IT’S six weeks until Christmas. That means the commencement of the battle of the brands.
Each will try to outdo the others with their seasonal advert. These campaigns, thanks to John Lewis, have become a yearly competition. It’s the time of year when I’m reminded exactly why we don’t own a television.
Although for once it’s not John Lewis that everyone’s talking
about. Another ad has gone viral before they have even released
their £10 million offering. The discount food chain Iceland has
got in there first. Its TV advert, banned from for being “too political”, has found a huge audience online. The banning of the advert, which highlights the impact of deforestation for palm oil, has prompted outrage. Many agree this is something people need to see
and have called on Clearcast,
the non-governmental organisation which pre-approves most British commercial television advertising,
to reverse its decision.
I’ve read the UK Code of Broadcast Advertising guidelines on political advertising. They’re extensive and reasonably unambiguous. Given that Iceland’s ad is a rebadged Greenpeace campaign, and the latter is known for its lobbying, direct action and ecotage (sabotage with ecological motives), it seems pretty clear to me that the advert had little chance of being approved for broadcast.
I think this was part of the plan.
I think Iceland always knew it would be banned. That word is magical for advertisers who want to boost interest in any campaign, product or thing, thanks to the way our brains work. We don’t like to feel like we’re missing information. We have a need, akin to hunger or thirst,
to resolve it. We humans are wired for curiosity, so when something is banned, we need to know why and judge for ourselves. We seek it out.
Advertisers know this. Content creators know this. There are whole behavioural psychology frameworks that are used to encourage content to go viral. Take Professor Jonah Berger’s STEPPS model, for example. By drawing on social currency, triggers, emotion, public displays, practical value and stories, content creators can use human psychology to increase reach. If you want to encourage people into a new bar, make its location a secret. If you want people to remember a brand of sandwich is low fat, tell them a story about the guy who lost 18 stone eating them. If you want people to watch an advert, say it
was banned.
Normally advertising uses this sort of manipulation to get us to buy a different soap powder, or drive a different car, or purchase face creams or credit cards or a particular brand of mince pie. Advertisers know how to tickle our brains in the right way to sell us things we don’t need. The Iceland advert, on the other hand, is not selling us a product per se. But it is guilty of selling us on a change in attitude. Yes, it’s one that most of us would likely agree is for a worthy cause. We need more people to change their lifestyle to protect the environment. We need more people to be clued up about the products they buy and the impact their consumption has on other parts of the world. As the maxim goes: we don’t inherit the Earth from our forebears – we borrow it from our grandchildren.
But is it justifiable to lift the ban on political advertising because the ends are noble?
I think the idea of what’s political and what’s not has been forgotten. Situated in the landscape of advertising, calling environmental campaigning overtly political
falsely paints capitalism and materialism as benign and non-constructed. We live in a liberal democracy where consumerism is encouraged as it is the driving force of our economy. For capitalism to work, we all need to buy as much as we can, so when we’re being sold anything, it’s political.
Professor Terrence Qualter defines propaganda as something that must be seen, understood, remembered and acted upon. That seems like a pretty succinct definition of the aims of the Iceland/Greenpeace palm oil advert to me.
In some ways, I think the ban on political advertising does more
harm than good. When it’s banned from TV, the next choice is to go online, where it’s free to share
and has a potentially unlimited audience. It’s not subject to the
same rigorous scrutiny, to the same ethical standards. Here, the boundaries between factual broadcast, advertising, propaganda and entertainment blur. Online, people are subject to so much information that they can’t possibly interrogate everything they consume, making them more susceptible to absorbing messages passively.
People see so much that they generally want the peripheral route to information, the easily digestible video clip rather than the long, detailed, logical argument. If you don’t allow it on TV, then you miss out on the opportunity for checks and balances.
I don’t think we need to worry about putting the Iceland advert
on TV. If the concern is about political messaging influencing people, just wait until they hear about the internet.
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Callum Baird, Editor of The National
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