'Brandals' replace billboards with spoof ads at UN Climate Summit

Members of the anti-advertising Brandalism campaign have given the corporate sponsors of this year’s UN Climate Summit a public dressing-down with a series of mock billboards.

Six hundred billboards, created by guerrilla art group Brandalism, appeared throughout Paris ahead of the 12-day summit, skewering alleged corporate and political complicity in climate change.

Volkswagen and Exxon Mobile were among those corporations in the Brandalism firing line, while US President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron and German Chancellor Angela also received the satire treatment.

One ad, titled “We’re sorry that we got caught”, lampoons Volkswagen over the recent ‘Dieselgate’ emissions scandal that led to the car-manufacturer recalling 2.46 million cars in their home country of Germany alone.

Brandalism claims the ads aim to critique “the corporate takeover of the COP21 climate talks”, highlighting “the links between advertising, consumerism, fossil fuel dependency and climate change”.

“We are taking their spaces back because we want to challenge the role advertising plays in promoting unsustainable consumerism,” Brandalism spokesman Joe Elan said in a statement on their website.

“Because the advertising industry force feeds our desires for products created from fossil fuels, they are intimately connected to causing climate change.”

The Brandalism movement, first founded in July 2012, specialises in “subvertising” – “the art of subverting advertisements” – for the purpose of opening up “questions about the ills created by advertising, the false needs and destructive desires it attempts to instil in us”.

Visit the Brandalism gallery for more samples of their culturejamming work.