From carrie at stayfreemagazine.org Sun Feb 4 15:49:49 2001 From: carrie at stayfreemagazine.org (Carrie McLaren) Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2001 16:49:49 -0400 Subject: Stay Free! | 5 February 2001 Message-ID: NEW YORK EVENT - FEB 23 New York University is having a one-day conference on anti-corporate activism ("culture jamming") this month, and so in an effort to combat my #1 phobia (not counting cockroaches), I'm going to give a little talk.....so will Reverend Billy and folks from Billionaires for Bush or Gore, Dyke Action Machine, and Green Maps, and others. Friday, Feb. 23 FREE! NYU, Jurow Hall, Main Building 100 Washington Square East For more details look here: http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/media/html/cultjamsch.html GAG OF THE WEEK In an effort to insure that its embarrassing reality show "Temptation Island" has no redeeming value whatsoever, Fox Broadcasting has refused to run a commercial for a contraceptive (a spermicide called Encare) during the program. According to a Fox rep, quoted in WSJ 2/1/01, the network doesn't run ads for birth control products _unless they mention disease_. (!) Too bad this bizarre logic (promiscuity is fine but contraception isn't?!) doesn't apply the Fox's programming or maybe we'd REALLY have something fun to watch; imagine the inhabitants of Temptation Island having to discuss gonorrhea before sleeping with one of the models. SUPERBOWL Competition for the worst Superbowl commercial this year was FIERCE, particularly among ads catering to a singular theme: "people bad, products good." Three commercials went for cheap yuks by portraying paramours who lie to or kill their sweetie (a guy fakes sick so he can ditch his wife and ride around in an SUV; a woman disposes of her couch potato boyfriend/husband with the help of a vacuum cleaner; and an office slug sits and tosses pencils in the ceiling to avoid going out with his SO). But the grand prize goes to the Pepsi spot in which a young white guy subjects himself to--gross!--sitting next to people on the subway. He copes by fantasizing about leaping into an ad that he sees on the train and joining the scantily clad bathing beauties pictured therein. Unfortunately for our hero, his vision is ruined when he imagines the people on the subway in the pool with him. (At which point I fantasized about getting the woman from a Snickers commercial to drop a couch on him.) Oh, will the comedy ever end... NEW ON THE SITE Just added piece by Jay Huber from the most recent issue of the magazine: The High Cost of Free Speech: In US courts, freedom of speech increasingly means freedom to advertise http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/17/freespeech.html Also, for those keeping track of the free speech issue, there's a new case worth noting: A guy in California, Mark Kasky, has filed suit against Nike for false advertising. The false statements in question were about Nike's labor practices -- they did not appear in ads, but were in press releases, letters to university presidents, and Nike's web pages. This raises some interesting questions: can PR campaigns be held accountable to the same "truth" standards as advertising? Or will commercial speech, in this instance, be considered political speech, which is protected as free speech? If the distinction between commercial speech and free speech holds, then it would be illegal for the commercial party--Nike--to lie but not necessarily its critics. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/12/29/MN1 34078.DTL A curious sidenote: the ACLU has weighed in on the matter -- in support of Nike. The ACLU has filed an "amicus curiae" brief stating that the company's speech cannot "be denied full First Amendment protection on the ground that the communication may also bring commercial benefit to the speaker." In other words, the ACLU says that Nike and other corporations should be allowed to lie to the public about labor practices, under the First Amendment. Anyway, the ACLU's position on this one reminds me of a particularly prescient ONION article: "ACLU Defends Nazi's Right To Burn Down ACLU Headquarters" http://www.theonion.com/onion3211/acludefends.html more later, carrie From carrie at stayfreemagazine.org Mon Feb 19 20:06:21 2001 From: carrie at stayfreemagazine.org (Carrie McLaren) Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2001 21:06:21 -0400 Subject: Stay Free! | 20 February Message-ID: howdy, here are some new items: Stay Free "Ad creep" Video Clip http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/17/video.html Here's a little video of Julie Caniglia and me, from a Canadian TV show called Media Television. It's a brief tour of Manhattan ad creep. Unfortunately, UNC's server is very sloooooow. If you have any problems, kindly try back later. Many thanks to Mark Sundeen for sending this poignant classified ad (for a "mission style" building) that ran in his newspaper: http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/public/index.html - - - - - - - - - - NEW FROM THE LAST ISSUE OF THE MAGAZINE (Subscribe and you'll get this stuff a year earlier: http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/order.html ) "Grave Revisionism: Advertising Claims the Dead" by Carrie McLaren & Jeff Hyslop http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/17/dead_celebs.html In the past couple of years, everyone from Einstein to Ghandi has been given new life-selling products. No doubt many of the exhumed, having acheived fame through the old-fashioned method of doing rather than promoting, are rolling over in their graves. By the time Madison Avenue gets through with them, we may have a tough time recognizing them. "Hm, was Einstein the one who sold computers or french fries?" ALBERT EINSTEIN "The trite objects of human efforts-possessions, outward success, luxury-have always seemed to me contemptible." (Apple Computers; Nikon cameras; Coca-Cola; an unnamed hair-loss product; many others) ALDOUS HUXLEY "Popular philosophy . . . is now molded by the writers of advertising copy, whose one idea is to persuade everybody to be as extroverted and uninhibitedly greedy as possible, since of course it is only the possessive, the restless, the distracted, who spend money on the things that advertisers want to sell." (Bass Ale) MARTIN LUTHER KING "The profit motive, when it is the basis of an economic system, encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition that inspires men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life." (Coca-Cola, Coors; Sears, Roebuck & Co.; AT&T; many others) MALCOLM X "Show me a capitalist and I'll show you a bloodsucker." (X cigarettes; "X" clothing line) RALPH WALDO EMERSON "For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred." (American General Corp.) CHE GUEVERA "In culture, capitalism has given all that it had to give and all that remains of it is the foretaste of a bad-smelling corpse; in art, its present decadence." (Che Beer; Swatch watch) JOHN LENNON "Money doesn't matter, it never did. Money is just another trap . . . It makes you sexy and intelligent and talented in a flash, poof! And it's a lie." (Apple Computer; One2One) GHANDI "What is a man if he is not a thief who openly charges as much as he can for the goods he sells?" (Apple Computer) HENRY DAVID THOREAU "Trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from Heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business." (This one's an honorable mention: not his image, but his name and a quote were used by Jeep) - - - - - ATTN: ADVERTISERS Since advertisers like dead people so much, here's a list of people you SHOULD use in commercials. Unlike the folks on the previous page, these guys would have loved to pitch products. -- Carrie McLaren http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/17/moredead.html JOSEPH McCARTHY (1908-1957) Joseph McCarthy did the advertising industry a huge favor, however inadvertently, by igniting the 1950s Communist witchhunt that purged Hollywood of talent. Those who lost their jobs were welcomed to Madison Avenue, where--unlike films or movies--their work appeared anonymously. Adding to his natural business appeal, McCarthy attacked public housing as a Communist plot. Although it will be noted that McCarthy was paunchy, pasty, and balding, he did lure viewers to TV screens. EDWARD BERNAYS (1891-1995) The godfather of corporate PR found his calling with Damaged Goods, a play about the dangers of venereal disease. Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud and, like his uncle, probed the depths of the human psyche. Bernays, however, saw his mission as uplifting the moronic majority (on behalf of corporate sponsors) and this perspective colored everything he did, from promoting mass persuasion techniques to affectionately nicknaming his house servant "Dumb Jack." H.H. HOLMES (1861-1896) Nineteenth-century psychopath Holmes amassed a fortune through insurance fraud and drugstore management. He then bought a hundred-room mansion equipped with gas chambers, trap doors, acid vats, lime pits, fake walls, and secret entrances. During the 1893 World's Fair he rented rooms to visitors, who, after being forced to sign over their savings, were tortured, gassed, dismembered, skinned, and thrown down an elevator shaft (not necessarily in that order). As one of the first American serial killers, Holmes would assuredly have loved the media attention an endorsement deal could offer. FRANCIS GALTON (1822-1911) A leading intellectual of his day, Galton helped pioneer modern statistics. He is, however, less known for his creative math (including a statistical test of the efficacy of prayer) than his devotion to eugenics, his method of genetically improving humans through science. Galton advocated the regulation of marriage and family size according to the hereditary of parents. Although support for eugenics began to wane in the U.S. in the 1930s, some of Galton's ideas became a real hit in Germany. ERNEST BORGNINE (1917-?) Although Ernest Borgnine is not yet dead, he did star in BASEketball. - - - - - - - - - STAY FREE-RELATED EVENTS Friday, Feb. 23 Culture Jamming one-day conference @ NYU Speakers: Carrie from Stay Free!, Reverend Billy, Billionaires for Bush or Gore, Green Maps, Dyke Action, and more http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/media/html/cultjamsch.html International Forum on Globalization Sat. & Sun., Feb. 24 & 25 Hunter College, 695 Park Avenue New York City Stay Free! will have a table during the conference. (I'm not speaking, though) http://www.ifg.org Thurs, March 3: University of Delaware "Ad Creep and the Fight for Urban Space" Carrie McLaren, 12:15 pm, Graham Hall 187