I’ve written before about the influence of advertising on our culture, and it’s huge role in propping up wasteful consumerism. Through its billboards, TV and radio airtime, bus-stops, and thousands of other places, advertising has a massive communications infrastructure ready to serve your marketing needs.
But then, you don’t always have to use that infrastructure to sell things. In theory, anyone can use that advertising network if they are prepared to pay for it. There’s no reason why we can’t have adverts with a positive public message up there some of the time.
Of course, most of us can’t afford a billboard. But if we got together with like-minded people and each chipped in a bit, perhaps we could use just a small part of the advertising network for something positive. That’s the philosophy behind Loudsauce, a crowd-funded media buying platform. Anyone can propose an ad, submit it to the site, and the community will vote for it and pay for it. Reach the funding target, and the ads will go live.
The website piloted the idea in San Francisco recently with a very civil billboard on behalf of the Bay Bridge.
More recently, billboards went up in Times Square inviting people to support Greece by holidaying there. They can do TV too, with crowdsources TV ads for the Occupy movement aired last week on a variety of channels, including CNN.
For some people this won’t be radical enough. After all, the big advertising companies are still making the money from their billboards, and they don’t much care who uses them. Some might prefer to just deface or hijack ads, a la Adbusters. I think there’s probably room for both approaches, especially since most people don’t want to be involved in criminal damage. You can never undo consumerism by out-buying the advertisers, but for specific causes in local areas, funding a billboard could be very effective. WorldWatch has a discussion of the two approaches here.
Loudsauce is just working in the US at the moment. You can find out more about their current campaigns here.
The Earthbound Report 
Hi Jeremy
Given our situation this (like so many other things) is largely a waste of time and energy in my view. The best thing concerned activists can do to save the planet and create a more just world, is build the local non-market alternatives economies/institutions in the towns and suburbs where they live. We need to have em ready for people to move into when the crashes start hitting em…see here for a justification for that bold statement http://socialsciences.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/TRANSITION.ThoughtsOn.htm
Of course, and as I say, it’s futile to see this as a big solution. But for a specific issue in a local area, I think it could be powerful. It’s one tool among many, and no substitute for actually building the alternatives.
Here and there, an occasional campaign may have tactical advantage in using these options, but the benefits are limited. Witness the attempt to SumOfUs in the US recently to respond to the Heartland mass murderer billboard with a campaign of their own on the same billboards, which was going to run with the same layout and design, but feature corporations who fund Heartland, saying “[X] still supports global warming denial, do you?” The billboard company refused to run it, saying that they won’t run anything that is critical of corporations who are also their customers.
A lot of the power of these sorts of campaigns is the novelty factor, so they have to be occasional, playing off the usual sorts of commercial messages.
The campaigns are also limited by the advertising companies themselves, as you say. LoudSauce have already run into that problem.