More on ads: the Exxon ‘flip-flop’
I’m writing this blog as it’s announced that Exxon’s damages for the Valdez oil spill, in 1989, have finally been agreed. Nineteen years after. The oil company are also infamous for allegedly providing US$23m to undermine the science of climate change, and offering scientists and economists $10,000 each to undermine the findings of the latest IPCC report. Now Exxon have just released these ‘game-changing’ climate ads across Europe. A flip-flop, or just good old greenwash?
Mitchell Anderson over at DeSmogBlog has already provided a great summary of Exxon’s activities, so I won’t repeat it here. It’s important and fair to note that this is not the only perspective on the issue. Some bloggers are picking up on the story/allegation that the scientific community are cashing in on global warming, and that finance is the biggest draw for shouting loudest on climate change as a threat. I totally disagree with that, but it’s out there. (Oh, and here’s the link to how much they’re paying for the Exxon Valdez spill).
So from me, rather, a few comments on the discourse of these adverts from Exxon, ad by ad (click on the ad for larger versions): Read more
Lexus advertises its climate credo
Lots of ink on car advertising this morning, as The Guardian report Fiat are criticized by the Advertising Standards Authority for “boasting” about claims on low CO2 emissions. FIat were found to have breached “the CAP code on grounds of truthfulness, prices, comparisons, motoring and qualification of environmental claims.” That’s a lot of breaching.
Now then, I wonder which of these categories could be used against this ad from Lexus? Probably none, unfortunately. I spotted this ad as I was on my way to work the other day:
Ad agencies and their clients have responded to climate change in a number of ways. Many have been aggressive and counter to the general trend that there is more we can contribute in reducing our individual levels of consumption (e.g. the carbon footprint idea). Others have been more responsible.
Team Lexus have taken an approach that is not the worst I’ve seen, but it’s unsavoury. What’s unsavoury is the translation of its strapline: yes, we know we pollute, but let’s drive faster, let’s accelerate that pollution, and take a swipe at the carbon reduction community at the same time.
- Putting your foot down = accelerating, driving fast, getting there in a hurry, often in an emergency
- ‘Putting your carbon foot down’ = all of the above, but with the understanding that you’re sending carbon into the atmosphere at an increased rate.
So what is it saying?
What this advert is saying is that buy a hybrid, but get the performance. Buy green, assuage your guilt, and pollute freely. This for a car that, on its website, claims its green credentials. This is not an individual instance for Lexus. As Segnit and Ereaut noted in their Warm Words II report for the IPPR, “Ads for the… Lexus RX400H attempt a bolder piece of mythmaking: guiltless emissions.
‘High performance. Low emissions. Zero guilt’ (Lexus Dealers 2007)
This was, like Fiat’s, found guilty (the irony) by the Ad authorities last year for misleading people on CO2 emissions information. Lexus company spokesman Scott Brownlee said: “We weren’t trying to be misleading and any changes that are needed, we will certainly make.”
Well, they haven’t shifted their position too far, have they?
Writing in the London Review of Books John Lanchester argues that the ‘SUV driver is…trying at the same time to send a signal…that even if climate change comes she will be able to protect herself from it.’
And that is exactly what the Lexus advert is appealing to: the need to protect yourself from an emergency. Because somewhere buried behind the machismo of peak performance and thrusting acceleration, and why it’s so unsavoury, is that the advert conflates the emergency of changing our CO2 consumption habits (our carbon footprint) with the need to be able to drive fast in an emergency, to protect those inside.
SUV vehicles such as the Lexus are causing more and worse accidents: worse for the other driver (if in a smaller, less builky vehicle) in the accident. SUV’s are sold on protection in emergencies, that is, for those inside. This is the anthropocentric mindset that, some theorists argue, is at the heart of the global system of exploitation that means a few million people own the world’s majority of capital; and the mindset that exploits the natural resources of our planet to continue to grow that capital ownership (it’s capitalism, by the way). But back to the ad.
So why has Lexus taken this approach?
Clue One: It may be an electric hybrid, but it ain’t that green by a long way: take a look at the top ten lowest emitters. So it cannot sell itself in a competition with the Honda Insight or Toyota Prius, so it has to maintain its market advantage: luxury performance. (It has a 3.3l V-6 engine, by the way). Read more
UK government rules on car advertising
Good news, sung quietly. Following up on a story from last week, where car manufacturers and advertising executives went to Brussels to protest against plans to make emissions information mandatory on all car ads, the news is: they failed.
At least in the UK. What this means is that this:
Changes to this:
The word du jour, as both Sian Berry (Green Party, Alliance against 4×4s) and Friends of the Earth, who campaigned on the issue, note, is “emblazoned”. This is the ruling, sent by the Department for Trade and Industry (DTI):
“The Regulations define ‘promotional literature’ as ‘all printed matter used in the marketing, advertising and promotion of a new passenger car…’. We are of the view that this definition does include material which is largely graphical, with limited textual content (perhaps containing only the model name and an advertising slogan). We therefore consider that street advertisements are subject to the requirements of the regulations.”
Good work. Shows what can be done with application and an inside to the law.
PS.
I spotted an advert for Volvo on the St Peter’s bridge earlier (Sunderland, over the Wear) with a strapline “put your carbon foot down”, off to take a picture. Photos here courtesy of the campaign site, AdvertiseCO2.co.uk
U.S.: Mixed messages = mixed-up audience
Some notes from the US. Lots of coverage on John McCain’s two faces today: 1) the climate change campaigner in his new 30-second TV ad ‘Global’, and 2) the five-gallon hat friend, talking to Big Oil in Texas about his plans to lift restrictions on drilling for oil and gas.
The ad goes out in New Hampshire and a number of other states. Not Texas. So, as Grist suggests, there are mixed messages. But actually, not quite. There are two clear, uncomplicated messages–they’re just targeted at two different audiences. (David Cameron is having a lot of success over here at the moment with the same tactic. During the Crewe & Nantwich byelection, no mentions of climate change. But “in a speech to environmentalists” (who esle?) Cameron promised he won’t drop green policies.)
Watch the ad here:
So what affect is this mixing up of messages having? Read more
Media’s blind eye to advertising
Yesterday I wrote about protests by publishers and car manufacturers against plans by the EU to introduce compulsory rules governing pollution info on car advertising. In last night’s 7pm Channel Four flagship news programme, the producers covered the story (good) but relegated it to the ‘And Finally…’ slot (bad) generally reserved for the more lighthearted story of the day.
I want to pick up on this, because news media play an important role in developing the public’s broader understanding of political and health issues.
Is Climate Change a serious issue or not?
Serious political and health issues are well covered, in general, by C4. And, just like smoking (the example C4 used as a parallel), climate change is both a political and health issue. So why the almost clownish approach? Watch it for yourself:
By relegating the story to the lighter-hearted final slot, through its ordering of scenes and interviews, by its very headline (’Driven to Distraction by Brussels’) and therefore by its emphasis on certain aspects of the story, the importance of the issue was downplayed. If this health threat concerned fire hazards in toys or flooding in the home counties, would it have be covered in the same way?
Media’s blind eye to advertising
No. And the reason is, I feel, the fact that advertising came into the mix. This report provides what I see as an example of the ‘institutional blind eye’ from which media suffers in relation to advertising. Generally this comes, in relation to climate change, in the form of charges of hypocrisy levelled at writing articles criticising government and business, but accepting advertising money from polluting products (airlines, car manufacturers etc). MediaLens picked up on this. For the Guardian, Monbiot and the readers’ editor responded.
But last night was interesting in that the turn of this blind eye became in many ways more subtle, challenging and, I feel, dangerous. The relationship moved beyond one of reliance, to one of defense: that is, this report, this news piece, made advertising the hero, in exactly the same way the car is made the hero by advertising. Read more
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? Read more
Artemis ads hunting me down
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? Read more
The cultural economy of the luxury brand
Yesterday I looked at the copy content in the launch of Standpoint, the new politics/business monthly magazine edited by former Telegraph associate editor Daniel Johnson, with launch articles from a number of neocon names and Telegraph writers that did nothing to support Johnson’s claim that it is a magazine of both the Left and Right.
The launch of Standpoint and its claims to bipartisan intellectual curiosity stirrred some thoughts around the rise of the “intellectual magazine” in the recent couple of years, and what this is saying about both the magazine market and the economic and political context in which magazines operate. My view is that the recent glut of “intellectual magazine” launches–such as Prospect, Monocle, The Economist’s Intellgent Life–is a battle for territory that has less to do with intelligence and more to do with economic prosperity and worldview dominance for its owners and advertisers. Which, of course, is nothing new in the media (see this overview), and thanks to Johnson, is neither hidden nor subtle in Standpoint’s stated goal:
to defend and celebrate Western civilisation.
That is, Johnson knows that in the time of the credit crunch, it’s not the lower and middle classes who prosper but the rich. So let’s create magazines for the ‘intellectual’ where ‘intellectual = rich, and politics = capital’.
It doesn’t take a great leap of intellect to work out that the magazines that are going to do best in this time are those that support this brand chain of command. Monocle goes from strength to strength on this model, as Vanity Fair expands across Europe, In the UK, Grazia grows onwards, and The Spectator has increased its sales, according to James Robinson reporting in The Observer, by
strengthening its financial coverage and introducing articles on luxury living, which attract a new set of advertisers.
But let’s begin with Standpoint. Read more
“The walls will fall”: last night’s calamity on C4
“When humans disappeared, sea levels were already on the rise.” This is not, as you might expect, the tale of house owners retreating from Brighton beach because the English Channel is swelling, caused by man-made climate change. This is a tale of the immediate disappearance of the human race (we’re not told why), and the water levels are rising because there are no longer humans to operate the pumps to clear the metro tunnels of ground water, to monitor and maintain the dams; to keep, to be precise, the dangerous forces of nature in check
Last night’s Channel 4 programme on a world without us, Life Without People, was a calamity for serious consideration of the issues facing the planet. The programme, an American documentary with American settings and predominantly American experts, with scenes of an overgrown New York reminiscent of Will Smith’s recent remake of The Omega Man, I Am Legend, showed us what Life would be like without humankind to stop it from getting out of hand. So what did we do? Read more
BBC website: experiments in convergence
It hasn’t exactly crept up on me. I was aware of the BBC plans, as I was working on a similar design build at my last editorial management job. Ajax technology, the dashboard, coverging media, putting the user in control as the philosophy behind the new careers site, Creative Choices. But now the BBC changes are here, like a number of other people (and not all of us are naturally averse to change) I’m very unsure. No, I’m clear. It’s the turning back of the clock… the ‘room to breathe’…
I’m not talking about summer. As one of the most popular sites in the UK, a large percentage of the online audience will have noticed, and had a reaction to, the BBC’s new design. Reading the Sports Editor’s blog on how the changes have filtered down to BBC Sport the revamp is explained as a need to maintain pace with convergence:
Much of the talk in media and technology circles is around convergence, with the boundaries between radio, TV and new media blurring all the time. Audiences are entitled, and increasingly expect, to get the best mix of words, still images, moving pictures, audio and interactivity in one place, on a single platform. That’s what we need to be able to offer our users, which means updating both the look and feel and the functionality of bbc.co.uk/sport.
This makes sense for a big hitter as the BBC, and you can see the importance to the corporation of adaptation.
The Sports Editor has also done a welcome chronological montage of the major site changes over the last eight years, from yellow back pages and Web1.0 right bang up to date with new technologies such as AJAX for its drag’n'drop homepage dashboard, reminiscent of netvibes.com and iGoogle. The problems as I see them are… Read more
