Images taken from punknews.org
The topic Culture Jamming reminded me of Nike's stint in using Minor Threat's album cover for a skateboarding advertising promotion (Nike's Major Threat Skate Tour) back in 2005. Does anyone know/remember this? Minor Threat was a hardcore punk band from the United States who projected the DIY subculture in their music. Based on my knowledge, the DIY (Do-It-Yourself) culture began as a punk and political movement decades ago which includes being anti multi-national corporations and mass productions etc. The band had been well-known for resisting against huge corporations such as Nike. Anyway, Nike used the band's iconic album cover without the band's permission which created a furore by band member Ian MacKaye. Nike apologized later on publicly saying that it was a 'poor judgement call'. You can read about it here.
Nike claimed that the band is iconic and used the album cover to attract skateboaders to the marketing campaign. Minor Threat may have been legendary amongst the punk community but how well do skateboarders nowdays actually know about the band in the first place? While some may argue that the main problem lies in Nike stealing the artwork without permission, the multi-billion dollar corporation had ultimately used it as a parody against the band. So the 'pop-culture marketers' had used the same strategy towards their own critics and made them taste their own medicine. Based on your previous judgements on culture jamming and ad parodies, is it now acceptable for the tables to be turned?
I thought it'd be interesting to bring this up for the tutorial discussion. Hope it's relevant enough. Have a good week!
1 comment:
This is an interesting idea. If you think about the Apple iPod parodies in last thursdays lecture, Apple is still getting some kind of advertising because people immediately identify the mockeries as puns of the original idea. I think it depends on how a coporation is attacked by culture jammers and what issues these jammers are trying to draw to our attention by their mockery. I can't think of any other examples (previously unmentioned) where mockery has been turned against the jammer by the original corp.
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