that will play out on the market between activists and the business community. The Culture Jammers' goal is to reduce the great symbolic power that the companies have in today's society - partly due to their massive marketing programs and use of branding aimed at the consumers.
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