This is KAWS (aka Brian Donelly) – a NY-based street artist who rose to fame in the 90s and 2000s from his unique form of graffiti known as ‘subtervising’ or ‘brandalism’.
Subtervising is defined as: “a technique that involves creating parodies or spoofs of corporate and political advertisements. The goal of subvertising is to:
👉 Deflect advertising’s attempts to influence people
👉 Stigmatize brands
👉 Raise awareness of corporate strategies
👉 Challenge the status quo
👉 Reclaim public space from ads
👉 Reveal the underlying ideology of advertisements”
KAWS had a master key that would open all the OOH ad displays in NY, so he would carefully transform the traditional ads to include his signature street art.
This juxtaposition caused people to stop and take notice.
As a marketer and designer, I’m very interested in anything that gets people to stop and take notice.
So I wonder if we’ll see more brands using mixed mediums, contrasting styles, using greyscale with pops of colour, photography with illustrations… to be more effective at grabbing attention.
I’ve seen some cool examples of this from brands such as OAKBERRY.
