This should come as no surprise but marketers are taking a perfectly great public theater tactic and turning it into a advertising technique. In the above ad T-Mobile takes the idea of flash mobs and Improve Everywhere to turn them into a hokey displays of corporate performance art. Why is this a problem? Obviously everyone are enjoying themselves. The difficulty is that practices like this contribute to an increasingly confusing environment in which the work of activists and artists get mixed up with marketing. People will no longer be able to tell the difference between guerrilla theater, performance art, street protest and marketing tactics. Ads like the above clip trivialize human creativity in the service of selling objects.
Mediacologyputting the ‘eco’ into media ecology (and other tangential meditations)
About
Bridging media literacy with ecoliteracy, this blog features various meditations and musings by Antonio Lopez, an old school dharma punk and media educator. He is the author of:
Elsewhere on the Web:
Or maybe it trivialises the attempt to market through the medium…