In the lead up to Black Friday, we have been bombarded with adverts from brands offering big discounts off various things we probably don’t need, and may not even be able to afford amid an ongoing cost of living crisis.
But a group of activists have used this moment of shopping frenzy to make a wider point about the unsustainability of consumer capitalism through subvertising – or subverted advertising. A subvert often uses the language and style of a brand itself as parody. It’s also known as culture jamming, or brandalism – a mashup of the words brand and vandalism.
The Zap Games was an anti-advertising festival which ran for two weeks from 11 to 24 November, in which people were invited to alter a public advertising space in a creative way to protest against the unbridled consumerism swirling around on Black Friday.
The French government is currently running a series of TV ads where people are encouraged not to buy new stuff, and to either buy preowned, rent, borrow or simply skip buying useless crap. There’s been a roar about it, the Economy minister siding with retailers against his colleague from the Environment.
They kept the ads up.
