Even as it battles “the commercial forces,” local non-profit Adbusters is finding that an Occupy-driven brand lift is great for business.
As the original author of the Occupy movement that has swept through more than 1,500 cities since the first Occupy Wall Street demonstration on September 17, Adbusters' magazine is reaping both brand and revenue benefits from its idea.
“It's quite obvious that it's giving us a boost right across the board,” Adbusters co-founder Kalle Lasn told Business in Vancouver.
“All of a sudden we have a kind of a notoriety. People that have just been sort of vaguely aware that there's a magazine called Adbusters and a website called Adbusters.org and there's vaguely things like Buy Nothing Day and so on – all of a sudden, they've heard about us and they've read about us and even business people who read your publication might say, ‘Hey maybe I should check these guys out; maybe there's something going on there.'”
Since Lasn and co-publisher Bill Schmalz founded the magazine in 1989, Lasn said the non-profit, ad-free magazine has grown from a money-losing venture into a “hub of global activism” with a circulation just below 100,000. He noted, however, that the challenges of the digital age made for a “blue period” for the magazine in recent years.
“Having a hard copy magazine is a hard slog these days,” he said. “So we've been putting a lot of energy into trying to keep our subscribers and make our covers as hot as they can be so they sell on the newsstand.”
He added that the publication gets a “boost” from its annual Buy Nothing Day and other social marketing campaigns.
But nothing, he said, has compared to the response Adbusters has experienced from the Occupy movement.
Lasn said the Adbusters' team dreamed up the Occupy Wall Street idea following Egypt's social media-led revolution in Tahrir Square early this year.
“We thought the level of disillusionment and the level of anger in the U.S. right now is not quite on the level of Egypt, but it's pretty high – those fat cats on Wall Street and those financial speculators still getting their bonuses and none of them having been brought to justice and none of them have stood up and said, ‘I'm sorry for what I've done,' and people are losing their houses, losing their jobs and a huge percentage of young people, even if they have a wonderful degree from a university, they just can't find a job,” he said. “So we figured that America was right for a Tahrir moment.”
The past weeks have validated that hunch – and been a business boon for the magazine.
Lasn said the Occupy Wall Street campaign “has given us probably the biggest boost we've ever had.”
“The number of people buying subscriptions on our website has gone up quite dramatically, and the number of people re-subscribing, there's all of a sudden a higher percentage there.”
Adbusters newsstand sales and web traffic are also up.
Lasn said the magazine added 10,000 copies to its latest print run, bringing it up to about 75,000.
“We used to get 10,000 to 12,000 people a day coming to our website from all over the world. And then for awhile there it was like 50,000. It's gone down a little bit now, but it's still like 36,000 – three times more than it used to be.”
Underlining Adbusters' motives, Lasn said the magazine's key gain from the Occupy movement has been in seeing its mandate bear fruit. “Our mission statement is ‘cultural revolution is our business' – that's always been our motto. And now all of a sudden we're really strutting our stuff; we're really doing it.” •
