• Imagine meeting yourself as that person. How do you react? Do you ignore yourself, or do you engage? Can you find common ground?
I believe my experiences in advertising shine a light on why we need to question the messages that we see and I hope that through this questioning we can override the subconscious messaging from companies who may not share our values. Only this will leave us free to make our own choices.
SHOULD WE BAN ALL ADS?
Having read this far, you may be thinking, ‘If advertising is so bad, why not ban it?’ If we could click our fingers and get rid of it all, would we? I might be tempted, but no.
At its heart, all advertising is a mass sharing of information, and it doesn’t even have to be for commercial gain. It’s often useful in telling us about things we might not otherwise have known about and services that are available to us. Plus sometimes there are puppies involved, so it’s not all bad.
However, I am one of the growing number of people who believes we should have a choice over whether we see ads in our daily life or not. They do, as we found out in Chapter 1, harm us by triggering materialism. We can choose to forgo certain TV channels and publications to avoid certain ads. However, it’s impossible for us to avoid all the posters and billboards plastered all over cities and I feel they should be phased out.
This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. In 2016 a group raised funds to replace all of the ads in one London underground station with pictures of cats. So for one glorious week the residents of Clapham Common got tabbies instead of tablet adverts.7 And in São Paulo, Brazil, the city council has banned all outdoor advertising. Fifteen thousand billboards have been taken down, which has completely changed the identity of the city. It has brought architecture to the forefront and also highlighted some of the social inequality of the housing usually hidden behind the vast ads.
There are now channels, apps and publications offering you the choice to pay if you don’t want to see advertisements. This could be seen as a step forward, but there is the danger that it could force poorer people to watch ads while the rich can afford to avoid them. This idea was taken to its extreme in an episode of Black Mirror that showed a dark future where everyone lived in tiny cubes, their walls entirely made out of TV screens.8 Ads blazed at them all day long, but if they wanted to close their eyes and shut it out, they had to pay. If they ran out of credit, they were forced to keep their eyes open and lap it up … shudder.
Advertising, like anything that can influence a huge number of people, is a powerful thing. This power can be harnessed for the dark side, the light, or all the myriad of greys, beiges and bubble-gum pinks in between.
What I’ve started to campaign for is an advertising industry with a conscience. I’ve met many people in ad land who want to have a positive impact on the world, but think that they can only advertise what people pay them to promote. They believe that the ad industry can’t afford to have a conscience, but that doesn’t have to be true.
I’ve moved away from talking about the products that I don’t feel are beneficial to humanity and chosen to put my effort into brands that I do feel can help. If advertising agencies started to seek out game-changing ethical businesses and spread the word about them, these companies might disrupt more complacent and damaging big businesses.
The people who work in advertising might feel that they’re just cogs in the machine that is commerce, but cogs can spin in both directions. Maybe, if the advertising industry empowered itself to change, it could spin its cog the other way, and take the rest of commerce with it.
If you’re one of the millions of people who work in marketing, PR or advertising, get in touch. There’s a lot we can do.
The ten tactics that make us spend
Advertisers are happy for us to believe that we aren’t influenced by their marketing tricks. But we are influenced, even if we’re not aware of it. Rance Crain, once the editor of Advertising Age, explains, ‘Only 8 per cent of an ad’s message is received by the conscious mind. The rest is worked and reworked by the recesses of the brain.’1
We might not run straight out and buy the product, but it’s clear that ads have an effect because the people who watch the most adverts save less, spend more and work more hours to pay for the things they feel they need to buy.2
To help you to practise mindful curation effectively, this chapter reveals the ten most effective tactics marketers use to put us under their spell, and the counter-curses we can employ to defend ourselves against them.
TACTIC 1: GET THEM YOUNG
We are conditioned from birth to recognise brands. Disney now hands out free onesies to get their logo in front of infants’ eyes (even if those eyes can’t focus yet), ensuring that they will be able to sell to these kids for years to come.3
When I was a baby in 1983, just $100 million was spent on marketing to kids. Now it’s over $17 billion.4 It’s been shown that babies can recognise logos and mascots from six months old,5 that at the age of three they can recognise 100 brands, and that they will demand the brands they know as soon as they can talk.6
My niece, at three years old, would joyfully quote the ‘Cillit Bang: Mould and Mildew Spray’ advert by heart. At the time, we all thought this was hilarious and rather adorable, but it does bring it home that kids are taking all this in, even if we think the TV is just on in the background.
Does this matter? I would argue it mainly depends on the content of the commercial. The average child sees more than 40,000 commercials a year7 and young kids don’t understand that commercials are trying to sell something, they just see them as another story.8
For me, the negative and disturbing imagery that makes up roughly 13 per cent of ads isn’t the only negative thing about commercials. Almost every food ad that kids see is for unhealthy food; as a result, for every extra hour of television kids watch, they eat 167 more calories.9
Most crucially for our kids, ads are the top pushers of the materialism drug – the mechanism that makes us crave material objects at the same time as isolating us from each other. In 1978 researchers Goldberg and Gorn studied two groups of kids. One group watched a TV show which included toy commercials and the other watched it without. Later, the kids who had watched the adverts chose to play alone with the advertised toys instead of with their friends in the sandbox.10
Today, TV isn’t the only place selling to children; 87 per cent of the most popular websites for kids include adverts.11
Another popular tactic marketers use is called ‘cross promotion’. This is where they take our kids’ favourite characters and use them to sell them unrelated products, usually fast food. Kids trust these familiar heroes who are so good and noble in stories. So of course, they would never suspect their favourite character was pushing food that was bad for them.
What to Do?
• Join and be active in the online campaign for a commercial-free childhood: www.commercialfreechildhood.org.
• If you have children, it’s worth knowing that the Academy of Paediatrics recommends no