What do you get when you combine a master storyteller and investigative journalist? Mike Daisey is one answer, a storyteller and performer whose story about what happens inside an Apple factory is touching hearts and minds.
After his visit to China, tours of factories, and meetings with union organizers and members of secret unions (which are illegal in China), Daisey created the remarkable performance “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory“.
Daisey usually performs for live audiences, but This American Life recorded a shortened version and interviewed Daisey (as part of their show) and did their own fact checking of Daisey’s account.
The upshot is that — for those who were still in doubt — Apple products, like so much of what we buy, come to us at great human cost.
A sexist Volkswagen ad speaks to the dangers of North America's corporate car culture. (Illustration by Coco Riot.)
[Update: Just hours after this story was first published, Volkswagen and their production partners have removed the video in question from their YouTube and Vimeo pages. Fortunately, we found another copy of the video, which is embedded below.]
Over recent weeks, viewing news updates at CBC online has become increasingly frustrating, due to a high-rotation, pre-roll spot given to an intensely sexist Volkswagen Canada ad for the 2012 Passat, which appears regularly prior to CBC video content.
Titled “It pretty much sells itself”, the Volkswagen ad, featured by Canada’s public broadcaster, is rooted in an offensively sexist storyline and unintentionally points to many intrinsic problems of car culture in North America. The storyline was described on the Volkswagen YouTube channel as “a very pregnant woman, her expectant husband and a paramedic come together to make an unexpected point about the 2012 Volkswagen Passat.”
Two new ad campaigns launched in Europe have some knickers twisted at the site of political and religious leaders making out and at the reference to oral sex to warn of the dangers of smoking. On the commercial front, Benetton has continued its Unhate advertising campaign with photoshopped images of world leaders kissing each other, once again appropriating the aesthetics and ethics of social justice activism to cleverly sell stuff & values.
In the PSA camp, a civil society group called Les Droits des Non-fumeurs (The Rights of Non-smokers) has launched an ad campaign targeting young people with images of individuals seemingly about to be coerced into fellatio while holding cigarettes in their mouths with captions reading “Smoking is to be a slave to tobacco.”
Ultra rightwing groups have responded in kind to both campaigns with the Vatican pressuring (with legal muscle) Benetton to actually remove adverts showing the Pope kissing the Egyptian Imam Mohammed Ahmed al-Tayeb, and conservatives in France lodging complaints against the sexy smoking adverts. What do you think?
Quebec bottled water company Eska has found out the hard way that racist advertising doesn’t sell. After one week of a small but scrappy boycott campaign, the company has decided to pull “Eska Warrior” adverts from print and television. The ads, like the one above, depict non-aboriginals dressed up in a melange of Hollywood Indian garb, complete with shooting arrows and eagle cries. As cynical as Avatar’s deployment of indigenous culture to sell McDonald’s merch, Eska is a company that takes water from First Nations lands in colonized Canada, bottles it, then uses pejorative portrayals of the very culture under attack to sell it back to the inhabitants. Brash, cold capitalism at work indeed. But some decided to fight back, including citizen journalist and Mohawk from Kanehsatake, Clifton Nicholas, who discusses his response to the ads in the video below:
Kudos to Nicholas and all the others who have supported this boycott campaign – a fight that isn’t ending simply because Eska has pulled racist adverts. No, this boycott looks like it will go the long haul. To find out more, visit the Facebook page.
An audaciously proactive guerrilla group has, just recently, conducted an early morning raid on ubiquitous advertising encasements at bus stops, metro stations and other locations throughout Montreal – replacing corporate adverts with art and political posters. They have put together a site complete with an interactive map where the locations of each intervention are highlighted with text and photos. The action is nothing short of heroic, brilliant and inspirational. Below is their blurb, from their website. Kudos to Artung!
At last night’s Hot Docs opening and Canadian premiere screening of Morgan Spurlock’s POM Wonderful Presents the Greatest Movie Ever Sold the peppy logo-clad filmmaker told the audience his film will have the effect of changing the way we look at advertising, TV, and films. Maybe Spurlock has been hanging out with a different crowd recently, because his grasp of audience intelligence—especially a doc audience—is certainly off the mark in terms of advertising savvy. While his film, as hilarious and entertaining as it is, won’t be affecting the way I look at advertising, it definitely changes the way I now look at Morgan Spurlock.
Spurlock is a master story-teller to be sure, and this was readily apparent in one of the funniest, rollicking Q&As I’ve had the pleasure to sit through. Story after story rolled off his lips in all manner of imitation and animation – and had pretty much all in attendance slapping knees and grabbing sides in fits of laughter. His 2004 doc-buster hit Super Size Me told the story of one man’s experiment to eat only McDonald’s food while suffering the consequences. His 30 Days television series was a masterpiece jewel in the cheap tin crown of reality television fare. With all these storytelling accomplishments and talent under his belt his most recent work, a 90 minute celebration of advertising, marketing and commercialization bereft of any engaging narrative, comes as a whopping disappointment.
TAKE ACTION:Send an email to The Walrus demanding an end to the greenwash, or call them at 1.866.236.0475. If you want to cancel your subscription, you can unsubscribe here.
“Divest from the Royal Bank of Canada, close your accounts, tell RBC to stop funding the tar sands project.” This was the advice filmmaker Shannon Walsh gave an audience in Toronto after a screening in 2009 of her documentary on the Alberta tar sands project, H2OIL.
Someone in the audience, noticeably moved by the film’s critical exploration of Alberta’s cash-cow and the planet’s eco-nightmare, had asked Walsh the dreaded question, “OK but what is something we can do right now?” Where many filmmakers would read out the laundry list of tepid actions like writing letters and signing petitions, Walsh gave everyone something concrete and tangible to focus on.
Whether the film has made an impact on RBC’s supportive connections to the tar sands is doubtful, but that might be more of a problem of visibility than apathy — Canadian films are notoriously underserved in the North-of-Hollywood distribution and exhibition matrix. Nevertheless, many had no idea that RBC was so intimately connected to what has been described as the largest and worst industrial project in human history.
The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for Canada’s premiere (and therefore very visible) literary arts, politics, and culture magazine The Walrus.
It has begun! In late August, a group – or project – calling itself the Toronto Street Advertising Takeover (TOSAT) reclaimed 41 advertising posts and about 25 larger billboards in the city of Toronto.
The “interventions” included painting over, pasting over and replacing advertising kiosk images with artwork and anti-consumer and anti-advertising graphic images from more than 60 international artists. Approximately 90 individual ads were “reclaimed”.
The takeover was orchestrated by 15 local artists lead by Jordan Seiler, a New York City–based street artist, well-known for his similar 2009 reclamation project in New York. The group was briefed on how to gain access to the kiosks and then issued a make-believe letter of permission from an advertising company stating that the company had “graciously donated over 20 Core Media Pillars to the Municipal Landscape Control Committee public arts program division,” among other fictional things. The kiosks were targeted in a 2-hour period on a Sunday afternoon; billboards were reclaimed later that night.
Contributors
Stefan Christoff, Colin Horgan, Julia Pyper
Michelle Siobhan Reid, Valerie Cardinal, Race Capet
Laurence Miall, Terry Fairman, Tyler Morgenstern
What do you get when you combine a master storyteller and investigative journalist? Mike Daisey is one answer, a storyteller and performer whose story about what happens inside an Apple factory is touching hearts and minds.
