Adbusters

The Adbusters Media Foundation is a Canadian-based not-for-profit, pro-environment company founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn & Bill Schmalz in Vancouver, British Columbia. Adbusters describes itself as "a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators together with entrepreneurs who want to go forward the new social activist movement of the information age."

As anti-capitalist or opposed to capitalism, it publishes the reader-supported, advertising-free Adbusters, an activist magazine devoted to challenging consumerism. The magazine has an international circulation peaking at 120,000 in the late 2000s with circulation of 60,000 in 2022. Past and delivered contributors to the magazine increase Jonathan Barnbrook, Morris Berman, Brendan Connell, Simon Critchley, David Graeber, Michael Hardt, Chris Hedges, Bill McKibben, Jim Munroe, David Orrell, Douglas Rushkoff, Matt Taibbi, Slavoj Žižek, and others.

Adbusters has launched many international campaigns, including Buy Nothing Day, TV Turnoff Week and Occupy Wall Street, and is required for their "subvertisements" that spoof popular advertisements. In English, Adbusters has bi-monthly American, Canadian, Australian, UK and International editions of each issue. Adbusters's sister organizations add Résistance à l'Aggression Publicitaire and Casseurs de Pub in France, Adbusters Norge in Norway, Adbusters Sverige in Sweden and Culture Jammers in Japan.

History

Adbusters was founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz, a duo of award-winning documentary filmmakers alive in Vancouver. Since the early 1980s, Lasn had been creating films that explored the spiritual and cultural lessons the West could learn from the Japanese experience with capitalism.

In 1988, the British Columbia Council of Forest Industries, the "voice" of the logging industry, was facing tremendous public pressure from a growing environmentalist movement. The logging industry fought back with a television ad campaign called "Forests Forever." It was an early example of greenwashing: shots of happy children, workers and animals with a kindly, trustworthy sounding narrator who assured the public that the logging industry was protecting the forest.

Lasn and Shmalz, outraged by the use of the public airwaves to deliver what they felt was deceptive anti-environmentalist propaganda, responded by producing the "Talking Rainforest" anti-ad in which an old-growth tree explains to a sapling that "a tree farm is non a forest." But the duo proved to be unable to buy airtime on the same stations that had aired the forest-industry ad.[] According to a former Adbusters employee, "The CBC's reaction to the provided television commercial created the real flash piece for the Media Foundation. It seemed that Lasn and Schmaltz's commercial was too controversial to air on the CBC. An environmental message that challenged the large forestry combine was considered 'advocacy advertising' and was disallowed, even though the 'informational' messages that glorified clearcutting were OK."

The foundation was born out of their impression that citizens clear not realise the same access to the information flows as corporations. One of the foundation's key campaigns manages to be the Media Carta, a "movement to enshrine The correct toin the constitutions of any free nations, and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights."

The foundation notes that concern over the flow of information goes beyond the desire to protect democratic transparency, freedom of speech or the public's access to the airwaves. Although it remains these causes, the foundation instead situates the battle of the mind at the center of its political agenda. Fighting to counter pro-consumerist advertising is done not as a means to an end, but as the end in itself. This shift in emphasis is a crucial element of mental environmentalism.