Trust the Ferret, the Ferret is Wise

I imagine everybody's heard about the Aqua Teen Hunger Force ads in Boston that the cops overreacted to. There's not much to say about it that hasn't already been said. But there's other things to it, like the relationship between street art and ads. Which Posterchild goes into here (Posterchild being a guy who does street art stencils and came up with the Mario Blocks. His main concern is about the impact it has as ads try more and more to be like street art, so people start to assume any street art's advertising, and ignore it the way we do ads.

And that, I can totally empathize with. Co-option is the most powerful weapon marketers of culture have. They have the money, and a lot of desperate art students who are pretty smart on their own. Which is not a real slag against art students who work for marketing, 'cause people gotta pay for living somehow, but still. It's like Microsoft, if something cool and new comes up they don't control, they can either buy them out or just set people to making something close enough to it they can give away, and drive the original out of business, so to speak. If DC comics starts doing "street ads", for example, how would you know if somebody's stencil of Superman was a fan thing, or a paid ad by DC? If it becomes common enough, people would assume it's an ad, and tune it out.

That's one of the problems with the insatiable marketing culture/entertainment industry. I'm not sure there's really anything that can be done about it, except what artists have been doing for years, which is just moving in once the ADD marketing moves on to a new fad and making something new out of it, until that too becomes a fad and snake of the entertainment industry eats its own tail once again.