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
Imagining our environment: Hiroshi Sugimoto
Research for my PhD took us last weekend to the Museum of Modern Art in Salzburg and an exhibition of the work of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. The Japanese-born New Yorker Sugimoto has been exhibiting since 1987 and is recognised as one of the outstanding contemporary photographers. Contemporary, but using almost archaic photographic equipment and practices, such as an old 19th century large-image camera, and an army of assistants touching up the black and white prints by hand.
It is this approach, along with the subject matter, that now draws me to Sugimoto as a case study of how we ‘talk’ about - in visual and verbal languages - and therefore represent the environment.
Why the environment?
Many of Sugimoto’s images are of, or relate to, how we experience the environment, both built and ‘natural’. Some of his most arresting images are of architecture in slow exposure (blurred) focus, teasing out how great design is strengthened by reconnecting with its more impressionistic, ‘yet to be realised’ image in the architect’s mind: what the design must have first ‘felt’ like. This urge to reconnect what we experience is the present with what we have experienced in the past, either internal or external to ourselves, is central to Sugimoto’s work, and is the kernal for perhaps his most emotive and powerful work, his Seascapes. 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
Long live ‘networked journalism’
Citizen journalism is the process by which the group (formerly known as the audience) plays an active role in news and information gathering, reporting, editing and dissemination. Here’s the definition from Wikipedia. It is the process by which people like you and me, outside of official media institutions (e.g. The Times, BBC), start up blogs, post images to Flickr and videos to Youtube, and begin to change the debate by providing access to stories that remain untold by those ‘official media institutions’. Talking of which, this video is entertaining… Read more
Esquire recreate cover from 1965
Have I said I love magazine covers? Esquire’s May 2008 magazine reimagines the 1965 cover that pictured Italian actress Virna Lisi, in town filming Assault on a Queen with Frank Sinatra. Shaving. In the magazine shoot, not the film.
The story in Esquire is told by the art director at the time, George Lois, who they say “created some of the most memorable covers in the magazine’s history”. Lois’s commentary is stark about the mercantile pressures he felt at the time (but got away from):
“The ad guys hated it. It was too edgy. They were worried about losing clients.”
In the recently released 2nd edition of The Magazine from Cover to Cover, Sammye Johnson and Patricia Prijatel focus on the same point: “how much influence advertisers have on the editorial content and the variety of means by which they exert their power.” One of my Level 2 magazine journalism students who’s doing some good features is also doing some work experience with a magazine over in Liverpool. He had an eye-opener the other day, when
he sat in on his first editorial meeting. “Do the ad team always have control like that?!” he asked. Why, yes they do.
I’m intrigued about the resonance that a magazine cover has when it pastiches, parodies, copies, morphs, etc, another image, either a previous magazine cover, or another famous marque or image. For example, the outcry over the recent Time Green cover and its pastiche of the famous Marines putting up the US flag at Iwo Jima.
Here, the two Esquire magazines are not so different: two women shaving, an image that was originally inspired by a 1965 article on the ‘masculinization of the American woman’. (Haven’t read the article).
There are a couple of obvious differences. Read more
