XIX Congreso Internacional de Ciencias Sociales Interdisciplinares

Abstract

Consumerism has become the new religion of the 20th-century hosting. Ideological wars were replaced with economic wars. Consequently, corporations became the new dominant power roaming the world with advertising as the main propaganda tool of these corporations: selling identities, images, aspirations, and inspirations, instead of mere products. Yet, there are always iconoclasts in each era, defying the dominant power. “Absolute Impotence” reads a parody of a vodka ad created by Adbusters, a nonprofit organization that advocates for “new social activist movement of the information age.” The editor of the groups’s magazine argues that America is no longer a country, but rather a multitrillion-dollar brand subverted by corporate agendas. Adbusters sponsors numerous initiatives including Buy Nothing Day and TV Turn Off Week that try to discourage rampant commercialism. These efforts along with biting ads and commercials that lampoon advertising messages are examples of culture jamming which is a strategy to disrupt the efforts by the corporate world to dominate our cultural landscape. In this study my aim is to investigate the concept of “Culture Jamming” getting transformed into an advertising strategy “subvertising”, which aims to use the format of culture jamming to romance the consumer and to trivialize the effects of culture jamming and create a “consumer cool” out of it. From this point of view, I will examine how advertisers co-opt the jamming context into a new form of advertising strategy through several examples from the Turkish market.