A touch of wit, and some good photograph manipulation software is all you need.

Culture jamming is described as a picture that is produced from a company used to sell their product. Even if the person who created the picture didn’t mean to make it comical they have participated in culture jamming, which is an act ““usually implies an interruption, a sabotage, hoax, prank, banditry, or blockage of what are seen as the monolithic power structures governing cultural life.” (Harold, 192). One of the most well known of the culture jamming is Adbusters.

Adbusters is a collective of creative culture jammers working in together to change the way that the public views corporations and the information they spoon feed us. Culture jammers like Adbusters feed from the weaknesses of the advertisement, producing funny replicas of the original ads. This collective has targeted many of the major brands like Absolut Vodka, Nike, Calvin Klein, etc...

Two of the spoofs that I found the most entertaining and well put together were the parody of the Absolut vodka and that of Nike. Adbusters put together an add called Absolut Impotence featuring a bottle of the product somewhat withered...The point of this add was to show people the effect of over consuming a product that is over glamorized by the media. Adbusters uses the knowledge of what alcohol can do to the body and presents it in the same way as the original ad, giving us the opposite effect of that the Absolut company wanted.


The second of parodies was the impersonation of the Nike advertisement. Instead of having a good looking sports star with the traditional “Just do it” logo underneath, there is an image of a normal looking guy decked all out in Nike with the logo “Just douche it”. This is meant to embody that “Nike” personality that is portrayed in almost all of their ads.


Whether or not you think these are funny or have any kind of merit, culture jamming is an effective way to prove a point. If you have the resources and the wit it’s a good way to make a stand against the corporations and their power over the public

Works Cited
Harold, Christine. ‘Pranking rhetoric: “culture jamming” as media activism’. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 21: 3, 182-211. Web. 22 November 2009.