It costs 10.99
Based in Canada
the adbusters media foundation was established in 1989
12000 copies are sold bi-monthly, which is low but high for a bi-monthly magazine
Symbolic annihilation is when you dismiss/ignore an entire race. Woman symbolically annihilates black people, representing them negatively and suggesting they're not as important
Adbusters assumes you have contextual knowledge and have knowledge of the things they reference.
How do contextual factors shape their production, distribution, circulation and consumption of magazines?
what is the dominant ideological perspective of adbusters?
-It's very hard to know straight away, contrasting with woman as it's ideologies are clear straight away.
Right from the start we called ourselves Adbusters and went head on against the whole fucking industry
Advertising has occupied our minds. There are now roughly between 2,000 and 5,000 marketing messages a day seeping into the average brain of anybody who lives in the UK or Canada, the US or Japan. That’s a huge onslaught of marketing messages coming into your brain whether you like it or not. A lot of people who feel stressed or anxious, they don’t quite know why it’s happening to them – and of course it could be happening for all kinds of reasons – but one of those reasons is this incessant onslaught of advertising that not only attacks your mind and puts a lot of noise into your system, but it also tells you lies; it tells you that you can be happy if you buy this or buy that – it’s an emotional mindfuck. […] But the world is going back. The [future will be in magazines] that are driven by the sheer joy of communicating deeply with the largest number of people.
The future is all about ecological crisis, financial crisis, political crisis, and they will never be able to have a life that’s anywhere like the one their parents had. Unless they stand up and fight for a different kind of future, then they’re not going to have a future.
How does Adbusters subvert traditional magazine conventions, especially in relation to
advertising?
advertising?
When I was a young man the model of a magazine had something to do with advertising but it was fairly marginal. It was all about having constituency, a bunch of people who loved what you did and felt they were part of a tribe surrounding what you were doing. That was such a beautiful, down-to-earth model that somehow got subverted by advertising. Now a design student or someone like you – you don’t even think about not using advertising. You start calling up advertisers and putting ads in your magazines even before you get your writers together.
2 - Constructing audiences and constructing brand identity using digitally convergent media
(using the website)
- In what ways does Adbusters construct it’s audiences?
By creating an aesthetic and enforcing ideologies with it's use of declarative lexis. These ideolgies construct an anti-capitalism audience.
- How does the website reinforce the brand identity of the magazine?
It uses images of the actual magazine, it creates an interactive 'journey' to heighten the effects it has and uses digital elements to encourage audiences to interact and become more easily influenced.
- Is there a clear ‘house style’ that is evident across the magazine and the website?
Run down and blatant. Poor type set, crooked layout. It looks cheap and run down to intentionally evoke reaction from an audience after they've paid 10.99
- What does the website offer that is different from the content of the magazine?
An 'interactive journey,' a shop, the option to donate, a gallery of spoof ads
- How does the website extend the brand (e.g. through videos, merchandise etc.)?
merchandise which can act as a talking point, a link the blackspot collective which creates a mob mentality.
- How does your magazine use social media (e.g. to market the latest edition or offer additional content)?
They directly address their audience and build a further relationship which is reinforced by naming them jammers. They post cryptic photos to act as hermeneutic codes and encourage their audiences to pick up a copy. They use repetition with each post to coax their audience into reading.
- How can readers interact with the magazine through the website and social media?
They can leave comments on social media, there's a 'get involved' tab where they can look into writing which doesn't require any educational qualifications.
3 - Ideology in practice and how adbusters interacts with its audience
• The campaigns (e.g. Occupy Wall Street and Buy Nothing Day) that the Adbusters Foundation runs.
• The controversies and criticisms of Adbusters.
• Other products that extend the Adbusters brand
-Buy Nothing Day (BND) is an international day of protest against consumerism. In North America, the United Kingdom, Finland and Sweden, Buy Nothing Day is held the day after U.S. Thanksgiving, concurrent to Black Friday; elsewhere, it is held the following day, which is the last Saturday in November.[1][2] Buy Nothing Day was founded in Vancouver by artist Ted Dave[3] and subsequently promoted by Adbusters,[4] based in Canada.
-this allows audiences to put into practice the ideologies that adbusters preach and be part of a collective led by the magazine. whilst the magazine makes you feel depressed and hopeless this gives you a chance to make you feel like you're doing something.
Born in Estonia, Mr. Lasn lived for several years in German resettlement camps with his parents after they fled the advancing Soviet army toward the end of World War II.
Advantages of capitlalism- simple hierarchy, the more you work the more you get, gives people goals, curran and seaton argue that media works by reinforcing ideologies the audience already knows.
Adbusters is a savage angry and extremely focused magazine yet it is targeting an audience which already knows these things. Likely white, middle class and living in the western world, so what is the point?
Mr. Lasn acknowledges the truth of that, and says he’s not a community organizer and certainly not a graceful politician. “I’ve said some things that have pissed people off,” he says. And it’s not just corporations like Nike, McDonald’s and Philip Morris that have been stung by him. Israel’s policies toward Palestinians are an Adbusters target.
A blog post in February 2011, for example, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Violate International Law,” compared Israel to a drunk friend: “For over half a century, America has been Israel’s bartender and enabler: each year dumping billions of dollars in military aid that is used to oppress Palestinians.”
The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish advocacy organization, says the magazine’s provocative statements have occasionally contained anti-Semitic elements.
“While anti-Semitism is not part of their overarching message or mission, Adbusters makes no apologies for spreading Jewish conspiracy theories and promoting offensive analogies to the Holocaust,” said Abraham H. Foxman, the league’s national director. “Some people want to get attention to their cause, but unfortunately Adbusters has found it convenient at times to play into age-old conspiracy theories about Jewish control of the government in an effort to get attention to themselves.”
In one instance, in 2004, Mr. Lasn published a list of 50 people who, he said, were prominent American neoconservatives and influenced American policy in the Iraq war. Half of them appeared to be Jewish, he wrote, and affixed a mark next to those names. He said American Jews tended to vote Democratic and that many were opposed to the Bush administration’s foreign policy and to at least some Israeli policies. But, he said, the “neocons seem to have a special affinity for Israel that influences their political thinking and consequently American foreign policy in the Middle East.
In an interview, Mr. Lasn said he was “naïve” in publishing that list. “I had no idea of what the effect would be,” he said, “and if I could do it over again I’d do it differently.”
c
No comments:
Post a Comment