Nissan has launched an ad campaign that tries to blend with street art in cities across America. The campaign, along with its own web site, seeks to find an alternative way to brand Nissan as "street" and "cool", but on closer inspection it is far from it. The campaign has caused many in the street art community to speak up:
From BLEAKNYC: "With the whole Nissan add thing - its a dichotomy, on the one hand you have big business capitalizing on anything new and so called "trendy" to ensure a proper demographic buying group, which has been the pre-imminent downfall of a lot of sub-cultural movements. on the other hand, with a major part of street art being the drive to sub-vert and/or re-appropriate corporate images/logos and call attention to their destructive/biased platforms, the fact that big business has taken notice, to even try to understand the movement speaks volumes about the impact of street art. you(we) are making an impact, grungy kids/adults armed with nothing more than paint, wheat paste, stickers, spraypaint, drive and imagination are getting into the heads of multi-millionaire corporation heads. KEEP IT UP. later." From SCT: "A few months ago in Holland we had a same sort of disease. A lot of stickers of a mask with snaketongue went up all over the country. The campaign was so huge and agressive, they even pasted over other "real" streetart. They also apeared with urls on the stickers #www.darkafterdark.nl# (do not click, don`t give them the hits.) After a bit of research it came out. This was campaign done by a big BeerBrand (I don`t tell you wich Brand, it doesn`t taste good anyway, so fuck them,) They hired a bunch of naive students to spread their propaganda. Fuck this sort of campaigns and fuck the guys who abuse streetart for commercials." From Adrants and Wooster Collective.
