A CRITICAL APPROACH TO SOCIETY OF CONSUMPTION: CULTURE JAM AND SUBVERTISING

Advertisements are one of the most effective means of conveying values or images to consumers in a persuasive way. This effectiveness, which has attracted the attention of the opponents of marketing, together with the different interpretations of advertisements by anti-capitalist trends which have appeared in the postmodern period, has given rise to a new field of popular activism. This new field is a new type of criticism of consumer society which sees it as the culture jam, and which demands that advertisements produced to affect consumers for commercial purposes should be rewritten to reflect their stylistic and contextual characteristics. This study will examine in detail, giving supporting examples, the movement which has resulted in the integration of views opposed to consumer-focused marketing culture with activist trends and which is expressed as a culture jam, and the use of subvertising in this movement. It will also throw light on this new area of anticonsumption activism. In the framework of this study, content analysis is applied to the 74 ads which are taken from official web page of Adbusters Media Foundation. The content of the advertisements are analyzed in terms of their elements, topics, and tactics.