Taking a Closer Look at Visa: The Subvertising Project

The Project: Take an ad or series of ads and remix or subvert it.

Ethical and Rhetorical Goals:


In receiving this project, defining my approach came naturally. Part of the process of starting the subvertising/remix assignment required going in a specific direction with the original material; I choose Visa almost right away, so choosing to subvert the message rather than remix the ad to improve it seemed the most appropriate way to go. Choosing to subvert the message "Life Takes Visa" was important for two reasons: the first is that I found the ad campaign to be compelling advertising. The second reason is because of our present financial meltdown, especially with the housing market in the States and society's compulsion to exceed their income (more often than not). Specifically, I wanted to go in the direction that Naomi Klein describes in "Culture Jamming: Ads Under Attack", which describes the particulars of culture jamming and how it is successful:

"The most sophisticated culture jams are not stand-alone ad parodies but interceptions -- counter messages that hack into a corporation's own method of communication to send a message starkly at odds with the one that was intended. The process forces the company to foot the bill for its own subversion, either literally, because the company is the one that paid for the billboard, or figuratively, because anytime people mess with a logo, they are tapping into the vast resources spent to make that logo meaningful" (281).

This quotation governed and shaped the methods and tools I used to subvert my own project, as well as aided in overcoming several of the creative obstacles I faced in designing and subvertising each ad's message. In explaining my process step-by-step I will reference this quote among other of Klein's thoughts.

Before diving into the technical and creative developments of the process, it is important to take a moment to examine the pre-design goals, specifically in terms of ethics and rhetoric surrounding Visa as a company and the services they provide. Stripping the company down to the basics are along the lines of the following: the company lends money to their cardholders via a bank, under certain terms of agreement that involve grace periods for money-repayment, a specific interest rate subject to increases (or on occasion decreases) and penalty fees, annual fees, etc. that are subjected upon late payment, under-payment or the amount of debt in general. While these variables are different for each person, the tendencies for detriment to the card holder are often imminent and inevitable.

A credit card can be a positive force in a disciplined user. If the card-holder uses the card limitedly and within their income, the card introduces good credit and freedom to purchase larger expenses in smaller increments: purchasing a fridge, for instance, will benefit from credit by paying it in instalments that are within the consumer’s monthly means. A person who is unable to afford a meal at a restaurant, however, will be at the mercy of high interest rates and late fees upon purchasing something they cannot afford.
The result is a company that caters to the consumer-driven society of North America (and beyond). Visa, as a prominent credit company, represents the very act of living beyond one’s means, in exceeding one’s grasps, in getting over your head. While it often gives its customer’s the freedom to make purchases, it also can place the same person in the bonds of debt and bankruptcy. A credit card for many is a ticket into the competition: immersing oneself in brand names and products in ways that they become a part of their identity and value. In subverting the messages that Visa advertises to its card-holders and potential customers, I wanted to address consumerism as a whole but also credit cards in particular. The first message I found important in Visa’s series of “Life Takes Visa” ads is their false sense of freedom. The second message I found important was Visa’s alluring power to satisfy immediate gratification. The third and final message I choose to subvert is Visa’s ability to avoid the technical and problematic features of their credit plans, and in subverting it, making the viewer aware of their need for carefulness and awareness about interest rates and personal budget plans. Rhetorically, I wanted to be as Klein suggests: starkly at odds with their message. The idea at large seemed simple; the execution of each ad was difficult. With respect to the wide range of culture jammers out there; I wanted to fall somewhere in the middle. Obviously in posting my project on a media influenced website is testament to this (unlike some radicals who even refuse interviews with “the corporate press”, for instance). But I can appreciate a jammer purist, who believes that “like punk itself, [subvertising] must remain something of a porcupine; that to defy its own inevitable commodification, it must keep its protective quills sharp” (296). This quote reiterating my choice of Visa (the face and means of consumerism), as it explains the delicate nature of subvertising as well as the power consumerism has; the power to transform even the forces that seek to challenge it.

The Process:


Initial Plans and Group Work

My initial reactions to the ads were that they inspired. I felt a genuine attraction to the messages Visa were sending: Life Takes Mystery, Expression, Inspiration, Individuality, etc. Furthermore, the images invoke natural, organic processes of life: schools, children, snow, gardening and art. The second reaction was to Visa’s ability to assume involvement in these processes. By stating “Life Takes Visa”, the company becomes the source of everyday living. You cannot live with it.

Here are the original ads:











In looking to subverting their message, my immediate reaction was to flip the phrase to “Visa Takes Life”; insinuating that Visa drains you of resources rather than frees you to engage in activity. Although I liked the phrase, I felt it was too drastic. To claim that Visa takes life almost sounded murderous to me. This changed when engaging in group discussion in class and presenting my vague and inarticulate thought process to my group. When mentioning the obvious shift in words, the group found it very effective and great starting point in mounting a subvertising series. The group work also helped by suggesting using other photos rather than the ones used in the Visa ads themselves, and also to use a few of the photos to highlight their detriments rather than their positive aspects (for instance, we discussed the photo of the boy’s tongue on the pole, and how this image in its literal form is quite disadvantageous to the boy despite Visa’s message to go for it). We discussed our general issues as well; the importance of maintaining a sense of the original design (as important to the definition of “culture jamming”) and the means of conveying information without disrupting that integrity. The three other companies I remember as being Bounty paper towels, TELUS, and Windows 7. At the time, I felt my project was much weaker in terms of furthering it in a given direction, but their images, approaches and ideas for their own projects helped direct my creativity. This was especially helpful for picking which images to subvert, since Visa has launched more than one campaign using “Life Takes Visa”.

The First Stab at It

I used Gimp to subvert each advertisement, although sometimes I would use Photoshop Elements 9 to make small adjustments where Gimp could not. I chose Gimp because it was free, simple to use, and had most of the features I needed. Right at the beginning, I chose one of the ads (the one with the clearest pixels that I could find online) and made a “Visa Takes Life” template: an image with the slogan that I could insert onto any of the advertisements I was working on. This made it simple to begin each project. I would start by erasing the original slogan, often with the clone tool on either Gimp or Photoshop. This tool is simple but painstaking: you select a section of the image to transfer to another place. This was handy in every image, but it required careful drawing on each image. This was usually the longest process. The other obstacle was brainstorming additional taglines for each advertisement. This is where most of the message is conveyed, or at least connects the original image to the new slogan. I found it extremely difficult to find something short to say that conveyed the fullest meaning. I also didn’t resort to a tagline initially. I really wanted to find a way to convey the subverted message visually, but this turned out to be difficult. Here is my first attempt at the project, which took much longer than expected (on account of teaching myself Gimp):







This first attempt had several problematic features. The message and context of the subversion was only understandable in juxtaposition with the original ad. The bill attempts to show the other side of story: the snowboarder has to pay for the trip, the ski lift pass, the snowboard, theoretically paid for by a credit card. Pulling at straws, perhaps, but the top photo conveyed two things in my eyes: the angle of the camera drew on the idea of “perspective” and the bill also connects bills to snowboarding.

The Second Attempt


After this first try, I decided (also at the suggestion of peers and Professor Jay) that a series of ads might be more effective than one or two. This made more sense afterwards, as it would make the work load slightly easier in terms of technical work (the same “Visa Takes Life” is placed on each ad) as well as a more powerful overarching message the five ads send combined. Each tag line served a couple purposes too, one that it ties the message together, but also combine the visual image to the message. After all, many of the images relate to the 2007 winter Olympics, and that context is irrelevant today.











Final Thoughts


In a lot of ways I feel this project doesn’t project a lot of the thought and work that I put into it, but I wonder if that is part of the art of advertising in general. A lot of the ideas behind my critique of Visa are limited by the nature of the image, the slogan and need for simplicity. From a technical perspective, my one issue I wasn't able to overcome is the low quality some of the images were originally. In subverting them, the rearranging often left the image a little pixalated or unclear, especially with the longer words like "individuality" and "perspective". But I think that my understanding of Visa’s unscrupulous system and the issues with their advertising correlates well with the readings thus far in this class about advertising. I don’t know that I have been always effective in translating that understanding to the subvertisements. Is adding tag-lines that didn’t exist before unnecessary? Is there a more appropriate means of achieving the message visually as opposed to textually? These are the kinds of questions I asked myself upon “completing” the project, although I am aware I can revise at a later date. Overall I think that I am generally successful in turning the message around. Studying the way credit card debt works has also been educational in terms of my own financial well-being, and learning about the system at large. My ideas about Visa haven’t changed much either in researching credit cards. If anything, the subvertising project has re-emphasized how dependant we are on consumerism to survive. Whether this is good or bad, the problematic elements of Visa seem inevitable.

Finally, here is the signed contract concerning honesty in design work for this project:

Advertising Ethics

After all of the readings I've read through for this course on advertising, what code, what rules, and what moral compass do I think advertisers should steer by?
I think advertisers need to be intensely aware of the vulnerabilities of their audience. In a perfect world, advertisers would only promote products and services that truly benefit the consumer in a positive, life-enhancing way. Is this possible? No, because even the most well-intended advertiser will sell a product into the wrong hands. Another impossibility that factors into perfecting advertising is the inability to discover all the nuances of humanity coupled with mass marketing. It can’t be done: marketing relies on stereotypes to sell products on a wide-spread scale. Like Twitchell mentions in his article “What We Are to Advertisers” he writes: “Mass production means mass marketing, and mass marketing means the creation of mass stereotypes” (192). Perhaps to perfect advertising is to remove it from its own definition; to advertise is to brand the consumer, to manipulate our capacity to create meaningful connections between our endless systems of symbolic action. It is also difficult to define a moral compass because I recognize my own intricate involvement in the system of consumerism. It feels very inescapable. I felt this acutely when reading Twitchell’s breakdown of the types of consumers: actualizers, experiencers, achievers, etc. This paradigm breaks down so called individualism to mere patterns of behaviour controlled by our need for meaning and establishes a place more prestigious or unique than our neighbours (coworkers, friends, family, etc.).
The more I think about what moral compass or rules advertisers should live by, the more complicated I find the network of participants in the advertising world. From a semiotic or rhetorical standpoint, especially a postmodern one, the process of persuading and selling is a basic way to analyze how we create meaning. The corruption, perhaps then, isn’t in the advertisement of any given product, but the choices the individuals who read the messages make. I don’t mean to say this as a cop out for really creating a system of rules for advertisers, rather, I believe the power that advertising has is completely fuelled by its consumers. No matter how persuasive Coca Cola is, it is our own individual decision to prefer it over Pepsi, as the study showed in Sandra Blakeslee’s article: “...when the same people were told what they were drinking [who had originally chosen by taste when the brand was unknown], activity in a different set of brain regions linked to brand loyalty overrode their original preference” (198). I think the word loyalty is an interesting word to associate with brands, because it is more often associated with relationships. But the bonds that we create (bonds signifying meaning) with products give us value. If this is innately true of our nature, that we need the value that comes from the bonds we create, then maybe this isn’t always a bad thing. Therefore, advertisers should be primarily seeking to create product-consumer bonds that create higher levels of positive value in their purchaser. If a company is honest and serving a product that is to the utmost benefit to its demographic, then let them use the most rhetorically apt means possible to them. The rhetoric is not the problem by itself. Everything in moderation, right?

My Worth to Facebook

The viral loop application on Facebook is an interesting one: it calculates your worth to the social networking website Facebook and your influence over your friends on it, as well as how valuable your social network is. I predicted before calculating my worth to Facebook that it would be fairly low: although an avid Facebook user, I am more of a browser than a contributor to its world. So when I discovered my loop value was $120, I wasn't too surprised. Most of my friends on Facebook are of the same general age and influence as myself: mostly students, young and just starting out. It was interesting to note that the viral loop application doesn't just take into account how influential you are as a person; it's also about who you know. Of the odd 400 people on my Facebook, I'm only generating 120 dollars. There are a few aspects of my social network that could account for this. One is that most of my acquaintances (because lets be serious, I hardly know everyone on Facebook intimately) are from Southern Ontario. In terms of Facebook's overreaching numbers, it is a small demographic. It makes you wonder what kinds of elements a Facebook user needs to increase its value; a variety of friends or perhaps a larger quantity of friends. Another element to this algorithm they mention on the app is your activity levels. Without looking at any type of banner advertisements on Facebook, one can just look at their news feed. I have a friend on Facebook who consistently posts website links, youtube videos, comic strips to their wall, and almost always takes over my news feed. I wonder how much he is worth to Facebook compared to myself. Looking at my activity, I often will go days without making any sort of comments or postings or status updates even though I go on the website daily. But all this aside, Facebook can be seen as the ultimate in mouth to mouth advertisement, it’s constantly updating you on what everyone you know is doing, thinking, liking, not liking, and therefore buying. It’s the subtlest of sellers, and it does so through your friends instead of through a commercial.

Internet Advetising: Multiplayer Online Games

When discussing advertisements and their effectiveness in class, there has been an agreement on the causation of successful ad campaigns and strategies: the more interactive and sophisticated the ad, the more likely it is to persuade its audience. When thinking about the kinds of interactive ads I have come across in my own experience, online gaming definitely came to mind. Between the ages of 10 and 15 loved playing Neopets, a gaming website geared towards kids with the objective to take care of one or several neopets, increasing your neopoints to further its needs and your prosperity in the neopets world. It’s interesting because these kinds of games, especially simulating or mimicking rpg games, these web games train their users to accumulate and expand, find ways to increase their value through buying and selling to upgrade their pets abilities and health. Neopets was able to make money also by allowing companies to create fake neoproducts that you can buy and sell on the website. And so Neopet users simulate marketing behaviour. I went on the website again today to see if it has changed much and logged into my old account. Now under my pet’s information page (which indicated all my pets were starving and dying from neglect!) there are advertisements for WSPA stating: “if you love animals, please help free them from cruelty”. Advertisements of this kind didn’t exist when I used the game website frequently about 9 or 10 years ago. Not only does the website train kids for consumerism, but it gears its ads in specific and calculating ways to incorporate messages while interacting with its various components.
Another website that uses simulation to sell in a kid’s online game is Toontown. I also was addicted to Toontown back in the day, a couple years after my year or two playing Neopets, probably around the age of 13 or 14. The best thing about Toontown is your toon’s adversaries are these robotic creatures called Cogs that have names that pun consumerism terms (for instance, the Cashbots have names like “Bean Counter”, “Loan Shark” and “Robber Baron”). The toons have to fight these greedy robots who love money and paperwork (as described by the website’s Player’s Guide which I looked up). This is all very ironic because as you defeat these cogs, you increase your value as a player, which can be traded for beans and you can upgrade your wardrobe, your home (by calling the Cattle Log...awesome). While intending to teach children about the problems with greed, it rewards its players by making them constantly consume and increase their wealth. This is all increased by the fact that the game is online and you interact with other plays not unlike World of Warcraft, which has similar goals for its players. These kinds of websites are based on the idea that we are innately built for consumption; its what makes the players keep playing the game. This game’s entire focus is to promote the Disney universe, while its players interact with such characters as Mickey Mouse, Minney, Donald, Goofey, etc. An entire interactive universe that can be played for free to promote a company. And it works.

Banksy makes us think ; Ads make us act.

The philosophy and morality behind infamous street artist Banksy is compelling; he points out the flaws of society in poignant and graphic ways. The popularity of his kind of work has increased over the years as well. Personally I've known of Banksy for years, often by word of mouth discussion in high school about his "cool" work. It's interesting to see these as subvertising expressions; granted they make you think, but do they make you act like advertising does. Before exploring this idea more-so, I can say that Bansky and other subvertisers and culture jammers do play an invaluable role in battling the advertising bombardment; as Klein describes: "the belief among jammers that concentration of media ownership has successfully devalued the right to free speech by severing it from the right to be heard". Within the very act of manipulating an ad creates awareness that advertising's rights have become culturally accepted and inevitable. But it is a step. The problem then is that advertising is infinitely more subtle, especially in the last ten or twenty years with the development of postmodern thinking and culture.

Although subvertising like Banksy's graffiti-like artwork about environmental issues, consumerism and education is powerful, it proposes to its viewers that there are problems with North American (and European) society that need drastic solutions. The molehill becomes a mountain when the message is heard: to boycott a product or buy organic food; or to invest time and energy into a local project for better education opportunities can inspire a person to think but not necessarily to act. I suppose this thesis comes from an idea that human nature tends to be inherently selfish. While someone might see Banksy's BP oil statue another person sees a commercial on TV for the new BMW 7 Series Sedan. We thrive on climbing social ladders to convince ourselves we matter. It's difficult to see beyond that so much of time. Awareness of this human phenomenon doesn’t make it go away; I still buy the brands I like to wear even though I am intensely aware of the branding conspiracy. A culture jammer like Banksy therefore comes up against not only against the faceless Madison Avenue conglomerate but against a larger force at work: human tendency. I like what Kalle Lasn (of Adbusters) has to say in the Klein article about culture jamming, society and human nature: “we are culture “addicted to toxins” that are poisoning our bodies, our “mental environment” and our planet.” Perhaps as he suggests, we need constant bombardment of the kind of work Banksy and others produce in order to see a paradigm shift in our public consciousness. I’d like to say we might see this within the next generation as we educate ourselves about the kinds of discourse advertisers use, but I think it’s safe to say adbusters have one big enemy that’s not going to make it easy: us.

Re-edit.

To see further thoughts on Kilbourne, see "The Science Behind Beauty".

Advertising: Culture and Identity

There are particular moments that I can look back upon and think to myself "yes, that advertisement directly affected my thinking"; something basic like going and buying an ice cap from Tim Horton’s after seeing one on TV. However, I think it's safer to assume that advertising that has influenced our culture as a whole has had a deeper and more subtle effect on my personality and identity more-so than any individual ad I have seen, read, or watched.
This idea was reinforced by reading the article by Kilbourne and her examination of the cultural norms reiterated by perceptions portrayed in ads everywhere. By explaining the “more you subtract, the more you add” strategy behind advertising, to see its affect in your own life can be staggering. I can now look back and see decisions I have made based on the idea that my identity or personality is lacking in a way based on a culturally perceived norm; such as being quieter (such as on page 138 of the article, which talks about a perfume ad using the copy “Make a statement without saying a word”). It’s subtle, but it’s a worthwhile observation: based on cultural ideas about girls, I’ve even found myself more apt to find a girl obnoxious and a guy funny even though both might be acting in the exact same manner. Can anyone else say they have felt the same way about this kind of behaviour?
In the same way, I expect certain behaviours from guys based on the norms reinforced in advertisement. Whether these norms are right or wrong are not the point of this observation, but nonetheless they exist, such as expecting a broader knowledge on cars, brands and their parts, or brands of beer. I like beer, but I still innately find it to be more of a male drink even when drinking it. Is this a result of advertising solely? Or has advertising taking an existing cultural idea and made it stronger.

Reiteration of cultural norms in advertising can be applied beyond gender stereotypes. One that comes to mind is environmentalism. (Disclaimer: I do not think environmentalism is a bad thing!) But I do see the effects advertising has on the Western cultural ideas about pro-Earth agendas. Something like the following global warning advertisement (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-_LBXWMCAM ) reinforces ideas about the Earth and humanity. By associating the little girl with future generations, there is a sense that by protecting the planet, we can protect the innocence of generations to come. Whether true or not, replacing a whole generation of people with the image of a little girl influences our thinking. From a semiotic point of view, we begin to replace ideas with associated images, arbitrary or not (indexical or symbolic) to form ideas and truths. Good, bad, right or wrong, it stands to say that I have been personally affected by advertising on a level that I can’t even fully deconstruct.