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That’s Artemis Investment Management, not the Greek goddess of of the hunt.

I’m thinking through the choice of cultural objects as case studies for my PhD that explores how we represent, talk about and communicate the environment. I’ll be looking at media, long form journalism, literature, poetry, and now, I think, a key contender has to be advertising. In particular, the long-term campaign and advertisements of Artemis Investment Management: The Profit Hunter.

The Profit Hunter Campaign
I’ve been incensed by these ads for a while. They’re all over the UK travel network (tube, train, bus) and, here’s a great example, on a London taxi.

The Artemis brand is moulded around this conceit of profit hunting as a mimetic analogy with profit as an animal in the natural wild, tracked down, hunted, by its investment specialists. Its advertising campaign uses a pastiche of 1930s Great Adventurers in hunting gear.

It’s not a metaphor, stupid
What astounds me is that the people behind this campaign, both client and ad agency, present the goal of capital profit gain at the metaphorical expense of the environment, when they must, surely, understand that what they are communicating is no longer, and never has been, simply a metaphor?

The animal itself, the profit, is a clever illustration that marries together a line graph profit and what looks like an extinct, or soon to be extinct, primitive bird that can’t outrun the smart investor/hunter.

I’ve been a reader of semiotics and deconstruction for some time now, and will develop the argument in detail, but in essence it’s not difficult to anticipate my position. The signification of these advertisements contributes to the cultural meaning-making that the environment is a resource for human endeavour, from which great profits will be plundered. Fair play to Artemis, they’re not exactly subtle about the evisceration of our planet by capitalism’s global financial racket, are they? In fact, any typical semiological analysis would be redundant faster than you could say “What’s that you smell boy, a profit up ahead?” But how can we address these ads as cultural objects?

Semiotics no more
Whereas this model of semiotic analysis would have suited Barthes:

we’ve reached a more complex way of addressing the world. In many ways the Greek connection is not coincidental. Whereas the myth of Oedipus is the externalisation of an internal human trauma, so the Artemis myth (that the hunt is in some way governed by powers outside of nature) reaches its zenith in late capitalism’s appropriation of our natural resources. The externalisation of the message into the form of a bare communication of a rampant capitalism means the internal nightmare of capitalism (the hidden costs) are now experienced as the fully revealed benefits of the process of profit-hunting. E.g. the equation of profit with a living creature; the admission that capitalism’s greatest profits come from ransacking our finite resources.

A bug that’s been circulating…
Of course none of this is new. In their book Affluenza, De Graaf, Wann and Naylor trace the rise of advertising’s social function to create consumer demand back to the 1950s:

Even though advertising really hit its stride in the 1980s, one can see the seeds sown as far back as 1957 when the marketing director for the Chicago Tribune stated, “advertising’s most important social function is to integrate the individual into our present-day American high-speed consumption economy.” He also stated that, “the average individual doesn’t make anything… he buys everything, and our economy is geared to the faster and faster tempo of his buying, based on wants which are created by advertising in large degree.”

For me, the Artemis adverts are a final illustration of late capitalism’s self-indulgence, and speaks clearly of the unfettered and unashamed, you could say Narcissistic, means by which our financial systems operate at the expense of environmental resources and, well, living things. More on this to come. But so there’s plenty of warning for them, Artemis, I have you in my sights.