Things used to be easy and unambiguous. You found advertisements in magazines and on billboards, art in galleries and museums, and people expressing themselves by means of graffiti and defacing of private/public property was thought of as a nuisance by most. This is an oversimplification, but bear with me.
Over the years, as the urban environment got denser, it also got more cluttered with ads, and street art took on a new poignancy and presence. Today, anyone in an urban environment is subjected to thousands of commercial advertisements, but also non-commercial messages per day.
Clearly, this constant stream of information desensitizes people to messages, and it’s getting increasingly harder to catch anyone’s attention. To do so, in fact, means that advertisers need to break out of the very pattern they are helping to create. The holy grail of advertising is to cause passers-by to do a double-take. This can be accomplished by creating alien interjections in the urban web, somethings that doesn’t fit in, that stands out semiotically.
Weburbanist has a great article series on what’s sometimes referred to as Guerilla Marketing. Read more at these links:
- Guerrilla Marketing 1: History of Guerrilla Marketing
- Guerrilla Marketing 2: Origins and Evolution of Guerrilla Marketing
- Guerrilla Marketing 3: Major Corporations Go for Guerrilla Marketing
- Guerrilla Marketing 4: Guerrilla Marketing versus Viral Marketing
- Guerrilla Marketing 5: Guerrilla Marketing for Good Causes
- Guerrilla Marketing 6: 10 Types of Guerrilla Marketing
- Guerrilla Marketing 7: Is Guerrilla Marketing Right for You?
- Guerrilla Marketing 8: The Future of Guerrilla Marketing
- Guerrilla Art Versus Guerrilla Advertising: What’s the Difference?
- Creative Guerilla Marketing Campaigns
An example of guerilla art: Recently, Graffiti Research Lab and the Anti-Advertisement Agency teamed up to subvert big-screen-TV ads at NYC subway stations. By putting a laser-cut foam stencil over the still-running TV screen, they transformed the commercial messages into a luminescent projection of their own propaganda. The idea of a backlit street medium was originally concieved by Ji Lee as abstractor.tv.
With this adbusting-campaign, called Light Criticism, AAA and GRL are postulating that “the real graffiti problem” (read: the real public space nuisance, uglifier of the urban landscape, and medium of stupifying propaganda) is commercial advertising, not street art.
Higher-quality .mov video at AAA
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 3:03 pm and is filed under design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.