BC Business
Adbustersb_5.jpg
We sure have been hearing a lot about hurting media companies lately, which makes the story I did recently about Adbusters all the more interesting. For those not familiar, Adbusters is an anti-consumerism magazine based in B.C. that distributes all around the world. As the article tells, the magazine was founded when a bunch of activists were not able to buy advertising space for their messages in conventional media. Advertisers can choose which ads they’ll take, and, yes, even in these tough times, they’re turning down good money to keep Adbusters ads off the air.
It seems a bit overboard to me, considering how inoffensive the ads are.
So the folk behind Adbusters have spent decades in the courts trying to force broadcasters to carry their advertisements, arguing that the public has free speech right to the airwaves because they’re “public space”. And after our story went to print (typical) a court decision was made that seems to support their argument. BC Transit had refused to run ads from the Canadian Federation of Students just prior to the 2005 B.C. election. The Supreme Court of Canada recently decided (unanimously, no less) that this was an infringement of free speech, forcing TransLink to change its ads policy. The sides of busses, you see, were found to be “public space”, hence, free speech applies. Of course, we won’t know for years whether that argument will hold up when it comes to the airwaves.
It strikes me as an argument that shouldn’t be necessary in the first place. Canwest is a wounded and bleeding animal and yet it still refuses to sell any ad time to Adbusters. As though a couple seconds of anti-consumption rhetoric is really going to make much of a difference.
And the added irony of all this is that Adbusters, another media company, is in the black. The magazine part of the business has suffered recently, editor Kalle Lasn told me, but the company also has a merchandising arm that’s still doing OK, selling books, posters, DVDs and a line of sneakers.
Go figure. This could be an instance where the wacko activists are doing more sensible business than the media giants.