Page 80 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

5 DIGITAL DESIRES: MEDIATED CONSUMERISM AND CLIMATE CRISIS 65

reality app called No Ad enabled people to aim their phone at an adver-
tisement in the New York City subway system and see it replaced by a work
of art. For ten days in 2015, the city of Tehran replaced all its billboards
with artworks: an idea was not entirely devoid of promotional intent, since
the campaign was aimed to encourage people to visit the city’s art muse-
ums, but it was a temporary respite from a more overtly consumerist
aesthetic.
Most rebellions against advertising have been more self-consciously
subversive. Feminist graffiti in the 1970s used wit and black spray paint to
call time on the rampant sexism that characterised so much advertising of
the period. A more recent addition to this artistic/satirical tradition took
place during the COP21 climate change talks in Paris. Many of the talk’s
sponsors were companies like Mobil and Volkswagen, who despite their
promotion of fossil fuel production used the talks to ‘greenwash’ their
image, to appear to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
A group with the mischievous title ‘Brandalism’ replaced posters for some
of COP21 sponsors, in order to “highlight the links between advertising,
consumerism, fossil fuel dependency and climate change” (http://www.
brandalism.org.uk/brandalism-cop21).
Brandalism’s work may be more challenging than the arch cuteness of
the Clapham Common takeover—both legally (the CATS campaign was
crowd source funded, Brandalism’s reclamation of public space is more
covert) and politically (Brandalism names and shames, while CATS offers a
softer critique). Both, however, recruit talent from the world of advertising
to protest against a kind of corporate monoculture.
They contest the messages in advertising because advertising is every-
where. We now have commercials in our schools and on our clothes. They
clog up—with increasing speed—nearly every form of communication we
devise. Our dominant TV genre—in terms of sheer volume—is not com-
edy, drama or sport, but advertising. The average British viewer is now
exposed to 48 TV commercials a day. Recent studies showed that around
40% of US TV time is now taken up by commercials (Lewis 2013).
Media that were once largely commercial free—from movies to the
internet—are now full of commercial messages. There was a time when the
only advertising linked to Hollywood films was the local cinema’s pitch for
the restaurant round the corner. All Hollywood movies now come with a
slew of product placement deals or products tie-ins—which, in some cases,
are more profitable than the box office take (Wasko et al 1993; Kretchmer
2004).