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Ad agencies say adverts don’t work: believe them?

What do you think of this advert?*

Now, does it conform to what you would consider responsible advertising? Does it (thanks Leo Hickman) meet Advertising Standards Authority’s code of practice section 2.2. “All marketing communications should be prepared with a sense of responsibility to consumers and to society.” Well, yes, unfortunately it probably does, unless you’re progressive enough to read ‘environment’ every time you read ‘consumer’ or ’society’.

If you’ve got this far (and deniers will have clicked away, well, three seconds ago). you might agree with me (and George Marshall. Thanks George) that car manufacturers and advertisers are, in fact, not taking the issue of climate change seriously.

Well, this morning they are. But not as you’d hope. As reported in The Guardian, magazines publishers and TV, print and media executives are today to protest against EU plans to introduce large and, importantly, compulsory warnings about CO2 emissions on car advertising. They fear that:

As a packet of cigarettes carries a mandatory health warning, a Mercedes C-class advert may be forced to carry a climate hazard alert within months. Manufacturers would be forced to stop supplying pollution information in barely readable small print at the bottom of ads.

Some quotes from the protesters:

“The massed ranks of the media are up in arms,” said Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council. “This will not achieve the goal,” said David Mahon of the European Federation of Magazine Publishers.

So, rather than reflect on their contribution to environmental sensibility, car manufacturers and publishers are concerned that their creative and commercial rights are being attacked by EU lawmakers. Germany, in particular, despite its green credentials, feels targeted. The UK is joining in, as “car companies supply about 10% of ad revenue and are threatening to halt magazine advertising if forced to make loud statements about pollution.”

However, perhaps the most interesting defence against the plan is that “the ad agencies argue their work has a minimal role in persuading people to buy a new car.” As the Guardian points out, as the Independent did back in May, if that’s the case, why do car companies spend so much money on them?

Do adverts work?
The answer is yes, and no. As advertising academic Gerard Tellis argues in his 2006 paper in the Journal of Advertising Research:

Many of us have our favorite ones. For example, students cite the advertisement for Victoria’s Secret in the 1999 Super Bowl that sent millions of people to their website in the first few minutes… However, when these and many other successes are averaged over billions of dollars of mundane advertising that saturate our media and permeate our lives, the mean effectiveness drops substantially…

What about a few of Britain’s most effective?

This iconic ad from March 30, 1979, on the eve of Margaret Thatcher’s victory. Or,

The Economist’s follow up to the ‘Hello Boys’ Wonderbra ad (which you know) that continued its strong brand campaign.

What is quickly evident in Tellis’s analysis is that he goes on to apologise for advertising in saying:

Indeed, if we were to respond immediately to every advertisement we saw, our lives would be a whirlwind of consumption that would be quite unsustainable, even for a few days! It’s not that advertising does not have the potential to be powerful. It’s that much advertising gets lost in the noise of competing brands, or what is worse, merely adds to the noise. Every creative artist probably hopes to build a winning blockbuster advertisement. Only a few succeed. And these successes are quickly imitated so their edge is dulled. This is the nature of a free, competitive market.

Yes, they do work (first hand experience)
Now, full disclosure, I’ve worked in advertising for a few years. I went into it wanting to know how to change people’s behaviour through messaging. And we did (on Cussons Soap, for one; Fullers beer another). But I left, because, well, I was selling soap, and driving commercial growth at the expense of other, more important, factors in life.

What I find difficult in Tellis, as I found difficult at the time in advertising, was the ability of advertising to focus so very much on the short-term and its ability to separate out the long-term environmental crisis we have on our hands with this “whirlwind of consumption” that IS unsustainable in the long-term. THAT’S THE POINT, Gerard. Sorry for shouting. We are constantly both making and being hit by this whirlwind. Debt is rising. Gaps between rich and poor are rising. We have environmental refugees. Resources are finite. Oil is hitting $120 a barrel…

Advertising is one of the driving forces of capitalist consumption, which is exactly why advertisers advertise. It works. It was invented to work around the crisis of full consumption, where we didn’t need a new car, because we had one already. Just having a car was, now, not good enough. We needed a new one. A better one. Same for crockery, clothes, houses. Problem is, we have, as the anthropologist Gregory Bateson identified back in the 1950s, a superlative skill of replacing the natural (Amazon rainforest) with the aesthetic (coffee tables) and more aesthetic (newer coffee table). But not everything is replaceable.

And the situation is getting worse, less regulated, less responsible. As Jean Kilbourne wrote for the New Internationalist in 2006:

[these adverts] state or imply that products are more important than people. Ads have long promised us a better relationship via a product: buy this and you will be loved. But more recently they have gone beyond that proposition to promise us a relationship with the product itself: buy this and it will love you. The product is not so much the means to an end, as the end itself. After all, it is easier to love a product than a person.

Jean was writing about two adverts, one of which was this one for BMW. The car is now the ultimate attraction for any male. Responsible towards women? Or men, for that?

Final word
Back to the car makers and publishers. The Independent makes the point that the car manufacturers have themselves to blame, in that they have flouted voluntary guidelines, introduced in 1999, that ask for prominent treatment of the CO2 emissions and petrol consumption of cars, stating that it should be “easily legible and no less pronounced than the main part of the advertising message” and “easily understood, even when read briefly”. Car manufacturers and their ad agencies haven’t done this, and now the EU is looking at making the restrictions mandatory.

I hope the EU lawmakers can represent us well today. Even though I teach magazine journalism and have a belief in the survival of the magazine market, it will be hit hard if car advertisers carry through their threat to reduce their car advertisements in magazines.

But I believe they won’t. The best and most creative ad agencies will find ways to make a virtue of any car attribute, as they have always done. Most importantly, as argued by Chris Davies, a Lib Dem MEP reported in the Guardian, “The objective is to encourage a shift in consumer behaviour. They’re more interested in looks and appearance, speed and power, the sexy image. If the aim is to reduce emissions, you need to change that behaviour. Through its advertising, the car industry shapes market demand.”

*Thanks to George Marshall, founder of the Climate Outreach and Information Network, whose blog keeps tracks on the different forms of climate denial, including adverts such as these.The Guardian picked up on this in January, even compiling a media gallery of six of the best.