Click them away!

Madrigal suggests a fairly simplistic approach, but the sentiment behind it is interesting. The specific ploy almost sounds like something out of an old George Hayduke revenge book, like the one where he suggests taking junk mail magazine subscription cards that have the ‘postage paid by addressee’ metering system and attaching them to a brick. Voila! They’ll pay for their junk mail!

Like it or not, the physical elements of media systems, the operational controls, will always be much harder to disrupt than the emotional elements. The market is self-healing in this regard. The auction price for those terms will drop, Big Dada will be noticed and rerouted. It may even claim success based on increased volume, more popularity. Big news in the sales meeting! More and more people are interested in our jumbo mortgages! Let’s roll out a print and TV campaign! We’ll drive consumption even higher!

The key is twisting the emotional values of messaging, the image. Defaced logos, like the one atop this page, can go much further in affecting perception. There’s a reason Adbusters is mostly images and short slogans, appropriated icons. Kalle used to be an ad guy, he gets it. And, on a web whose youth culture runs mostly on images these days, that’s where I’d focus.

But here’s the bigger question: what if people, especially the younger generation, don’t object to advertising, and shrug their shoulders at the idea that it’s driving a culture of consumption, because it provides them with things they consider valuable, like Facebook, and Google (the world’s largest advertising company)?

Off to watch the GE Technology Extra embedded in the page to help support further writing like this..