I have to say they asked for it.
A teaser campaign focused on one of the banks, with the slogan “For those who know” was the perfect target for a subvertising. This single episode of adbusting was only meant as a joke, but as in actual fact it symbolically summed up many years of my work as a social activist.
After the fall of communism in 1989 my country was bombarded with advertisements. There were no legal tools to control this process. Until then laws were not needed becausee outdoor advertising, behind the Iron Curtain, was almost non-existent. Later, both international corporations and local businessmen used all the legal loop-holes to transform the landscape into a visual dump.
I couldn’t stand it and in 2007, together with a group of friends we launched a NGO, MiastoMojeAwNim (untranslatable, but something like “my city and things within it” -a line from famous Polish song about Warsaw). It had one aim, to introduce a law that would control and limit the presence of adverts in public spaces. After seven years of lobbying, we managed to convince the parliament to pass a suitable act. Today, the excess of unwanted advertisements are disappearing from streets and advertising agencies are observing the rules.
