Adbusters Media Foundation (Canada)

The Adbusters Media Foundation (AMF) is a Vancouver-based activist organization with a [Page 4]number of progressive social, economic, and media-related agendas. The AMF, primarily through its bimonthly magazine Adbusters, is critical of the advertising industry, accusing it of promoting myriad social, environmental, and health problems that, it argues, are exacerbated through rampant consumerism. The AMF promotes a lifestyle critical of, and counter to, the consumerist frenzy. According to AMF's self-description, “We want to change the way information flows, the way corporations wield power and the way meaning is produced in society” (http://www.adbusters.org).

The AMF advocates for a number of economic and cultural issues. Media Carta is the AMF's own brand of advocating for media democracy. True Cost Economics argues for a new measure for economic progress. First Things First is a program targeting graphic designers and is aimed at promoting change from within the power structures where they work. Buy Nothing Day, an event held every year the day after Thanksgiving, urges people to reconsider and “downshift” their consumer lifestyle. Mental Detox Week (originally called TV Turnoff Week), encourages people to spend the time they would normally watch television, or engage any type of electronic media, with other activity. The AMF hopes that participation in Buy Nothing Day and Mental Detox Week can lead to larger transformations in people's lives.

Adbusters and the AMF have been closely aligned with the practice of culture jamming, especially in promoting and distributing subvertising texts within the pages of the magazine. The connection between culture jamming, Adbusters, and the AMF has been further solidified by cofounder Kale Lasn, who took to referring to the work he and his organization are doing as culture jamming. His 1999 book Culture Jamming outlines the tactics he argues will lead to a cultural revolution, with the AMF at the helm. By the late 2000s, the AMF oversaw the publication of Adbusters with a global circulation of 120,000.

The prominence of subvertising within the pages of Adbusters helped to build the magazine's reputation among progressive cultural activists. With the increasing cooptation of subvertising tactics by mainstream advertisers, however, the AMF, with Lasn's leadership, created the Blackspot “anticorporation,” a company which markets an ethically produced, Converse All-Star style sneaker called the Blackspot. According to late 2000s advertisements for Blackspot in Adbusters magazine, the brand aimed to expand into the music and restaurant businesses in order to promote local consumer cultures.