A Thought

One thing has repeatedly crossed my mind throughout the duration of this course. It is a concept that was mentioned by Kevin Tuerff when he asked us how we, as advertisers, convince consumers to consume less?

This is quite the predicament, as ours is a profession based almost entirely on the promotion of consumption; a profession where failure and success are gauged by the level of consumption inspired by our work.

When working with a product like Belkin's surge protector, which Tuerff spoke about, the task is fairly easy, as the product's main selling point is that it consumes less energy than a standard surge protector.

When it comes to any other number of products with more finite applications, the solution is much more muddled. How do you get across the message of consuming less when advertising a product like Pepsi? Pepsi's business model is pretty reliant on people consuming as much Pepsi as humanly possible, so they wouldn't take to kindly to an ad campaign that went something like this:

"Pepsi. Just have one!"

Since promoting a reduction in consumption has been overwhelmingly shunned, brands have attempted to make people feel good about buying their products for reasons not intrinsic to the benefits of the product itself.

Pepsi Refresh Project is a perfect example, who wouldn't want to buy soda from a company that puts, like, 1/100,00,000,000,000,000,000,000th of its profits into socially responsible gestures?

The problem is that none of the proposed ideas in Pepsi's initiative do anything about the 13 empty Pepsi bottles, cans and cups that litter any given block in any given city.

Not to be left off the rapidly accelerating bandwagon, Coke chimed in with its Live Positively campaign. With ads that make claims like, "If you've had a coke in the last 80 or so years, you've been a part of the biggest beverage conveyance recycling effort ever." Good for you! Better have a few more Cokes to reward yourself.


The problem with campaigns like these is that the are intrinsically hypocritical, promoting goods responsible for an obscene amount of waste while claiming to be some shining beacon of light for social responsibility.

This ends up being the problem with the entirety of Green Brand Advertising. How can a consumer good possibly be beneficial for the environment when it was produced in an industry with an ecological footprint as deep as... as... well... as something really deep?

Sure, Clorox may be using all natural ingredients, but it's still a damn bleach company, people! Bleach was specifically created to end the lives of natural things!

Both Tuerff and Adam Webach attested to the fact that they are realists, and that they understand the world isn't going to change overnight, which is certainly some valuable perspective to have for anyone going into this business.

You have to understand that you're not going to run some magical green campaign that reaches every corner of the earth, prompts governmental and societal revolution, saves the planet, and cures every known disease. It doesn't work like that.

As fun as it may be to say in a James Earl Jones-esque voice, the fate of the world is not in the hands of advertising. We're not going to be the ones making the change, the change has to come from the top, from governments and corporations.

We're going to be the ones telling people about it.