March 28, 2024

The Branding of the Occupy Movement

But he did brand it.

Last summer, as uprisings shook the Middle East and much of the world economy struggled, Mr. Lasn and several colleagues at the small magazine felt the moment was ripe to tap simmering frustration on the American political left.

On July 13, he and his colleagues created a new hash tag on Twitter: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET. They made a poster showing a ballerina dancing on the back of the muscular sculptured bull near Wall Street in Manhattan.

For some people they were just words and images. For Mr. Lasn, they were tools to begin remodeling the “mental environment,” to create a new “meme,” the term coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins for a kind of transcendent cultural message.

“There’s a number of ways to wage a meme war,” Mr. Lasn, whose name is pronounced KAL-luh LAS-en, said in an interview. “I believe that one of the most powerful things of all is aesthetics.”

Mr. Lasn, who helped found Adbusters in 1989, had spent much of his career skewering corporate America, creating “subvertising” campaigns like “Joe Chemo,” which deftly mocked the Joe Camel cigarette ads of the 1990s.

But the spread of the Occupy protests signals a substantial step up for the magazine and Mr. Lasn, who is 69. The protests, he hopes, will “somehow change the power balance and make the world into a much more grass-roots, bottom-up kind of a place rather than the top-down Wall Street mega-corporate-driven system we now have.”

“This,” he added, “is the kind of dream many Occupiers have.”

Mr. Lasn was born in Estonia but his family fled near the end of World War II, when he was 2. His family lived in refugee camps in Europe before moving to Australia. He worked for several years for the Australian defense department, before moving to Japan and shifting to advertising.

By the 1970s, he had landed in Vancouver, disenchanted with what he felt was the moral detachment of the advertising industry. After working as a documentary filmmaker — and butting heads with the Canadian government and media over logging practices in old-growth forests — he founded Adbusters in 1989.

The magazine, which is owned by the nonprofit Adbusters Media Foundation, is published out of the basement of a house south of downtown and claims a circulation of about 70,000, mostly from newsstand sales outside of Canada. It has had prominent writers, among them Christopher Hedges and Bill McKibben.

But with its vivid artwork and photography, snippets of poetry and glossy fake ads with slogans like “Everything is fine, keep shopping,” Adbusters feels less like a manifesto than an evocative brochure, for $8.95 an issue.

“It’s an art object,” said Deborah Campbell, a former associate editor. “When you look at art it speaks to you in different ways, and some of it is intellectual and some of it is provocative and some of it is a sense or a feeling.”

Before Occupy Wall Street, Adbusters had many smaller campaigns, including “Buy Nothing Day.” For years it has sold Blackspot shoes, made in an “antisweatshop’ facility in Pakistan. Mr. Lasn has written books, including “Culture Jam: How to Reverse America’s Suicidal Consumer Binge — and Why We Must.”

It has struck some people as strange that a Canadian magazine helped start the Occupy movement, but Adbusters is only based in Canada, not focused on it.

“Everybody knows it’s here but it’s not a local magazine,” said David Beers, the editor of The Tyee, an online news Web site based here. “He isn’t a local figure. It’s not like he’s on the morning radio. You never hear about the guy unless he’s in a fight with someone.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=56c25e84ddca28346ffe32d8569f61b5