The BUY NOTHING DAY awareness ad campaign comes at a perfect time when the whole world, especially the US, is in economic recession. It’s a call to action to save money and natural resources. The campaign, thus, asks people to consume less. The campaign runs after Thanksgiving precisely to convince people not to indulge in frantic and frenzied shopping and spending during the Christmas season. It’s both an alarmist message and a rallying cry. A very timely advertising pitch, indeed. Buy Nothing Day was conceived by artist Ted Dave of Vancouver, British Columbia in 1992 and has run yearly since, and whose cause has been championed by Adbusters magazine.

Spearheaded by a network of anti-shopping activists, the mission is to get as many people as possible to completely buy nothing within 24 hours. This is, quite apparently, an anti-consumerism activism. It also means to slam against corporations whose instinct is to make people covet for material things. At the very least, this is a campaign that means to help in the fight against global warming and climate change – phenomena brought about by man’s hyperconsumption and irresponsible use of resources.

But man is wired to consume. So, the little slogans of old such as ‘shop till you drop’ and ‘consume until doom’ stay stuck in people’s psyché. It will take a tremendous paradigm shift to sway man from spending and consuming and into buying nothing. Man is a creature that hates deprivation. Anything that alleviates his fear of being deprived and depraved is an automatic call to him. In this day and age, that call is shopping and buying. So, as long as man has the means to spend, he will buy, buy, buy.

Via ADBUSTERS