I apologize for not writing much, but for a long time here doing anything on the internet, even coding something fun, felt like building sandcastles while the tide was coming in. Just a complete waste. Advertising also felt like a complete waste to even comment on.
It seems so long ago, when the world was full of opportunities and change could be made just by rallying people and gathering friends together. I was in a Swedish generation that was allowed at the age of 18 to begin queueing up at the municipal housing agency for an apartment to rent in the city we had grown up in, and the predicted wait was 25 years.
It was fall 1988 or 89, and I wanted to throw a party - the kind you can't throw at home. Meanwhile, there was an empty building on Folkungagatan 164, just sitting there. So me and my friend Martin began going to Folkungagatan every day instead of to school. We cleaned the place up, boarded up the rooms with spare doors where the floors were too weak to hold after a fire. I painted the walls on three floors, with themes on each. One floor was all Ska symbols, a dancing "Beat Girl", a couple of Walt Jabsco's playing soccer across a room. The next floor had Doors lyrics. In this image you can see "Dance" to the right of the a lady and the beginnings of a dancing figure. I only had red, black, and white paint, so it was all very sparse and graphic. I recall painting on one of the tile ovens "this is my house but Martin's roof" because he liked to sit on the roof and enjoy the view. To be allowed into this party you had to bring you own tea lights, ashtrays from McDonald's, and booze. It was a rousing success - alas I was grounded for skipping school, so I missed it.
A year or two later, friends of mine occupied the building as a protest against the fact that our generation lacked apartments, and the police had to remove them (youtube video by police). We had spoken before she went there, and I told her about the artwork on the walls. Before they barricaded themselves, she called from a nearby phonebooth laughing at me; "Girl, when the hell did you do all this!?"
I was a photographers assistant at the time, and through my camera's lens in the bushes outside I caught my friends face in the window, and hours later as she was escorted by the police on the way out. The building was so damaged by the aforementioned fire, the police bulldozers, and years of neglect that there was no saving it, and it had to be torn down in 1991. (Many moons later I was neighbors with another one of those 12 occupiers, but I digress, and Sweden is truly tiny).
Ironically, this brings me back to advertising. The reason I've been bored with writing about it for so long is because it's been quite detached from everything. With the media landscape so fragmented, one might think that ideas would have found ways of becoming even more targeted to where they are, but somehow this seems to only have translated to the old "go viral" and "use influencers", still.
I got excited about an ad recently when I went to pick up my mail, because in situ, it was funny as heck. On my driveway, which is very cracked and so sad, lay a plastic bag with a rock in it. Also inside the bag was a xeroxed paper explaining that local company whatever can fix my cracked driveway, just call number. I laughed out loud. So simple, so on target. And all it takes is for that company to have a bunch of those bags in every one of their trucks that are already out fixing driveways, and then circle the neighborhoods as they arrive and leave a job.
Pressure washing ads for pressure washers have stopped being funny, so when Spencer Pratt used a pressure washer to say vote for Spencer Pratt to clean up LA, he elevated the simple media idea to advertising something else.
The real Spencer Pratt campaign, where the commercials are shot by Gabriel Kirkpatrick Mann, moves fast but is real, while the fan campaigns move even faster and are all made with AI - presumably because the fans can't afford a director and film permits. Both are making big waves on social media and in media, and as we can see by the photo above, a mark on the streets in real life.
The AI videos are certainly getting all the online attention, but in real life, the little pebble in a plastic bag can be a bigger eye opener than any flyer. Those cleaned up pavements may get a lot of local attention.
I don't know what real thing you can do where you are, but I think we are in the mood of actually trying to fix things again, like protesting the fact that the youth have nowhere to live, or that our streets aren't clean. Or that we have no place to party. What is the real thing you can do about it?
