Trey Patterson 12/09/11
Adbusters Magazine
Today I’m here to talk about the magazine called Adbusters. What is Adbusters? well it is a Canadian-based nonprofit, pro environment and anti consumerist organization founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalzin Vancouver, British Columbia. Adbusters is self described as a gobal network of artists, writers, educators, pranksters and more who just wants to advance the new social activist movement to the younger generations. Adbuster has numerous international campaigns, including buy nothing day and Occupy Wall Street. Adbusters usually have a specialty of making spoofs of other extremely popular advertisements that we would see each and every day. Adbusters is a bi monthly magazine so every other month it comes out with two months posted on the cover of it. I believe that adbusters is worth subscribing to because of the variety of there magazine.
Adbusters anti-advertises, has different campaigns that people could join in on and just as the name implies, it puts you in mind of mad tv magazine how they spoof everything from tv shows to even advertisements and makes them look very stupid and funny to look at. Also Adbusters was a part of the highly talked about Digital Turnoff week which told people to spend seven days with any electronic devices, and the whole Occupy Wall Street. Adbusters promoted occupying on Wall Street as an ad of theirs urged people to bring a tent. I personally like how adbusters handled things because the company doesn’t care about what everyone thinks it cares about what everyone is going to think. Another funny thing about the wonderful Adbusters is the fact that even though the name has ad in it, adbusters is entirely ad free.
Adbusters is open free to the people on their website as you can view their magazine to your hearts content. They use a variety of type fonts and sizes to explain their points to the consumers. This one ad that I was looking at said “Rick Perry for President” and under it said that he would put America back to work and under that in a tiny sized font they put “and make the airplanes run on time” which I found to be hilarious. This is the type of ad busting that adbusters do, it’s not too crude or too rash but a little criticism and funny add on’s to the ad to make it more funny in general. Also in the magazine they show a good amount of random pictures like a guy lying out in the street for no apparent reason and people walking past him. When I saw that I enjoyed the symbolism because it shows that there must be no jobs and it’s hard to make it out there in the world now and days. I enjoyed a picture like this over a make-up advertisement any day because to me it’s just to get people attention to buy a product rather than people seeing what’s going on around them in the world and the economy today.
In my own little experience with magazines I used to subscribe to game informer, which is a videogame magazine that you could get and subscribe to from GameStop, I would enjoy and read every single month it came in. I would always see a game I would like and would want to buy it immediately, my next paycheck even, as long as I bought the game with good reviews. Well when I have gotten older II actually landed a job at GameStop and was told I had to sell the magazine. Come to find out the magazine is full of ads and games that people would want to by only just to put them into a huge circle of never ending game buying, so on my own I learned that game informer was a magazine for profit.
Well with my viewing of adbusters self handily I recommend it a whole lot better than any other magazine people would see out there. Adbusters uses a unique way to keep people interested by using cool up to date graphic arts and cool stylish fonts. Adbusters is a magazine you could use to escape reality and notice what’s going on in it oddly enough. I belive that adbusters is highly underrated because of its bi-monthly rate and it’s no advertisements, because advertising other people’s ads help the magazine out a lot in the marketing process. All in all Adbusters is a very different and unique way of doing graphics, news, humor, education, and more in a simple real time magazine. I hope that people can see what I saw in this magazine and notice the variety in it.
