Week in Media: we need more than punchlines about consumption
The anti-consumption narrative may be wrong-headed but it’s spooking our industry. The best response is more practical action on how to reduce media’s carbon footprint, writes the editor
We are now just days away from what could be an era-defining gathering of important people in a conference to discuss the world’s most important issues.
No, I’m not referring to Mediatel’s Future of Media conference next Wednesday and Thursday (although that is unmissable for people who are keen to learn and discuss the most important topics in media right now).
The COP26 conference in Glasgow has been menacingly lurking over advertising and media in recent weeks in myriad ways.
It’s not just the advertising of fossil fuel companies or car brands that has been under the spotlight as we think of practical ways to halt our destruction of the planet.
What is really spooking our industry’s leaders and trade bodies is the narrative that consumption itself – fuelled by advertising and ad-funded media – is the true demon that needs to be slain.
The latest shot across the bow appeared in The Guardian this week, courtesy of Adrian Chiles.
“What we need is a brilliantly executed ad campaign around the slogan STOP BUYING STUFF,” Chiles wrote on Wednesday.
And here comes the punchline: “The trouble is, the geniuses in the ad industry who we’d need to create this campaign will always remain dedicated to getting us to do the exact opposite.”
I’m sure Chiles did his research and spoke to ad industry executives and brand marketers to come up with this argument, rather than just lazily hit out at the most visible part of our economic system. You rarely hear anyone complain about the legal firms and accountancies in a similar way.
But, yes, this industry is indeed full of smart people and they are indeed a dedicated bunch when it comes to winning new-business and keeping clients happy.
In other words, they generally do what brands tell them to do. And brands will generally do what they think fits well with consumer demand.
The problem is, “consumers” are not a monolithic group. It’s one thing for Chiles, a millionaire celebrity whose girlfriend just happens to be the editor of The Guardian, to moan about how much stuff he has and yet still wants more (no less, on a web page where the publisher was serving ads for credit cards and travel companies this morning).
But it’s quite another thing for millions of others in our country.
Figures released by the ONS last month showed how UK households have reduced their spending during the pandemic by an average of £109 a week, which is nearly a fifth of their budget.
Around a third of workers have seen their household income fall – just ask people at the cinema sales houses or events marketing businesses about how much stuff they have been buying while on furlough (if they were fortunate enough to avoid redundancy).
Meanwhile, thanks to the pandemic impacting global “just in time” supply chains and an unnecessarily hard Brexit, it’s not actually as easy to buy all the stuff a millionaire could wish for at this particular time.
And yet, the way we consume is radically changing. Look at our coverage of the tech companies’ advertising upfronts over the last couple of weeks and you’ll see how laser-focused on ecommerce they are.
Facebook, TikTok, Snap, podcast publishers, Twitter, and Pinterest all, to varying degrees, announced new ecomm products and services as they all pivot from serving ads to serving shoes.
Sure, it becomes much easier to buy “stuff” on impulse when you just need to make a couple of taps on your phone instead of haul yourself to the nearest Westfield.
And maybe society is too “consumerist”, as we live more isolated, digital lives and seek pleasure in things rather than communities.
These are big and interesting challenges for how we live more sustainable lives, but they don’t have all that much to do with advertising.
Instead of picking easy targets, we should focus on practical ways our industry can and is using its messaging and strategy expertise to do better.
There are now various free carbon footprint calculators, as produced by the Advertising Association’s AdNetZero and ethical marketing company, Good-Loop.
Yes, “greenwashing” is a legitimate charge against Big Oil companies, for example, but there is an impact on our consciousness when we see and hear their ads incessantly trumpet their green tech and investment in renewables. Even if they could do more, I suspect we are so much more aware of what should be done than we were 20 years ago.
The next step that brands need to take is to demand that all the vendors, including their advertising and media agencies, demonstrate how sustainable the work they do for them is. UM UK CEO Rachel Forde indicated this is already beginning to happen in our recent article on whether the industry has taken climate change seriously enough.
This information should be written into the contracts of all agencies, while the industry’s leading advertisers should publicly commit to publishing commonly agreed metrics for how they are reducing carbon usage in their marketing.
Advertisers and media owners also need to collectively do more to stop funding misinformation about climate change. Keyword blocking is a problem too: social media agency Media Bounty’s Change the Narrative report for the IPA found that 70% of the most shared stories on climate change in the past year were being blocked for monetisation.
Or maybe instead we could just follow Chiles’ argument to its logical conclusion and, say, bring back rationing? As fun as that might sound to some, it still wouldn’t solve the current issues that man-made climate change has already created.
We need talented communicators, whether they are politicians or marketers, to galvanise the world into taking tough and urgent decisions to clear up the mess we’ve made and reduce the mess we’ll make in future.