Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity

by Anne Elizabeth Moore

A writer and activist investigates corporate America's inroads into—and alliances with—the cultural underground.

"There's an industry around you that works, whether you agree with it or not."—Alec Bourgeois, Dischord Records label manager

For years the do-it-yourself (DIY)/punk underground has worked against the logic of mass production and creative uniformity, disseminating radical ideas and directly making and trading goods and services. But what happens when the underground becomes just another market? What happens when the very tools that the artists and activists have used to build word of mouth are coopted by corporate America? What happens to cultural resistance when it becomes just another marketing platform?

Unmarketable examines the corrosive effects of corporate infiltration of the underground. Activist and author Anne Elizabeth Moore takes a critical look at the savvy advertising agencies, corporate marketing teams, and branding experts who use DIY techniques to reach a youth market—and at members of the underground who have helped forward corporate agendas through their own artistic, and occasionally activist, projects.

Covering everything from Adbusters to Tylenol's indie-star-studded Ouch! campaign, Unmarketable is a lively, funny, and much-needed look at what's happening to the underground and what it means for activism, commerce, and integrity in a world dominated by corporations.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Business, Cultural Studies, Economics, Music, Sociology

272 pages, Paperback

First published November 12, 2007

About the author

Anne Elizabeth Moore is an award-winning cultural critic. The Fulbright scholar and Truthout columnist behind Ladydrawers: Gender and Media in the US is also the author of Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity (The New Press, 2007), Hey Kidz, Buy This Book (Soft Skull, 2004), Cambodian Grrrl (Cantankerous Titles, 2011), Hip Hop Apsara (Green Lantern Press, 2012) and New Girl Law (Cantankerous Titles, 2013). Co-editor and publisher of now-defunct Punk Planet, founding editor of the Best American Comics series from Houghton Mifflin, Moore teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has worked with young women in Cambodia on independent media projects, and people of all ages and genders on media justice work in the US. Moore exhibits her work frequently as conceptual art, has been the subject of two documentary films, and has lectured around the world on independent media, globalization, and women’s labor issues. She has written for Al Jazeera, The Baffler, N+1, Good, Snap Judgment, Bitch, the Progressive, The Onion, Feministing, The Stranger, In These Times, The Boston Phoenix, and Tin House.

She has twice been noted in the Best American Non-Required Reading series. Her work with young women in Southeast Asia has been featured in Time Out Chicago, Make/Shift, Today’s Chicago Woman, Windy City Times, and Print magazines, and on GritTV, Radio Australia, and NPR’s Worldview.

Her friend (and one of her favorite fiction writers) Elizabeth Crane wrote a short story about Moore, and it was widely reviewed. Thus the Village Voice called her a “Possibly perfect protagonist”; Washington City Paper said she was “A woman who has always been comfortable in her own skin”; and Hipster Book Club said she was “A perfect altruistic punk-rock super-heroine.” She has appeared on CNN, GritTV, WBEZ, WNUR, WFMU, and Georgian television. Moore recently mounted a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

In 2016, she was awarded the third permanent residency in Detroit's Write A house program and now lives in a Bengali community in Eastern Michigan.

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a strange book. It's mainly an expose of new advances that corporate marketing has used to exploit DIY and underground markets, which is kind of a silly idea since these markets are traditionally not exactly filled with excess money to spend on products. It shows examples from a wide variety of corporations who have used 'anti-marketing', to help strength their own brands. Basically a lot of this book can be summed up in the cliche that there is no bad press, if you can get mentioned, or thought of it's good, no matter if it's in a positive or negative context. So for example when Negativland makes a record sampling a quite popular soft drink manufacturer , even though it is being done in a satirical (or political if that's your way of looking at things like this, which is my personal bent on things like this) it is still working as unpaid advertising for the the good folks who make acidic sugar water. Or when a shoe company appropriates famous imagery from a Minor Threat album cover, even though it sends Ian Mackaye into a fit of self-righteous rage and drawing a backlash from the fans of the seminal anti-corporate band, it's still good advertising. It got people who might normally not have noticed the shoe company to think about it.
That's the basic premise of the book, that advertising these days is using subversive forms to turn the critique of their products back into marketing. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone with any kind of background in the theories of the Situationist International (SI). The SI stated almost forty years ago that the dominant paradigm (the spectacle, the system, the man, the corporate world, whatever you want to think of it as) will ingest even the most radical acts and incorporate them into self. That's the power of the system. 60's radicals? You're being used for all kind of nefarious ends. Punk rock? You're the soundtrack to a whole wide profit margin of the early to mid 90's, and now you sell everything via pre and 'hipster'-ish marketing. Crass? You're now for sale at an especially vapid mall store. The Situationists themselves? You're aesthetic can be found in marketing everywhere now. And now it's happening to the self-righteous holdouts of the 90's DIY community, to the zinesters and comic book artists, and whoever else you want to hold this community as encompassing. And it's not that the system wants these underpaid people's money, but they want to tap into the integrity that's implicitly been attached to them. (If you don't think this is a goal, then look at the number of say hipsters in a large urban population like New York, and really look at them with their awful co-opted and not so ironic fashions, their punk rock studded belts, their shoes that look sort of underground, but are produced by an especially awful company, and when you keep looking you'll notice that on a lot of them there is something wrong, the ripped clothes look too neatly ripped, their are still vestiges of their non-hipster self there even amongst their calculated looks, you realize that even with the permanent tattoos and everything else their is something terribly inauthentic about them. They have attempted to buy and produce their integrity, and what makes so many people hate them so much is that they are trying to buy something that isn't for sale (excuse the mini-rant)).
Like the hipsters and their rampant consumerism, even if it's in 'cool' things the marketing world is attempting to create more spaces for 'cool' purchases, and they don't mind if it's being bought ironically, or sincerly, they are still getting the money. Or in advertising they are still creating an impression, which makes you think of the company in question.
The question of the book comes down to what can we do about this?
Now, this book isn't for everyone. In advertising speak, this book is aimed at someone like myself. Someone who spent a good portion of the 90's worrying about issues like selling-out, and making zines, and going to cheap DIY shows and caring about how to make a transition into adulthood with out giving up on core principles. Most people don't think of things like this normally, and most people wouldn't find what is being talked about in this book as being especially evil. To tell the truth I don't find it very surprising, anyone with any sense of history will realize that eventually the underground is mined for it's integrity. It happened in the early 90's with the onset of grunge, when labels fell over themselves trying to pick up bands, produce 'zine' like advertisements, and set themselves up as an 'alternative' to their own mainstream culture. Now it's moved up a notch, and become more transparent. As this book points out even radical acts like the Rev. Billy picketing a store still brings more attention to the store, crowds gather around, and the brand of the store is more firmly entrenched in the spectator's mind. The same is said of the whole agenda of Adbusters.
The book doesn't answer the question of what can be done about this. And I think it's a shame. The author missed one big component of this whole picture, you have to let yourself know about these things, you have to concern yourself with the products for them to make an imprint on you. You need to connect with the media for the message to hit you, and this is impossible in a certain extent in our world of ad's and billboards, and graffiti being used to push commodities onto us. I actually didn't know about any of these ad campaigns before reading the book. And ironically the book did more to make me aware of these companies that I lately give no thought to, then it did to open my eyes to any theories or ideas that I didn't already know. In this way this book acted as the same unwilling advertising tool that the author is arguing against.
So, as I read this book I thought, in my not caring about these companies, not giving them a thought, not buying their products, not conciously trying to be anything more than the person that I have created by living as closely to my principles for the past 15 years or whatever it's been, I have been missed by these types of marketing, and in a lot of ways by marketing in general (the one wonderful side of having little or no extra money to spend on things, except for books and movies, I'm not perfect, no one probably is). My younger self would hate me for saying this, but one way to personally get around the effects of the marketing world is a certain 'transcendent' apathy. Not just a blind apathy but one based on a defeatist resignation and a turning away from the world that one finds repulsive. Now this doesn't fix anything though, but in my case it worked in that I wasn't affected by any of these ad campaigns because I didn't even know they existed.
The other thing that the author misses is the second part of the basic tenet of the SI. Since even the most radical act will be made part of the spectacle, the goal of the artist (in whatever medium, even living can be an art to the SI) is to constantly change, to keep moving, allow the spectacle to eat up the corpses of the past, while creating ever new and more difficult art that can momentarily open up spaces of resistance. Since the advertising world (to represent the spectacle here), is always changing, and ingesting new ideas, recruiting from the ranks of the underground, the goal if you don't want you're way of life to be co-opted is to keep changing and growing. On a non-personal level this can involve the creation of more radical situations that may even eventually threaten the structure of the system if it tries to ingest it. I have no idea what this kind of situation will be, but to date none of the actions done against the companies in mocking them or re-appropriating their logo's has really done any good, or I should say have continued doing any good. The people who are going to react in the positive revolutionary way to these aims have already done so, and now a magazine like Adbusters, has lived beyond it's usefulness, and become a commodity itself, creating a norm that can be easily digested and consumed. The key is change. Change and rejection.

All names of offending corporations were deliberately omitted.

[Oriana]

Just read an amazing review from bitch magazine which ended like this:

"Parts of Unmarketable may be impenetrable to those unfamiliar with the ways of DIY art and activism, but that's precisely why the book works. Instead of a "don't-always-trust-what-you-see" tome targeted at the masses, Moore talks straight to the artists producing the work, passionately prodding them to think about integrity, ownership, and meaning. In doing so, she's created an authentic work about the collisions of corporate and counter cultures that everyone who cares about culture should read."

Oh hell yes. I can't wait to read this!

[Splendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Put simply, art is created for the love of the creative act and advertising is created to sell you things you don't need. The two are distinctly different and confusing them is dangerous. I'm paraphrasing, but that's a key message of Unmarketable.

The book goes on to explore the various ways that corporations (Nike, Sony, Lucasfilms, etc.) take a genuine grassroots DIY culture movement and turn it into a marketing vehicle in an attempt to not necessarily to reach the unreachable audience and convert them into customers, but more importantly, use them to create buzz. Word of mouth campaigns are almost FREE and extremely effective and powerful.

Elizabeth Anne Moore uncovers some really interesting (and infuriating!) examples of the new ways that corporations are dealing with the problem of oversaturation. I respect Moore because she collaborates with one of my hero-artists, Steve Lambert (founder the Anti-Advertising Agency) , so when I learned she had a book out, I had to read it.

How far will corporations go to reach new audience and sell more products to make more profit? After reading this book, you'll understand that there is absolutely NO limit. The tactics these companies use are a form of white collar crime. Moore notes, perhaps preaching to the choir, that most people don't even notice (or care?) that we live in a world that has programmed us to be mindless consumers. American culture is saturated with commercial messages to get you to go shopping. It's a topic that both infuriates me and fascinates me. And often times, it alienates me. So reading Unmarketable, for me, was another reminder to always stay aware.

While I enjoyed this book, there are a few little issues. First of all, the tone is a bit too academic and could use more humor or personality to brighten up the bleak subject matter. Moore also does too much forward-referencing (I made that word up). For example, in the early chapters she repeatedly introduces subjects by saying things like, “This had interesting results, as you’ll read more about in Chapter 11.” Is the reader really going to remember references to specific cases that were briefly mentioned in the beginning of the book? Are we supposed to cross reference?

Also, the footnotes! There are so many! And these aren't just the kind of footnotes that reference sources (those I appreciate), but rather interesting side stories that are worthy, but were probably ripped from the main text by an aggressive editor. Most of the footnotes are the personal gems that I feel are lacking from the somewhat straight-forward, factual writing in the chapters, so they are worth reading.

Structure aside, I enjoyed this book a lot and found myself constantly jotting down notes about organizations, artists and articles that I wanted to read in the futures. So, at the very least, consider this a rich, entertaining reference guide.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book, but... OK, I think Moore's heart is in the right place, and there is a lot of stuff in the book that is interesting and thought-provoking (some of the material on "stealth marketing" by companies was fascinating and disturbing, and her ideas about how "word of mouth" advertising campaigns erode the value of conversation is going to keep me chewing for a while), but...

Some background. I ran an independent bookstore for a few years in the 90s, and I carried a lot of independent, underground, fringe, etc books, comics, etc. I took the job because I liked the material, and I expanded the selection in a lot of unexpected ways, following my own taste and the tastes of people I liked and trusted. I am familiar with the weird feelings that selling something you care about cause. And I hosted a lot of in-store events -- readings, bands, art shows, oddball promotions -- pretty much anything I thought would be fun and might get people's attention. I also did it because I liked the art and the music and the readings and stuff, too, but I also did it because it was marketing -- it both advertised my products and built me a better reputation within the particular subcultures I served. I was a businessman first and a fan/participant second, because being the other way around is a sure path to a failed business.

So I am conflicted. I think I acted with integrity. My small store, of course, was on a different commercial level than the huge corporations, but I am not sure that getting a band to play in my store was actually any different than Starbucks getting zine producers to make some zines under a Starbucks' logo. There probably is a line, but, the more I think about it, the harder I find to say where that line would be.

I am also nervous around discussions of "integrity." I don't think that movements can have any integrity -- people can and do, but groups don't; they are just collections of people. Group integrity is just another form of posturing -- defining a largely arbitrary line between us and them. "Integrity," like "purity," is a concept that is important to yourself, but that easily becomes a bludgeon to beat the people around you. It's a concept that is so often used as a weapon that I think it's lost pretty much all its value in serious discourse.

So -- interesting book, worth the read, but...

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author gave me a few new things to think about but for the most part I think you'll gain more academically from reading the books she cites ( Conquest of Cool for example). What I found the most compelling were her personal accounts of interactions with corporate money/power as an activist and as an artist. These above anything else show how complicated our culture has become in both production and consumption.

[Ben]

Like a good kick to the head.

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the messy late capitalist world of advertising, branding, lifestyle politics and the everyday demands of ‘culture’ as a site of political struggles, there is little that is more contentious than the charge of selling out the cause, given the struggle over to ‘the man’. Moore, a leading figure in North American DIY cultural politics and former editor of the deeply missed Punk Planet sets out to explore just what ‘selling out’ might mean to cultural workers in contemporary capitalism. Her approach is based on two broad sets of assumptions – one derived from her reading of the cultural politics of ‘alternative’ communities, and one from contemporary advertising and branding theory.

The branding and advertising strand is the notion contemporary branding practice is designed not just to sell us stuff but to inspire deep and abiding loyalty. In developing this strand of the case she draws on two sets of ideas. The first is the situation Naomi Klein elegantly explored in No Logo that brands are, to all intents and purposes, both empty and all pervasive, and that it is the brand itself more than anything else that sets products apart. The second, likely to be less well known among activists and Klein readers, is the idea popularised by ad executive Kevin Roberts that branding and advertising aims to develop ‘lovemarks’ – brands that attract loyalty and attachment that is unreasonable where the need that is catered to by a branded product is nothing more than possession of the branded product. A key thing about ‘lovemarks’ is the problem of emotion – fans, committed followers, group members can often tell when emotional commitments and attachments are not heartfelt, when they become false from the point of view of the brand-loving communities (which take on the semblance of cults): that is, these groups are really good at spotting inauthenticity and failures of integrity.

The alt-cult strand is more difficult, more contentious and often not recognised by people whose experience do not include close associations with these kinds of politically charged and savvy communities. In her words, in communities of this kind (and she draws on punk and alt cultural workers – the ones she knows best – but I have seen similar ideas in left political groups, indigenous and feminist politics during the last 35 years or so that I have been involved in this kind of politics) the following assumptions hold (see pg 14):
1) That selling out is a purely black-and-white proposition: you either sign on the dotted line or walk away form the deal, and either option is whole and complete and affects every future thing you do.
2) That selling out is always fully acknowledged by all parties in advance: it is not done accidentally or without full consent.
3) That a corporate entity is the sole agent in all acts of selling out, which it sees as a necessary prelude to future sales.
4) That selling out always affects the greater community negatively, and is done exclusively for personal gain.
5) That the personal gain to be had by selling out is enormous and financial.
As with all typologies this is blunter than actual practice, but I would agree with her that experience tells us that these assumptions and principles hold for many oppositional cultural and political groups. The thing I’d add, a point that she does not make clear, is that these assumptions rest on a narrow and fixed/static and possibly essentialist notion of integrity and authenticity.

Having established these propositions, she then sets out through a set of case studies to explore these assumptions in the context of the approach to branding and advertising that Roberts calls ‘lovemarks’. Not surprisingly she finds it to be much more complex. The case studies are rich and diverse and take in Negativeland’s album Dispepsi, Lucas film’s use of DIY imagery and artists in their Star Wars marketing, advertising that appears to be graffiti murals (giving us the neologism graffadi), Nike’s shameless rip-off (theft) of punk band Minor Threat in an advertising campaign for skate shoes and many others. In each case the appeal to, appropriation of and inclusion of oppositional artists and styles suggests that there are ways that the five assumptions of ‘selling out’ are not suited to the new cultural politics and branding, and in some cases finish up doing the branding agency’s job for them: for instance, to what extent does the marvellous satire of Adbusters and related forms of culture jamming help reinforce brand awareness?

The most useful single section of the book is her polished and insightful discussion of copyright and the question of ‘fair use’. This usefulness, I willingly admit, may be because these issues are among several key questions I grapple with in my paid work and in the contemporary politics of academia, but shows us important ways that the corporate world is enclosing the commons and privatising culture and knowledge. Equally, she reminds us that this activity can, in many instances, be resisted, and that in many instances corporate attempts to ‘protect’ their ‘intellectual property’ have no basis in law and are contrary to legal protections.

So, there is much in this book to be admired and to inspire. I am surprised/intrigued at the ways some reviewers on this site and elsewhere seem to have misunderstood the complexities of her argument and see it as simply a defence of the assumptions she outlines and I quote above. This misunderstanding seems in part to be a product of the book’s major weakness – Moss sets up the tension at the outset: alt culture’s assumptions about selling out vs. ‘lovemarks’ and so-called postbranding. Although the tension pervades the book, however, she does not come back to them to assess what the tension means after the rich and often self-critical or reflexive assessments of the various case studies. That is to say that there is a sense that in the end the book becomes too subtle and the conclusion finishes up walking a line that is not clear – or at least not clear to me, and I am very sympathetic to the case being made. The final chapter is a nuanced discussion of how to decommodify dissent and ‘take it off the market’ but gets lost in a language of the success and failure of resistance, and seems to lose the very sense of integrity (authenticity, truthfulness to self) that is at the centre of the book. So, the analysis and case studies are really good, but the proposed solution disappointing and unclear.

Which leaves me with the question – is the book a failure? On balance and give the strength of the analysis definitely not – it just could have been more of a success.

[Kristen · Rating 2 out of 5]

You are a graffiti artist. The city is on to your tricks and sends crews out to clean up your artwork, almost by the next morning. Nearly all the walls in your city neighborhood have now been declared, by city ordinance, off-limits.

You wake up one morning, go out on the street and see a stunning new work of graffiti on one of the forbidden walls. Upon closer examination, you discover that it is an advertisement for Tylenol. Who did this and why did they get away with it? And does Tylenol think they can fool you this way?

Anne Elizabeth Moore's Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing and the Erosion of Integrity is all about how marketing execs find new ways to sneak their messages into your world. Or, more specifically, into Moore's world. She belongs to the original punk movement. Over there in punk-world, they have vowed to live with integrity, free from the influence of corporations. Oh, but those clever people at Nike, Tylenol and Toyota--they have their ways!

This is a book that would make a riveting documentary. Or a week of documentaries, given all the material Moore covers in here. But it's a tough read, especially since, unlike the author, my integrity isn't all that offended.

[Cobramor · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kinda reads like an underground declination of "No Logo". Worth for the chapter about Dischord, otherwise too repetitive and not enough grip

[Dawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Advertising is everywhere. It's gone beyond the usual TV ad, billboards, the sides of buses. Now on entire vehicles, digitally inserted into sportscasts, cleverly placed in TV shows and movies. Ads' very ubiquity threatens to make them irrelevant. The old standard, the 30-second TV spot, gets attention only during the Superbowl, if those wringing their hands and wailing about the advent of the DVR are to be believed. In response, ads get put everywhere else, integrated into the modern landscape. This phenomenon in itself, however, is dangerous to the marketer. Attention is all in spreading the word about brands and products. But the problem with being part of the landscape that what is familiar will fade into the background. Thus, anyone looking to market anything is forced to find ever more creative and attention-grabbing ways of going about it in order to be successful.

Unmarketable outlines these methods, used alongside the traditional ways. They aim to generate attention without being blatant about it, subtly subverting the target audience's attention. Or not so subtly, in some cases. The book generally decries these new marketing methods as co-opting "underground culture" - whatever that means; author Anne Elizabeth Moore doesn't define it to my satisfaction, possibly in anticipation of some degree of preaching to the choir. Although, given the amount of "Look at us! What are we doing? How did we let ourselves be suckered into becoming corporate shills without even being handsomely compensated?" attitude evident throughout, perhaps preaching to the choir is the point.

Moore's audience, the tribe of punk/DIY/underground artist types, are also anti-establishment and anti-corporate; this makes the co-optation of the culture all the more vital to advertisers and their success all the more shocking. And Moore is certainly shocked at how easily it was achieved, especially having been drawn in herself, and wonders how it is possible to fight against the air of inevitability in selling out. However, the vast majority of the book is devoted to describing the what and how of various successful (either through favorable or unfavorable means) corporate underground marketing strategies, and disappointingly little to how to combat it. Her ultimate suggestion is to hold some things, "our emotion, our relationships, our ability to voice dissent, our integrity" sacred, and "unmarketable." But if that very integrity, as amply demonstrated throughout the book, is so easily, and sometimes without realizing it, sold, how, exactly, is one to hold on to it? How do you keep giving The Man the finger when The Man will pay you to tell him to go to hell?

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

The conceit of a capitalist with "integrity" is one of those straw men, like a "noble savage" or "benevolent monarchy" -- it burns so brightly, and quickly, and it illuminates all sorts of ill-begotten treasures of criticism and intellectual bravado. Ultimately, though, the spoils of such a bonfire provides little more than an easily dispelled mound of ash. In short, the critique, while possibly entertaining, rings contextually hollow and structurally unsound.

Such is the case with UNMARKETABLE. Standing up, with one leg planted in the bubbling crude of punk's DIY mythology and the other poised in the smoldering funeral pyre of consumer-based capitalism, Anne Elizabeth Moore pieces together a scolding disapproval of multinational corporatism and its million-dollar ad campaigns.

Indignantly, she stammers on about the co-opting corporate locations of underground ethics and mores, without offering much, if any proof of, such examples of "integrity." Aside from trotting out Dischord Records* as the prime example of DIY ethics, most of the co-opted underground media she explores were barely independent and hardly subversive before the corporate mimicry.

Ultimately, the book falls prey to too many of its own targets of scorn. UNMARKETABLE has the same publisher as Rev. Billy's Church of Stop Shopping's book, The New Press. While New Press is a non-profit press, the cross pollination smacks of cross promotion and should be more apparently disclosed. Nor does she examine or admit to her own complicit involvement in the crass, ad-catalog skateboarding cash-in BAIL, published by Punk Planet.


* Nike using Minor Threat to sell shoes?! GASP! Dischord has been milking that cash cow for years now, while berating fans who still would like to hear those songs played at Ian Mackaye shows.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

A *very* interesting book. After reading "Not Buying It, My Year Without Shopping," I was compelled to look into marketing as an important part of our consumer culture. Moore focuses on a particular kind of marketing (that which is viral and often co-opts underground and DIY culture), and I have to admit that by the end, I had become pretty suspicious of everyone and everything around me. She makes a strong case for the idea that at this point, isn't everyone selling something? Most of the book revolves around case studies that explore the way in which large corporations have infiltrated her life and those of her friends, offering corporate backing (and the promise of a steady income and health care) if they can appropriate the tools of underground culture to promote, say, Tylenol. It's scary. And what's worse is that when artists decide to "sell out" and agree to such sponsorship, they often end up making less than minimum wage anyway.

In the end this is a rather myopic read - she is interested in one slice of the corporate marketing pie, so her narrow subject matter eventually leads to some repetition. I learned a few new things about our consumerist society, however, and did quite a bit of thinking about the erosion of integrity. Not altogether inappropriate to finish on Christmas Day...

[Steev Hise · Rating 3 out of 5]

some of it is old hat to me, the copyright stuff, etc, but it documents some very recent developments in marketing that are extremely disturbing.

If you've already read books like Conquest of Cool, No Logo, Captains of Conciousness, or been reading zines like Stay Free!, this is not going to be a really useful or revelatory book.

Overall, i was a little disappointed because the book doesn't really provide many solutions. there's a chapter at the end called "taking dissent off the market", but it only provides one example, and a pretty tepid one, of people trying to fight and answer these latest trends in marketing. it also didn't address a fundamental question: why do some people not "get it"? why do people, even people involved with "underground" or DIY expression, not "get" that it's a political act, and that you're helping to dilute and destroy integrity every time you go over to the other side?

The book mostly just created a sense of hopelessness, and a depressed feeling that the only way to really prevail over corporate hegemony is a Fight Club style destruction of our entire civilization. sigh.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Floated in and out of this book. It seemed to be circling an answer to a question I have been curious about for years: how much of the anti-corporate movement culture is authentic, and how much of it is an identity of resistance? Can corporate culture and DiY culture co-exist? This book seems to suggest that as marketing firms co-opt DiY tactics for advertising (zines, crafting, indie music, turning graffiti into "graff-AD-i") - they dilute the DiY culture. This book details some of the tactics that corporate culture uses to co-opt DiY culture for marketing - but we can read about that enough in No Logo. It would have helped to have some analogies - seeing how cultures co-opt one another and how identities of resistance form. The DiY culture seems such an easy target if only because it is so easily summed up as a culture of resistance. And what comes for such a culture after you've been co-opted? This book has plenty of questions and examples, and thus makes for a good snapshot. But it doesn't have many answers or directions forward.

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

I thought I would like this book, but it was just too much of a "cooler-than-thou" feel to the first two chapters. The author seems to have an issue with modern business and relishes her life in the DIY culture that has attracted the attention of new marketing. It's perfect for those who thought No Logo and Adbusters are too centrist. I couldn't get past her moral dilemma at getting a grant for teaching zine workshops and them worrying that it was supported by Starbucks. That this grant support was limiting her freedom and she was becoming a corporate tool. I can't subscribe to the notion that all big businesses and everything they do is always evil, but if that's your cup of tea. Then you might enjoy this book. I'm going to look for a more balanced view of the new ways marketing tries to sell their products.

[Anna Bond]

I can't really rate this book because I have worked with half the corporate shills she discusses. My heart sinks to think upon what deaf ears Moore's argument must be falling - the ideal of integrity seems almost entirely lost in the music industry, and her examples imply that it's the same in the worlds of design, alternative sports, etc. Depressing, but because of what I do, not at all surprising.

A new marketing firm pops up every day. Any suggestion that selling one's creative output to the highest corporate bidder is actually doing your part to further their horrific labor practices, brainwashing of the American public, conservative political goals, etc., is usually met with anger or the condescending "as if you'd make a different choice given the opportunity" attitude.

An interesting, if disheartening, read.

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

A great idea for a book, but overall, I found this investigation of hip marketing techniques and their destructive effect on the underground quite awkwardly executed and often just plain banal. It has little in the way of valuable insight on the intersection between art, politics, commerce and advertising. It's also full of wild inaccuracies, assumptions and generalizations about the value of the counter-culture in general. Do independent labels have more "integrity" than major corporations? What makes indie and punk art and music so much more precious than corporations shilling their products? You won't get an answer here. I could go on and on. Best thing about it for me: it's a quick read.

[Veronica · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review is up at my blog.

A snippet thou:

If you eschew Target to make your own clothes, buy from your local grocery & prefer Bust to Cosmo, would you take $2,000 from Ford to help spread the word about their new electric car? That's the main premise to Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing and the Erosion of Integrity by Anne Elizabeth Moore, but this is not just a book for the DIY/punk crowds. By giving us case studies on how easily some fairly indy people sell out, including the author, it forces those of us, like me, who don't claim an indy or DIY label to consider "How much is my work worth?", "When was the last time I sold out?" and "Do I even care?"

[KAOS · Rating 2 out of 5]

heavy on jargon but never fully and clearly explained. self-congratulatory and offering few alternatives between corporations (bad) and a diy punk underground (utopia). lots of anecdotes and annoying footnotes with useless asides about how the author has donated all of her zines and how she felt about barbie growing up. her "shopdropping" episode at american girls store was written up like it was revolutionary and daring but i would argue that it was inappropriate and lame. i wanted to learn something from this but i found it trite (ps i only read the first half - life is too short). i would have preferred to read something more scholarly and less self-aware (and self-obsessed).

[MM · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well let's see, add this one to the likes of Thomas Frank and Naomi Klein's journalism. Moore was co-editor of erstwhile publication, Punk Planet, and she's concerned with how consumer culture messes with artistic expression, and integrity in general. Nothing terribly new here and much of the ideas seem oversimplified, but there are some good stories and interesting case studies. And hey, the chapters are short and it's a quick read -- good for keeping in the bathroom for toilet visits. You might find yourself yearning for more idealistic days when concepts like "integrity" seem uncomplicated.

[Ray Charbonneau · Rating 2 out of 5]

The stories about how marketers make use of "guerrilla" tactics are interesting, but they're not signs of an impending apocalypse. If you agree with the author's assumption that all corporate activity is evil and all independent art and DIY media are pillars of integrity, then this book gets easier to swallow. Unfortunately, that's immature BS.

Successful countercultures grow to become part of the larger culture. The author needs to get over that.

Also, the author manages to totally ignore how the internet has made offline DIY publishing almost obsolete, which leaves enormous holes in the arguments she puts forth.

[Shaun · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really interesting! Anne Elizabeth Moore takes a deep dive into DIY, punk culture, independent labels, brand marketing, and the constant fight against big corporations who want to own everything and squash any sort of competition.

The book feels a little dated in 2022, but still highly relevant to our times. Very little mention of social media, big tech billionaires, Tesla, or Amazon… but wow could you imagine a second edition?

The writing is accessible and not overly intellectual. Highly recommend to any independent, small business owner feeling discouraged but how challenging it is to maintain your creativity and small business standards amid a world owned by greedy corporations.

[Kickuntilitbreaks · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great look into the 90's 'alternative' boom and marketing's calculated break-in into the underground. I promise this book will make even the more seasoned anti-capitalist rethink how our modern consumer culture is fed to us in the subtle contexts of Gen-X marketing. It is also a great read because it's not simply another mud-dragging, down in the dumps expose of how the whole world is going to shit.. It does discuss a few different angles of 'alternative' culture, as well as a few victories in the battle against its cooptation.

[Kate]

Based on its packaging and concept, I had high hopes for this book. Unfortunately, I didn't find it useful, well-researched, or convincingly argued. A few intriguing ideas are introduced, investigated superficially, and then more or less dismissed--for example, I would've liked to have read more about the idea of satire/parody vs. political activity. Maybe I'll read Naomi Klein's No Logo, which this book references repeatedly.

[Shira and Ari Evergreen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book made me reevaluate my relationship with money and has challenged me to figure out how to make a living while really retaining my integrity as a culture worker. I mean, I've been working on that for years, but the author of this book and the many interesting people she interviewed are helping me see that I could go even farther. Good stuff - and an excellent primer on the punk movement, as well as on street art's evolving relationship with commerce.

[John Wenz · Rating 3 out of 5]

A number of great point are brought up in this book - but ultimately, no solutions are given. It's as if things are so bleak that a "public" sector of the forms of expression she addresses is forever lost. Corporate co-opting will never be gone - it's their job to catch on to "cool." But a primer guide to actually fighting back would make the book a more cohesive whole, rather than a sort of rehash of "No Logo."

[Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unmarketable is full of facts and anecdotes about various guerilla style marketing campaigns, which would be interesting enough on their own, but it's real strength lies in addressing questions of when and how an artist can sell out in various ways, and doesn't so much judge/preach/decide the what the limits are or should be as much as it provides a framework to get you thinking more deeply about the issues at hand.

[Justinburt1 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Are you a sell out? According to Moore, there's a good chance you are. Unmarketable is a philosophical look at how companies are turning to new and underground forms of advertising and what those ramifications are. Someone is quoted in the book as saying "this world is controlled by corporations and creatively fueled by the independents; it's only a mater of time before both entities walk hand in hand in harmony." So, have you sold out?

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

My thesis project for my master's degree was "about" consumerism and the media - this was 2000 - 2003, and I did a lot of research, apparently I did far more research than necessary (sigh). This book does a good job of describing developments in that area in the past 5 years. I'm still not sold on Reverend Billy.

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

ehhh. we all know the co-opting of underground culture is despicable (and inevitable), but this book doesn't really examine the phenomena, more opinion from the author on why it's all so wrong. 200 pages of the ranting about keeping it real, just skip to the last 10 pages for something with substance.