Badvertising: Polluting Our Minds and Fuelling Climate Chaos by Andrew Simms
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I bought this after watching a cracking podcast by the two authors, one of whom I remembered from the ‘infinite hamster’ animation – a truly disturbing thought experiment about exponential growth.
The book’s basic premise is this: in a free country, unless some object is out-and-out destructive and has no other use, for the most part you can’t get up and outright ban it. What you can do, if you want a lot less of it about, is prevent it being advertised.
But would that make any difference? For us jaded people who’ve seen it all before, adverts don’t really work, right?
Well, apparently they do – and the first two chapters descibe exactly how, citing some mind-bending findings of both the psychological impact of adverts and their sheer quantity in our lives.
The authors then take us in detail through the tortuous tale of how, in the UK and then elsewhere, over the 60 years roughly corresponding to my own lifetime, tobacco advertising finally came to be banned. Remember ASH, the health campaigners? And FOREST, the deceptively-named pro-smoking lobby? They and many others feature here, and in the book’s comprehensive index.
The upshot of all this activity, we are reminded, has been a dramatic reduction in smoking both here in the UK and in most of the western world.
Why, then, not apply what we have learned from tobacco to some more recent bad habits that we have fallen into – like buying obese vehicles to drive around in, or flying too often? This, after all, isn’t going to stop us from indulging: instead, it will relieve us of that nagging feeling that we are somehow ‘missing out’ if we don’t – which is the basic premise of every advert.
My only beef with ‘Badvertising’ is that in places you can feel the writers’ haste to get all this down on the page as soon as possible! This shows up particularly in the chapter about the sponsorship of sport, where the thread flips back and forth between listing which sports the high-polluting industries sponsor, and going into technical detail about what damage (not to the sport, but to health and society in general) they do. But perhaps it was just me.
Where this book really shines is in the final chapter. ‘A World Without Advertising’ sounds utterly fantastical, right? Well, er, wrong! It is so well within the realms of the possible, nay, the absolutely-easy, that many places have ‘taken down the billboards’ (and by the way it has taken this long for that Ogden Nash quote to appear) and benefitted as a result. In a refreshing change for an eco-campaigning premise, ‘Badvertising’ is not asking for the Moon with Brass Knobs on: merely for one straightforward piece of legislation.
I recommend ‘Badvertising’, firstly to people looking for a simple but effective step that we can take to help our beleagered environment and our quality of life, and secondly to anyone who has ever seen an advert and wishes to look after their brain.
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