Criticism is raining down on Danske Bank, one of the largest financial institutions in Northern Europe, for their latest marketing campaign ‘A new normal demands New Standards’. How and why this campaign ever saw the light of day is a big question for people in Denmark. For some, the ‘why’ overshadows the ‘how’, which for us has become the most pressing question in these past few weeks.
Danske Bank called on the advertising agency Mensch and artist-photographer Peter Funch, co-owner of Gallery V1 to produce the campaign. The gallery is celebrating its 10 year anniversary and is presenting, among others, famed artist and political activist Barbara Kruger, whose work has become emblematic with a practice of institutional critique and political awareness in a world where machinations, as she would call it, have lulled us to sleep with consumerism and false beliefs.
Barbara Kruger has felt the embrace of the mainstream she calls out, and she would probably claim that there is no out, other than what you carve, with the very same weapons used by the market.
The advertising industry has always had an especially acute sense for the latest, greatest and hottest in culture when it comes to appropriating its iconography for marketing. It is a means to an innovational end – namely branding. And it has also become a more or less accepted fact that this also means disarming everything that could serve as a threat to corporate entities.
The latest advertisement from Danske Bank seems to defy the myth that advertisement cannot go too far, and almost becomes a parody. The campaign was released on top of the medias lessened interest in what could rightfully be called the greatest theft ever to have been committed in Denmark, the ‘permanent’ loan amounting to the sum of 4 billion in U.S dollars, to which the bank answered with this hated campaign: that this loan was permanent and would not be repaid. It is ironic that if anything, the billboards and commercials succeed in waking the ever dormant feelings of dissent.
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten