Brandstorming: brandalism, unfluencers and the changing face of advertising

Critical thinking is a skill that is becoming more scarce.

This is according to Mike Sharman, co-founder of Retroviral, a creative digital agency.

Sharman’s latest book Brandalism: Building brands by vandalising the status quo, launched on Thursday.

Brandalism follows his award-winning book The Best Dick. It looks at the future of PR and influence, how advertising needs to change and how companies need to vandalise their businesses to survive in a fast-paced world.

Sunday Times Daily spoke to Sharman on Tuesday about the changing advertising industry. 

His casual attire – flip-flops included – were juxtaposed with Retroviral’s 50-plus awards piled on every free surface. These include awards for Kreepy Krauly’s My Kreepy Teacher, the spoof on the Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher. The campaign saw the pool cleaner’s sales increase by 20% year on year.

Brandalism is an anti-advertisement movement in which billboards and adverts are hijacked and their meanings changed — often revealing the truth behind the message.

As a local example, in Johannesburg during the 2019 Christmas season an iconic red Father Christmas character with the writing “ho, ho, ho” was hijacked on Oxford Road in Rosebank.

A graffiti artist placed “S” in front of “ho” and a “P” at the end. This changed the meaning of the jolly character laughing into Father Christmas telling the audience to “shop, shop, shop”, commenting on the commercialisation of the holiday.

According to Sharman, Credit Suisse reports that the average age of a company today is less than 18 years, whereas in the 1950s it was 60 years.

He blames this on the modern age of fickle, hyper consumerism, with brands having to reinvent themselves or become redundant.

“We have so many tools today that keep us connected, but these apps and platforms really just create more clutter. Now I need to update my Twitter, Instagram, reply to emails ... And it was worse during lockdown when we added a whole armoury [of platforms to keep us in touch with the world] and now we are constantly online.”

He said the world has become quicker and people are chasing fads.

Brands have made everything look perfect. Men with expensive cars; women in adverts are perfect in their imperfect lives. But there is beauty in imperfection. The Japanese call it wabi-sabi.

—  Mike Sharman

“Social media has created a platform for ordinary people to reach celebrity status, where the earlier adapters get the most followers and so there is a constant need to move to the next new thing so you can have followers and monetise your platform.

“The beast must be fed. 

“Work and play are now not separate and mental health is at an all-time low. This is why Nordic countries are experimenting with four-day weeks. We need an extra day to relax because our weekends are spent working — catching up with chores and so on.”

He said brands are forcing messages down people’s throats and adverts can have a negative affect.

“Brands have made everything look perfect. Men with expensive cars; women in adverts are perfect in their imperfect lives.

“But there is beauty in imperfection. The Japanese call it wabi-sabi [the constant search for the beauty in imperfection].

“We use filters and everything online is perfect. We don’t show failure. Having mental health issues is seen as a failure.”

To make an impact, advertising needed to move away from influencers and towards “unfluencers”, Sharman said. 

He used the example of a campaign Retroviral did for Biogen, the sports and wellness brand, in which they took an anti-hero, Hobbo, a man who weighed 130kg in September 2018. The audience followed Hobbo’s journey from couch potato to triathlon competitor in June 2019.

This allowed viewers to see themselves in Hobbo, who unlike a fit influencer was a real person displaying himself as he was.

“For the celeb posting about the brand, this is just a job, but by using real people in a campaign it resonates with real people.

“This is why businesses aren’t surviving for more than two decades.

“They actually need to damage their own image to reinvent themselves. They need to adopt a Banksy [a street artist] view of themselves [to see how they can subvert their own adverts] to understand how they are perceived by an audience.”

He said the problem with the advertising industry is that it originated with white men at the top.

“We all naturally have an unconscious bias.

“This is why we have adverts like the Clicks advert by hair care brand TRESemmé [in which a white woman’s hair was labelled ‘normal’ and African hair as ‘frizzy and dull, dry and damaged’].”

Off the back of this, the Human Rights Commission is holding an inquiry into racial and other discrimination in advertising.

“I think of Trevor Noah, who has many writers for his content. This way the jokes can be bounced about to see if they are crossing a line. We do this at Retroviral where we have people from different backgrounds, races and sexual orientations looking at proposals.

“It happens in the standup community where comedians bounce their ideas off each other. 

“We saw [this didn’t happen] with Will Smith slapping Chris Rock [over a joke made about Smith’s wife who has alopecia, becoming the next GI Jane — a character with a bald head].”

He said the problem is in the hierarchical structures within the advertising industry, with a “big idea” coming from one person who has unconscious bias.

“Traditionally the advertising industry is fraught with ego — either from the company who wants the advert, or the advertising agency.

“Today we have to be more prudent. Brands also don’t have as much money as before, so adverts need to be impactful and mindful of cash waste. We need to look at the objective and the impact of the advert.”