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A Fresh Advertising Pitch: Buy Nothing
« on: 2007-11-23 19:00:15 »
November 22, 2007, 4:51 pm
A Fresh Advertising Pitch: Buy Nothing
By Andrew C. Revkin
As millions of Americans brace for the jammed parking lots and mobbed closeout racks that come with the holiday shopping season, a small but determined network of antishopping activists is girded for action as well.
Their goal is to get as many people as possible to buy nothing at all over a 24-hour span on Friday in the United States (and Saturday elsewhere around the world), as a small blow against what they say are the destructive efforts of advertisers and corporations to fuel the deep-rooted human tendency to want the next new thing.
One of those spearheading the “Buy Nothing Day” campaign: http://adbusters.org/metas/eco/bnd/ is a repentant 65-year-old former ad man, Kalle Lasn. He is the editor of Adbusters, a magazine that says it is “about the erosion of our physical and cultural environments by commercial forces.”
Mr. Lasn, from Vancouver, says the targets of the movement are the wealthiest one billion people on the planet, “the 20 percent who consume 80 percent of the goodies in the global marketplace.” The goal, he told me, “is to create an economy and a culture in which it eventually becomes cool to consume less.” (The magazine, with about 120,000 readers, two-thirds of them in the United States, is not for profit, but it does sell advertising… as does this newspaper of course.)
On the Adbusters Web site, Mr. Lasn has criticized MTV, which he said has refused to sell air time for an antishopping ad depicting North America as a pig.
“Gangsta rap and sexualized, seminaked school girls are OK, but apparently not a burping pig talking about consumption,” says the Adbusters site. (I’ve asked MTV’s press office for a comment; nothing yet.)
On Buy Nothing Day, the organizers encourage people to do everything from simple family outings to creative public protests (some groups form snaking lines of nonshoppers pushing empty carts around the aisles at Wal-Mart stores).
The environmental movement holds a range of views on consumption, from those seeking to shut it down to those hoping to redirect it.
Treehugger.com had a useful post: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/11/dont_forget_abo.php this week trying to split the difference between buying nothing and buying smarter. Lloyd Alter, a blogger from Toronto who wrote about the buy nothing effort, put it this way: “My first reaction was, ‘Nice idea, if you don’t work in a shop.’ ”
The Treehuggers site, he said, sees many examples of legitimate “eco-retailers who need customers, not boycotts.” He alluded to a list of examples of earth-friendly products from an earlier post, including a share in the produce from a local farm cooperative, a bicycle, solar panels, something “preloved” from a thrift shop, a composting toilet.
Still, the more hard-core anticonsumerism movement has gotten a boost in the last few days with its own documentary, “What Would Jesus Buy?”: http://www.revbilly.com/ opening in New York City and Los Angeles over the past week. The film, reviewed favorably in The Times,: http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/11/16/movies/16buy.html chronicles a cross-country crusade by Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping, actually a performance artist, Bill Talen.
Here’s a trailer for the film.
I asked Mr. Lasn of Adbusters if he thinks humans are hard-wired to grab whatever they can get. He said we face a mix of deep-rooted instinct and an environment overloaded with efforts to exploit that instinct.
“We are hunter-gatherers, sure,” he said. “I still enjoy getting something, bringing it home and showing it to my wife. When her face lights up that satisfies me. So our genes are hard-wired. But there is also the environment. Since the second world war we have created a consumer culture pumping something like 3,000 to 5,000 messages into our brains every day from the time you are a baby, when you count logos on products.”
The real challenge, he said, is how to change habits in the face of climate change and other looming threats that don’t seem to capture our attention.
“I don’t think we’re wired to deal with this curveball that is coming,” he said. “This whole human experiment of ours on planet Earth is now in big trouble, and here we are sipping our lattes and listening to good music in our S.U.V.s.”
For an exploration of other social experiments aimed at shifting from growth as a measure of progress, check out my 2005 story on Bhutan’s experiment with “gross national happiness.”: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/04/science/04happ.html
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