Page 79 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

64 J. LEWIS

that generally clutters tube stations and other urban settings, it was well
within the imaginative zeitgeist of a creative ad campaign.
But a closer look revealed two curious features. Most of the pictures
contained no text and no logos—just cats peering out from a variety of
angles across a blank white space, or the word CATS plastered across the
ticket barriers. Those that did contain words simply revealed the acronym,
the ‘Citizens Advertising Take-over Service’, with no hint of who they were
or what they might be selling.
Could this be a clever campaign by an inventive ad agency, perhaps a
deliberately enigmatic precursor to a more revealing product pitch? Since
advertising has become the common vernacular of visual communication
(Ewen 2001), both these possibilities seem plausible. But behind the coy
display in Clapham lies a profound question about creativity in the
twenty-first century. Imagine how our cultural environment might look if
advertising creatives were set free from the constraints of consumer culture?
Suppose the principal imagineers of modern life (Lewis 2013) were no
longer obliged to weave their tales around sales, but could tell any story or
paint any picture?
The Citizens Advertising Takeover Service (CATS) asks us to take just
such an imaginative leap—to think what life would be like if advertisers
could do more than just celebrate consumption. The idea was the brain-
child of James Turner, a former TV producer who had worked for
Greenpeace, to provoke thoughts about “a world where people value their
friendships more than the things they own” and to ask “if there’s a model
for creativity that doesn’t have brands as its patron”?
During his years at Greenpeace, Turner became aware that most cre-
atives working in advertising agencies were not there because of any par-
ticular commitment to consumerism. They apply their creativity to the
selling of goods because we have created a world where so much of our
creative talent is in public relations and marketing. In order to capture this
sense of possibility, Turner set up Glimpse—a collective of creatives drawn
from advertising and graphic design dedicated to “making positive social
change feel attractive to millions more people” (http://weglimpse.co/).
Cats in Clapham Common was the latest—and perhaps the gentlest—in
a series of anti-consumerist takeovers of advertising space. Adbusters have
an impressive back catalogue of beautifully crafted ‘advertisements’
designed to subvert the original messages and create (borrowing from
Raymond Williams famous definition of culture) a “new structure of feel-
ing” (http://www.adbusters.org/). In 2014 in New York, an augmented