Adbusters sell out

Anti-consumerists Adbusters, the people who brought you Buy Nothing Day, seem to have become what they hated. They’ve launched their own brand, Blackspot, and launched two very consumerist product lines with it so far: shoes, and music.

No, wait: Blackspot is an “anti-brand”, or so they say. Usually, “anti-X” means the opposite of X - anti-Christ, anti-matter, anti-war, etc. However, Blackspot is actually just another brand. The opposite of brands and labels are more brands and labels, apparently. The only thing that Blackspot is “anti” is pre-existing brands, so consequently, Nike is the anti-Reebok, Tommy Hilfiger is the anti-Calvin Klein, Microsoft is the anti-Apple, Pepsi is the anti-Coke, etc. Everything is anti-everything-else. Hmmm. Sounds like marketing hype to me, and nothing particularly new, either.

These Blackspot shoes are supposedly “made from organic, vegetarian, and recycled materials in a Portuguese union shop”, but when they say “recycled”, they fail to mention that that really means “70% recycled“. Selective information? Excessive hype? Exactly why do these people call themselves “anti-marketing”, again?

“Everything about the Blackspot, from its red toe tip and hand-drawn anti-logo to its renegade billboards and TV ads, is designed to do one thing: kick megacorporate ass.” Why, so you can inherit their mantle? Doesn’t sound like a particularly innovative deal! We swapped Woolworth’s for Sears, Sega for Sony, IBM for Microsoft, Oldsmobile for Honda, and now you have another swap to propose. Old news.

“Buy a pair and become a voting shareholder in The Blackspot Anticorporation.” Is this an “anti-corporation” in the same way as your “anti-brand” - basically, just another corporation? “Together, we’ll revolutionize footwear, and then move on to “Blackspot” other industries — Big Music, fast food, coffee shops, clothing.” So, like everyone else in the marketing/retail world, you want to expand your industries and product lines and outdo your competitors.

“Marrying a passion for social activism with grassroots antipreneurial zeal, we’ll rearrange the ugly face of corporate capitalism.” And by that, they’ll mean they’ll just swap the corporations around. However, the free market does that perfectly well without anti-consumer activists. Countless companies have disappeared or fallen by the wayside, like A&P or Diners Club, both of which were once the dominant players in their industries by far.

The only thing that Adbusters have changed is themselves: into just another hype-marketing, logo-obsessed retail corporation. That was a short “revolution”. It seems to have become an “anti-revolution”, and not in the meaning found in the Abusters Bizarro Dictionary, either.