Radical Advertising

Summary

The “Radical Advertising” Exhibition will take place at the NRW Forum Kultur und Wirtschaft in Düsseldorf from April 12 to August 17, 2008

Hermann Vaske will film interviews with the world’s most radical ad men. The interviews will be shown as part of the “Radical Advertising” Exhibition in Düsseldorf. The exhibition takes place in the Exhibition Hall in the NRW Forum.

The interviews will be published in the catalogue of the “Radical Advertising” Exhibition. Conversations will include Oliviero Toscani, Renzo Rosso, Dave Droga, Mark Waites, Paul Lavoie, David Lubars, Lee Clow, Guido Heffels, Marcello Serpa, Ralf Zilligens, Mark Williams and many, many more.

The transition from the 20th to the 21st century marks a radical paradigm shift in advertising.

Against the backdrop of globalization, the 1990s became the decade of the no-logo movement and ‘ad-busting’, an attack on the cluttering of the semiotic environment with advertising messages. The fashion industry not only made it fashionable to wear hijacked logos, it also successfully employed anti-advertising techniques in its marketing campaigns. In doing so, it spearheaded a radically changed concept of advertising that successfully incorporated political and artistic attacks on global advertising into its campaigns. The exhibition focuses on the ad-buster campaigns, the critical artistic reflections of the Chapman Brothers, and the opinion-forming campaigns of Benetton, Sisley, and Diesel.

Since the 1990s, however, globalization has also produced a fundamental change in the way media is consumed. With buzz marketing, guerrilla and ambient marketing, Web2.0 is creating the participating consumer. The exhibition will recreate spectacular ambient advertising campaigns in 3-D form and introduce the visitor to the advertising world of Web2.0

The term ‘radical’ covers both meanings of the word: ‘radical’ in the sense of revolutionary and ‘radical’ in the opposing sense of fundamental or absolute. This is exactly what the exhibition is about: it is about advertising’s fundamentally different approach, an approach that is revolutionary because it turns the fundamental principles of the system upside down.