Culture Jamming For A Difference

More recently we’ve started to feel a little discontented about the idea of culture jamming. Some of it just feels pointless: 30 people dressed in blue tops and khakis turning up at BestBuy achieves what exactly? And does dressing the walk-don’t-walk men on New York’s traffic signals really encourage us to walk rather than drive? Ok, some of it could be called art, but much of it is simply waste. What we’d like to see more of is Object Orange, we suppose - a project that pushes for real change.

Anyway, we only think of this a Rob Walker points us to a great anti-campaign by Greenpeace against Kleenex. Kleenex have been running one of those traveling shows where people can turn up and give their sad story to camera and then have a good cry into a Kleenex tissue. When they came to New York Greenpeace turned up and told the camera that what makes them sad is the forests being wiped out to make Kleenex.

Walker comments:

Obviously these confessionals won’t make it into an actual Kleenex ad, but videos made by the pranksters have gone up on YouTube, and have gotten some circulation on the Net. Could this spark a massive consumer backlash against Kleenex? I doubt it.

But that’s not exactly what the activists have in mind, or at least it’s not the whole picture. As one of the activists in the video explains: “A lot of their money that they spend on PR is put into campaigns like this. If we can show the shareholders that the money they’re using for this PR isn’t effective, and they’re wasting a lot of money, it’s gonna cause shareholders to hopefully back out and demand cleaner, more forest-friendly products.”

Kleercut from Greenpeace
Rob Walker