Presentation

1. Goal(s): What are the stated goals of your SOCIAL MARKETING CAMPAIGN? What behavior(s) is/are your SOCIAL MARKETING CAMPAIGN focused on changing?

The stated goals of the Adbusters campaign include defying the negative effects of consumerism and brand-marketing. They hope to empower citizens to regain control of cultural material and encouraging them to ask, "Are we consumers and citizens?” Furthermore, they add, “Our aim is to topple existing power structures an forge a major shift in the way we live in the 21^st century.” Adbusters is focused on changing mass-consumerist behaviors, such as brand-worshipping, bandwagon buying and blind consumption of advertising material. They hope to engage their readers in media literacy and media criticism.

2. The 8 “Ps” of your SOCIAL MARKETING CAMPAIGN - Product, Price, Place, Promotion, Publics, Partnership, Policy, and Purse Strings. How does your SMC address/approach all 8 Ps?

Product:  According to the book, Hands on Social Marketing, the product that social media campaigns usually promote is a change in the target audience’s behavior.  Adbusters wants to change the way consumers decipher the many commercial messages that they are exposed to each day.  They attempt to make consumers aware of the real motives behind the ads that major brands promote.  Aside from the behavior change, Adbusters also has some physical products to sell to their audience.  They have bimonthly magazine that sells for $38 a year.  They also sell posters of their mock ads and books that promote their cause.  However, most of the income they rely on come by way of donations from their supporters.

Price:  The price, according to the book, is what the audience has to give up in order to adopt the campaigns intended behavior.  In this case, Adbusters requires their target audience to take some time to look at and fully comprehend the meaning of an ad message.  They want consumers to be aware of the effects that successful commercial advertising has on people.

Place:  Adbusters are conducting their campaign through various forms of social media such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.  Their website, located at adbusters.org, is where to find their latest news, purchase a magazine subscription, and also browse their past mock ads.

Promotion:  Adbusters promotes their cause through the social media outlets which they are frequently found on.  They like to use mock ads that resemble real ones in order to discredit the brand and show how a product isn’t only defined by the symbol which makes it recognizable.

Public: main part is about the target audience; everyone who need the Adbusters.

Partnership: “ Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace.

Policy: change the law behavior; open the door for future legal action against media conglomerate.

Purse strings: Donate from consumers (on line; by check; by phone; PayPal); sold the Adbusters Magazine----help they contrribute to Adbusters.

3. Evaluation: How successful was your SOCIAL MARKETING CAMPAIGN in meeting its goals? Changing behavior?

With such a lofty goal at hand, Adbusters has barely begun to chip away at the consumptive mind-set of our society, as a whole. While Adbusters has become very well-known, their campaign materials circulate among very few people, relative to the number of people who consume the brand-marketing campaign materials that they criticize.

Adbusters has however made some major strides. In September 2011, Adbusters held their first Occupy Wall Street a protest against corporate involvement in political affairs. They launched the twitter trend, #occupywallstreet. Occupy became a world-wide movement with large successes.

Kalle Lasn, founder of Adbusters, comments that Occupy was an “incredible, magical moment in the sun, and then, somehow, faded away.” While Occupy gained the attention of the American public in a way that Adbusters had not been able to do before, it’s effects weren’t lasting.

Certainly, it is undeniable that Adbusters has changed the way many people consume advertising media, their goal is huge and at this point, has yet to be reached.

4. News/PR: Summarize and link to THREE news articles about your SOCIAL MARKETING CAMPAIGN that report, raise questions, and/or encourage support.

1. Imagine a world without McDonald’s, Nike, or Kraft Foods. A world where the budget-conscious and time-strapped have nowhere to grab a quick bite, where almost no one drives a car, where television is extinct. Sound pretty bleak? This is the utopian vision of the Adbusters Media Foundation.

This article, found on Activist Cash’s website, heavily criticizes Adbusters for various reasons such as being hypocritical, elitist, and radical. While this website seems to be radical itself, the article does raise some questions regarding Adbusters’ motives and worldviews. Some good points the article brings up:

a) Adbusters is selling anti-consumerism. They claim that western culture is too focused on consumption of items that we do not need. However, Adbusters has an online shop and their own line of shoes for sale.
b) Adbusters combats marketing with marketing. They attempt and sometimes succeed at airing commercials on television. The problem with this is that the magazine routinely carries messages that attack consumers for being too ignorant to make up their own minds and that they need someone to tell them what they want. Advertising does not exist to inform or persuade, in their view, but to coerce and control. The idea that advertising is essential to a free society — that without it, markets would collapse and consumers would be information-starved — is alien to them.--activistcash.com
c) Kalle Lasn does not believe in what his organization is preaching. When answering to a reporter about whether he ate at McDonald’s or not, He admitted he did and explained, People ask me this all the time — it’s very embarrassing — but I’m just a walking, talking contradiction. I’m not pure, and I don’t feel like I want to be all that pure. Why Americans must be purer than Kalle Lasn is something he has refused to explain.--activistcash.com

The article cites many issues of the magazine that feature articles preaching anger and hate towards consumers as a whole without even considering the possibilities of “conscious consumption.”

    I enjoy reading critical articles like these because it is always good to have multiple perspectives. However, I think the article did largely ignore the basic idea behind Adbusters, which is to eradicate reckless consumerism and promote more healthy lifestyle behaviors.

http://activistcash.com/organizations/36-adbusters/

2. The New York Times article entitled “Adbusters’ War Against Too Much of Everything” held Adbusters in higher regard than Activist Cash did in their article. While it was still critical of the organization, it provided a balanced review that did not fall too far into either end of the spectrum.

Pros:
-Adbusters is founded on the principles that core economic values must shift from profit-making and expansion of the gross domestic product toward improvement of human health and protection of the planet.--meme wars
-The article also points out that Kalle Lasn was inspired by 1960’s politics and the cultural movements that were going on during that time.
- A New York University professor was quoted in the article, saying I’ve certainly been very critical of [Adbusters] but I’m also very glad they exist. I think they do very important work sometimes, in their own way.--new york times

Cons:
-Adbusters tries to “attention whore”
-Says you are “either a shopper or you’re not.” There is no middle ground, no matter how conscious you are about spending money.
-In their book “Nation of Rebels,” by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, the authors state that it is obvious to everyone that cultural rebellion, of the type epitomized by Adbusters magazine, is not a threat to the system — it is the system.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/business/adbusters-war-against-too-much-of-everything.html?pagewanted=all

3. Patrick Kingsley from The Guardian writes very fondly of Kalle Lasn and his vision. This article focuses on the Occupy Wall Street movement and looks at Lasn’s feelings about it. He goes on to talk about Lasn’s book Meme Wars, and how it is Lasn’s attempt to put humanity on a new path. On the subject of Lasn’s visions for the future, Kingsley writes, “Lasn hopes to inspire the next generation to grab neoclassical economists by the scruff of their neck and throw them out of power.”--the guardian

    Kingsley is not critical of Adbusters or Lasn like the previous two articles, but rather focuses all on the positives that have come from the Adbusters campaigns since the organization’s inception. It is easy to get tangled up in the shortcomings of Adbusters, but with all they have done--such as the Occupy movement, Buy Nothing Day, and TV turnoff week--I think the organization deserves respect and credibility.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/05/kalle-lasn-man-inspired-occupy

5. Media Analysis: Which digital/social/traditional media platforms seemed MOST and LEAST effective in helping your SMC achieve its stated goals? Be specific and analytical in your response.

AdBusters had previously put a lot of their focus into traditional media platforms, and it continues to be very crucial to them, after all they are a magazine (a traditional media platform.) It is crucial to them to be talked about in the print news and on television, but at AdBusters they fully understand the power of social media, they were able to launch, their very well known, Occupy Wall Street movement through social media. AdBusters has 53,594 likes on Facebook, 47,749 followers on twitter and 890 subscribers on YouTube.  For AdBusters twitter has definitely been a very successful platform to use to communicate messages quickly and effectively. Their YouTube page does not generate as many views as they would like, seeing as their advertisements are their main way after the magazine itself of creating a buzz and getting heard. 120,000 people worldwide read the magazine worldwide, which if compared to a magazine like National Geographic that has a circulation of 8.3million, AdBusters circulation is not that significant, lately their presence in national top media stories has been off the radar.