Research shows that starting a sentence with "research shows" is a favourite trick of advertisers. All right, even if that first "research" is merely personal observation, you know the drill: research shows that nine out of ten cats prefer Whiskas; that eating whatever Carol Vorderman eats lowers cholesterol; that washing your clothes in new, improved, non-bio "Sludge" makes them whiter/brighter/smell nicer.
In advertising, "research" shows some funny stuff. But what recent real research into ads shows is not at all funny. It shows that the average American is subjected to around 3,000 "marketing messages" in an average day. Television, radio, the Net, newspapers, magazines, junk-mail, billboards, posters, stickers, hypnotic neon, even T-shirts and baseball caps relentlessly bombard your average Chuck Schmuck. He is carpet-bombed with commercial propaganda. Three thousand a day means more than one million a year and that, for even the most commercially promiscuous, clearly crosses the line between stimulation and abuse.
However, there's now some hope, albeit slight, for Chuck. It's called "culture jamming" and its aim is to wage war against advertising's incessant assault. In the true spirit of their enemy, culture jammers know how to brag about their own gig, claiming that their struggle against corporate culture will become to this decade what civil rights was to the 1960s, feminism was to the 1970s and environmental activism was to the 1980s and 1990s. Although there's no shyness about their claim, the most insane aspect of the jammers' puffery is that they could well be right.
It's not only America's Chuck Schmucks who are increasingly sick of being bombarded with ads. Even if we Irish have not quite been accultured to a 3,000-a-day habit, many of us Joe (and yes, Jo) Soaps have got to be feeling nauseated too. Indeed, throughout the wealthy world, people who used to be citizens but are now, in effect, consumers - and treated as such - are tiring of the incessant commercial assaults on their senses and sense of themselves. Sit in a traffic jam (not hard to do in Dublin) and witness the spontaneous button-pushing of radios in neighbouring cars when an "adbreak" begins. You know that other drivers are on your wavelength in more ways that one.
Culture jamming's guru is Kalle Lasn, a 58-year-old former marketing executive who lives in western Canada. Estonian-born (he emigrated when he was two), Lasn is the founder and editor-in-chief of Adbusters (www.adbusters.org), a bi-monthly magazine which is attracting critical acclaim from way beyond cranky, anarchic, lefty, feminist, eco-warrior, pullover-and-sandals quarters. The mag is surfing the wave that produced protests (and sometimes riots) in Seattle, Prague, London, Washington, Philadelphia and Los Angeles against rampant capitalism and corporatisation. But crucially, it is also talking to thinking people who do not take to the streets to vent their spleen.
Adbusters, which, post-Seattle, has seen its circulation soar to more than 100,000 worldwide (after years of selling just two or three per cent of that figure and only to a loyal and committed following), aims to jam America's "image factory". In pursuit of this goal, it publishes scathingly ironic parodies of familiar ads for well-known brands.
Thus Camel cigarettes are advertised by showing the company's iconic Joe Camel (renamed Joe Chemo) lying in a coffin. Prozac is packaged as a giant box of detergent carried by a 1950s-style, Doris Daytype housewife. "Prozac Mood Brightener", says the box - "Wash Your Blues Away". Calvin Klein's "Reality For Men" shows the naked, sagging-bellied torso of an average Chuck or Joe instead of the torso of a sixpacked, perfectly muscle-toned hunk. Reality, indeed.
SUCH visuals - and artistically they are brilliantly executed to maximise their savage sarcasm - work, the people behind Adbusters argue, because they take on advertisers at their own image game. Jammers call this strategy "subvertising" and in spite of legal risks, it is central to their counter-propaganda. Visitors to the mag's website are encouraged to download, print and make high-quality photocopies of a distorted American flag. In place of stars in the upper left quadrant, there are the familiar logos of well-known corporations. It's not quite the flag-burning of the Vietnam-protests era, but its message could be just as defining for a new generation and devastating for the status quo.
Of course, it's impossible to predict how successful the jammers will be. They are, after all, taking on multi-billion dollar interests. There can, however, be little doubt that they are mining a promising vein of worldwide (globalisation and all that) anxiety about commercial propaganda.
"It's pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country," said Raymond Chandler many years ago. With the amount and intensity of hype far greater now than then, Chandler's observation is more pertinent than ever.
A current Adbusters campaign is trying to promote a "Buy Nothing Day" on November 24th. Seeking to plug his message on television, Lasn has found, hardly surprisingly, that all the networks have refused him. Only after pressure from some print reporters did CNN agree to screen the Adbuster ad. (It should be worth seeing and would certainly make a stark contrast if screened immediately after the current "Let's do it - letsbuyit.com" TV commercial.)
Still, it's probably too early to say whether or not Ireland will buy culture jamming. Even though ads here - particularly TV and radio ads for financial institutions - often sound like the booming belch of the Tiger, there are more tangible harrassments. Crawling road traffic, chronic overcrowding at Dublin airport and a generally abysmal infrastructure understandably arouse more immediate exasperations. Yet aspects of culture seldom exist in isolation, and it's reasonable to see connections between the concerns of the culture jammers and the mass irritations of daily Irish life.
Generically, the mess might be termed "clutter culture". Too many cars on too few roads; too many airline passengers in too small a space; too much strain too quickly on under-resourced infrastructure, both physical and civic. There's too much e-mail (much of it an abuse of a wonderful technology), too much junk on the Net and too many TV channels to come. Even language has been maimed by advertising's insistence on appropriating and annihilating the vigour of the most powerful adjectives. Few things really can be "fabulous" or "fantastic" any more without sounding like a con. The aggregate of it all is clutter culture - physical and verbal - in which the benefits of excess must be weighed against increasingly excessive drawbacks.
Adbusters advertises itself as "the journal of the mental environment". In developed countries which have coping physical and civic infrastructures, it's easier to understand a focus on communication pollution. Here, the drive to catch up materially with the more fully developed world has been so compressed in time that it's no surprise it's become a scramble. But if we can have a "No Smoking Day" and a "No Cars Day", a "Buy Nothing Day" might not be that far away. Imagine it: "Let's do it - letsbuynothing.com". Signs are that many people are already pondering the cost of material prosperity.
Older Irish people may recall the more hypocritical sermons and sundry pulpiteering of religion's days in power and consider them to have been bullying, hectoring and patronising. Intended to dampen all your worldly desires, the browbeating was often outrageous and dangerous. But commercial advertising, intended to ignite desires you didn't even know you had, is now the dominant propaganda of our age. While it may not lay claim to your immortal soul or even your mortal body (unless, of course, you're "worth it"), it may well turn out to be equally outrageous and dangerous in its results.
It might also be recalled by people of a certain age that televised images of the civil rights struggle in the US in the early 1960s hugely influenced the style and tactics of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. Now, in challenging what they label "the persuasion industry", the demands of culture jammers and their admirers have shifted attention from civil rights to civic rights.
They argue that the goal of corporate culture (theoretically, at least, infinite choice) cannot but create clutter, and that citizens (whatever about consumers) have a civic right not to be perpetually bombarded with commercial propaganda. Viewed from such a perspective, the risible phrases and even more risible notions of "USA Inc." or "Ireland Inc." are easily seen, not as concise pragmatic shorthand but as ideological idioms not just championing consumption but consuming countries.
CONVENTIONAL Left politics clearly failed to halt the rise in power of corporations and corporate media. The big boys (and girls) of the Right won, and that's the unadorned, sagging-belly reality. Now, however, the understandable victory celebrations have gone on too long for many people. Culture jamming as a tactic of a "civic rights" campaign may fail as abysmally as the old Left. But it's difficult not to conclude that, whatever about the rights, wrongs and efficacy of the jammers' methods, they are at least posing questions which bedevil many of us amid the clutter and cluttered communications of contemporary culture.
In selling its own message, Adbusters pledges to "change the way we interact with the mass media and the way in which meaning is produced in our society". It's a big claim. Ads, we know, have certain formal obligations to truthfulness. But these are sufficiently roomy to allow for a huge range of rhetorical manipulations in fulfilling their primary goal - which, despite (or because of) self-regulation, let's face it, has to be in the paying advertiser's , not the buying public's , interest.
Fundamentally changing that will not be possible. After all, no payback, no ad. But more rigorous legal controls and a public educated to be genuinely more discriminating could lessen the frequency and intensity of the bombardment.
Advertising's voice (and in Ireland some of the smarmy voices are insufferable - but that's another week's work) is not simply the voice of seduction. It is, as the culture jammers argue, the sound of consumerism's seduction of the spirit - a spirit which, in this country, secularism promised to rescue from the fire and brimstone grip of a discredited Church.
Some hope. We accept far too much of the smarmy images and guff because advertising's own terms and conditions apply.
If nothing else, the culture jammers remind us that such terms and conditions don't only apply - they appal. You don't need much research to agree with that part of the Adbusters message. Maybe nine out of ten cats haven't yet got that message but, as corporate clutter culture continues to clog our lives and minds, they almost certainly will. Let's hear it - enoughisenough.com.