Going After Nike

Like many entrepreneurs, Kalle Lasn has big ideas, and even bigger dreams. He talks about $100 million in sales, about cutting into the market share of giants, reinventing the whole idea of the corporation, inventing "a new kind of cool." Entrepreneurs need chutzpah, but Lasn takes it to new levels because as he spoke one recent afternoon in his Vancouver office, he didn't even have a product.

He did have an idea for a product, though, and a few weeks later worked out details that, he pledged, would put it on the market by October. The product is a sneaker, but in a funny way that's almost incidental. It's called the Blackspot, and Lasn's ideas all revolve around this brand -- or antibrand. That distinction matters a great deal to Lasn because for the past 15 years he has made a name for himself as one of the most vocal opponents of the whole concept of branding, advertising, and marketing. The magazine he co-founded, Adbusters, is devoted to satirizing, criticizing, and flat-out attacking big corporations such as Nike, Philip Morris, ExxonMobil, and McDonald's and their carefully crafted public images.

In 1999, Lasn (who pronounces his name, roughly, kol-lay lazzen) published Culture Jam, a book that railed against the "mental pollution" of marketing, implicating a culture of media images and endless sales pitches for rising rates of depression, alcoholism, even suicide. He wrote that the book Silent Spring and other totems of environmental awareness "shocked us into realizing that our natural environment was dying, and catalyzed a wave of activism that changed the world. Now it's time to do the same for our mental environment." Proposed solutions involved "demarketing," "subvertising," and a "guerrilla information war."

Lasn had already launched a war against the "mental pollution" of corporate marketing. There was only one problem: "We were losing."

This doesn't sound like someone whose next move would be into the market for consumer dollars. But here's the thing about the guerrilla information war that Lasn and his rotating crew of two dozen or so employees at Adbusters were fighting: "We were losing," he admits. While the Adbusters Media Foundation has built enough of an audience to keep it out of the red -- the magazine sells for $7.95 an issue and has international circulation of 120,000, according to Lasn -- it has had little success getting its incendiary anti-ads into any mainstream venue. So rather than just attack Nike -- although, as we'll see, that's still his obsession -- Adbusters would produce a rival shoe of its own, with environmentally friendly materials and ethical labor. Like many a brand before it, Blackspot would be designed to stand for big ideas: in this case, socially minded entrepreneurialism and grass-roots capitalism. "And, of course, coming up with an antilogo," Lasn proclaims, sounding excited, as he often does, "we're moving from whining into action."

Action has not been easy. Finding a manufacturer, for one thing, has taken a long time. Moreover, Lasn has a habit of alienating people -- and not just his rivals. One would-be partner has actually become a rival and has beaten Lasn into the marketplace with a different take on the antipreneurial sneaker. And even some Adbusters fans aren't sure that the whole notion of an antilogo isn't just double talk for hypocrisy.

Still, the Blackspot idea is provocative, merging protest and rebellion with shopping-for-a-better-world strategies. Often when a new brand or product is invented, its creators then make an effort to describe (or invent) its deeper meaning or Big Idea. Here the Big Idea came first, and it's the product that's being invented after the fact. Lasn wants to merge the marketplace of goods into the marketplace of ideas: The question is whether the Blackspot will live up to Lasn's lofty goals -- or whether those goals will end up sounding like the empty rhetoric of yet another pitchman.

The plan for the sneaker was announced in the October 2003 issue of Adbusters. The controversy over working conditions at Asian factories where much sneaker-making has been outsourced has quieted since the 1990s, but part of the point seemed to be to find a new way to apply pressure -- and to offer consumers a chance to express their opinions through shopping. The proposed shoe was essentially a black Converse Chuck Taylor All Star low-top with its traditional logo replaced by a circular smudge and a black spot stamped on the sole as visual representation of the antibrand. The Chuck Taylor, the thinking goes, was a rebel sneaker, worn by the Ramones and fashion-rejecting punks. Last year Converse was bought by Nike, making the shoe an ideal symbolic target. "We want to do a kind of loose Converse knockoff," Lasn says. It will look like that iconic sneaker at first glance but on closer inspection will have various "tweaks," so that "suddenly you realize it's something more than a Converse."

The Adbusters Media Foundation has its headquarters in a five-story, 100-year-old house on a mostly residential block of Vancouver, B.C., and while there's a kind of college co-op atmosphere, the place bustled with activity on a recent visit. The magazine's creative director, Michael Simons, and "producer" Paul Shoebridge (yes, Shoebridge) are in charge of negotiating the various barriers that separate Lasn's ambitious vision from messy reality. Shoebridge recalls thinking that the next step would be a simple matter of tracking down a list of acceptable factories and picking one. He worked the phones, talking to various rights monitors and so forth, and found that while plenty of organizations track problems, no one seemed to be keeping tabs on who -- if anyone -- was doing it right.