Berliners Attack Urban Spam

Spiegel Online reports on a trend in Berlin where a bunch of demonstrators are attacking outdoor marketing by doing things like cutting out people in advertecture ads or products themselves from billboards.

Electronics maker Samsung isn’t quite so relaxed about what is happening. The South Korean firm had the entire Charlottenburg Gate on Berlin’s main boulevard covered up in fabric ads featured a new mobile phone. Here too the models — male, in this case — were abducted from the poster. You can almost see them leaping energetically out of the ad. The entire wrapping of the gate cost the company between €150,000 and €200,000, according to Samsung’s spokesman Hong Lim. Such sums are no laughing matter for the electronics giant: The unknown activists were charged with wilful damage to property and the ad was quickly fixed up.

But the companies and the Berlin police are clueless as to who could be behind the adbusting. “It’s a new trend, and just a marginal one,” says Marko Moritz, a member of the Berlin police department that deals with graffiti. He adds that “overall,” the calculated defacement of ads is “not relevant at all.”…

Perhaps it was unavoidable that “guerrilla marketing” would be met with an even more extreme response from urban artists. The French “Anti-Advertizing Commando” movement recently scrawled “Shut Up” on posters in Paris and various provincial towns. Single letters stuck on ad slogans to change their meaning are another device popular with groups such as “Résistance à l’aggression publicitaire” (“Resistance Against Advertising Violence”) and “Stopub” (“Stop Ads”) — a device they use in their “holy war against consumer society and the terror of brands,” as the German conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has reported.

No one has claimed responsibility for the adbusting in Berlin so far. But it’s clear that Germans are also acting up against encroaching ads.

Visual Kidnappings: Adbusting in Berlin – International – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News

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