About Adbusters

Adbusters

Adbusters is a Vancouver-based activist magazine devoted to challenging consumerism and corporate power. Published by the Adbusters Media Foundation, a Canadian not-for-profit organization, the magazine is reader-supported and advertising-free — a deliberate inversion of the commercial magazine model it critiques. Founded in 1989 by filmmakers Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz, it became one of the world's best-known vehicles for "culture jamming": the art of subverting advertising and media messages.

Overview

Adbusters describes itself as "a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age." The magazine is characterized by some observers as anti-capitalist or opposed to capitalism; its own framing centers on mental environmentalism, anti-advertising activism, and the democratization of communication.

The magazine is published in bi-monthly American, Canadian, Australian, UK, and international editions. By the late 2000s its international circulation reached 120,000. Its sister organizations include Résistance à l'Aggression Publicitaire and Casseurs de Pub in France, Adbusters Norge in Norway, Adbusters Sverige in Sweden, and Culture Jammers in Japan. The magazine's website is adbusters.org.

History

Adbusters was founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz, a duo of award-winning documentary filmmakers living in Vancouver. Lasn, born in Estonia in 1942, had spent his childhood in a German refugee camp and in Australia, run a market research company in Tokyo in the 1960s, and moved to Vancouver in 1970, where he produced documentaries for PBS and Canada's National Film Board for two decades.

The founding episode is a matter of record. In 1988, the British Columbia Council of Forest Industries — the voice of the province's logging industry — was facing public pressure from a growing environmentalist movement and responded with a television ad campaign called "Forests Forever," showing happy children, workers, and animals while a trustworthy-sounding narrator assured the public that the industry was protecting the forest. Lasn and Schmalz, outraged by what they saw as deceptive anti-environmentalist propaganda on the public airwaves, produced a counter-ad, "Talking Rainforest," in which an old-growth tree explains to a sapling that "a tree farm is not a forest." But they proved unable to buy airtime on the same stations that had aired the industry's ad — the CBC deemed their commercial "advocacy advertising" and refused it. Out of that refusal, and the founders' belief that citizens lack corporations' access to information flows, the Adbusters Media Foundation was born, and the magazine followed in 1989.

The magazine grew through the 1990s and 2000s into the flagship of the culture-jamming movement, launching international campaigns including Buy Nothing Day, TV Turnoff Week (later Digital Detox Week), and — most consequentially — Occupy Wall Street, which began with an Adbusters call to action in 2011. Its "subvertisements" — spoofs of popular advertisements — became a signature visual form, widely imitated across activist media.

Content

Adbusters magazine is known for its striking visual design: full-bleed photography, spoof advertisements, and essays that blend art, activism, and social theory. Its content addresses consumerism, corporate power, environmental crisis, media democracy, and mental health in an age of advertising saturation. Past and present contributors have included Jonathan Barnbrook, Morris Berman, Simon Critchley, David Graeber, Michael Hardt, Chris Hedges, Bill McKibben, Jim Munroe, David Orrell, Douglas Rushkoff, Matt Taibbi, and Slavoj Žižek, among others.

One of the foundation's continuing campaigns is the Media Carta, described as "a movement to enshrine The Right to Communicate in the constitutions of all free nations, and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights" — a direct descendant of the founders' 1988 confrontation with broadcasters over airtime access.

The magazine has not been without controversy. Its pages and campaigns have drawn criticism on various fronts over the years, including accusations of ineffectiveness and debates over specific editorial choices — controversies documented in its Wikipedia entry and in media coverage of the foundation.

The Magazine That Named Occupy Wall Street

Adbusters' most consequential campaign began with a single call to action. In 2011, Lasn, senior editor Micah White, and the foundation's 90,000-strong global network of activists instigated the first #OccupyWallStreet event on September 17, 2011 — the occupation of Zuccotti Park that became a global movement. As the publisher's own description of the later book Meme Wars puts it, this was the work of "the editor and magazine that started and named the Occupy Wall Street movement." The campaign remains the clearest demonstration of the magazine's theory of change: that a well-timed visual meme, amplified by a network of culture jammers, can catalyze real-world political action.

The magazine has doubled ever since as a poster resource for activists — as Dazed observed in a profile of Lasn, its pages are "illustrated by images hijacked from popular culture and given subversive motifs," thousands of writers have used it as a platform to challenge conventional economic and environmental wisdom, and the visual language of subvertising it pioneered has been widely imitated across activist media worldwide.

Meme Wars and the Books

The foundation has periodically converted its magazine work into books. Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics (edited by Kalle Lasn and Adbusters, published by Seven Stories Press/Penguin Random House) grew out of a special issue of the magazine entitled "Thought Control in Economics: Beyond the Growth Paradigm / An Activist Toolkit," and was billed as an articulation of next steps for rethinking the world after Occupy. Lasn called it "a textbook for the future": image-heavy and full-colour throughout, it assembled contributions from Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Samuelson, George Akerlof, Lourdes Benería, Julie Matthaei, Manfred Max-Neef, David Orrell, Paul Gilding, Mathis Wackernagel, and the father of ecological economics, Herman Daly — an attempt to turn culture jamming into a curriculum for "barefoot economists."

Penguin Random House's author page for the book describes Adbusters itself in terms that track its evolution: "a not-for-profit, reader-supported, advertising-free magazine with a circulation of approximately 70,000," putting forward anticapitalist, pro-environment concerns through philosophical essays, activist commentary, and advertising spoofs — a leaner figure than the 120,000 circulation the magazine claimed internationally in the late 2000s, reflecting the broader contraction of print media even in the activist press. Lasn's earlier books Culture Jam — the volume that coined and illustrated the term "culture jamming" — and Design Anarchy remain the foundation's canonical statements of purpose.

Coverage & Audience

Adbusters' readership is international, spanning its American, Canadian, Australian, UK, and international editions, with a late-2000s circulation of 120,000. Its audience consists of activists, artists, students, educators, and readers drawn to anti-consumerist and environmental politics. The magazine's cultural footprint extends well beyond its subscriber base: its campaigns, particularly Occupy Wall Street, and its visual vocabulary of subvertising have influenced activist media worldwide.

Ownership

Adbusters is published by the Adbusters Media Foundation, a Canadian-based not-for-profit organization founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in Vancouver, British Columbia. Lasn has remained the magazine's editor-in-chief. The magazine is reader-supported and carries no advertising — a structural choice that distinguishes it from virtually all commercial magazines and that underwrites its editorial independence.

Digital Presence

The magazine's website at adbusters.org serves as its digital hub, hosting current content, campaign information, and the foundation's network activities. Adbusters maintains a social media presence amplifying its campaigns and visual work. Its history is documented in its Wikipedia entry, in Lasn's books Culture Jam, Design Anarchy, and Meme Wars, and in profiles such as Lampoon Magazine's 2023 feature marking the magazine's decades of activism.