Ads Drove Unsustainable Consumption Levels. Can They Change?

The year 2011 suffered no shortage of headline stories: Seal Team 6 dispatched Osama Bin Laden. Prince William married Catherine Middleton. Protests in Tunisia touched off the Arab Spring. And, in a bit of news perhaps slightly less reported, the clothing company Patagonia committed the most grievous offense known to advertising. It took the form of a full-page ad that appeared in The New York Times on Nov. 25. On it was an oversized photo of Patagonia’s signature R2 jacket: a lightweight, high-collared coat made from 60% recycled polyester and a fine gift for that holiday season. But it wasn’t the garment that caught people’s attention. It was the screaming headline above it: “DON’T BUY THIS JACKET.” “Because Patagonia wants to be in business for a good long time—and leave a world inhabitable for our kids—we want to do the opposite of every other business today,” the ad’s copy explained. “We ask you to buy less and reflect before you spend a dime on this jacket or anything else.” Nothing quite like this ad had been done before, and little wonder why. Brands don’t stay in business by instructing consumers not to buy their merchandise—on Black Friday, no less. Patagonia’s intention was to raise awareness of its Common Threads initiative, which asked Americans to buy clothing that will last a long time, repair it if it breaks and recycle it when its utility has come to an end. Only one tenet of the initiative encouraged those who didn’t genuinely need a garment not to purchase one. Still, that headline telling shoppers to keep their money. Were Patagonia executives scared? “Oh, we were terrified,” Vincent Stanley, the brand’s longtime director of philosophy, told Adweek recently. “I mean, we took it out on Black Friday. [The fear was,] are we going to lose sales?” But that didn’t happen. And though a few cynics accused Patagonia of hypocrisy—running an ad that pretended not to be an ad—Stanley remains proud of the copy he co-wrote 12 years ago. He also thinks it’s great that more and more companies are adopting sustainable manufacturing practices, but says those measures simply aren’t enough. “If you're going to have a decarbonization,” Stanley said, “you have to couple that with reduced consumption.” All that stuff we don't need Stanley is referring to a far-off corner of the sustainability issue that few brands want to think about, much less advertise. If shoppers truly want to do their part to contain global warming, they don’t just need to buy “green” stuff—they need to stop buying so much stuff. Of course, that’s easier said than done. According to the Global Footprint Network, if everyone in the world were to consume as much as Americans do, we’d need the resources of five Earths just to sustain the population. Research from the World Economic Forum holds that consumers are now responsible for up to 70% of greenhouse gas emissions. While the choice to consume is ultimately up to each individual, most every party along the consumption chain plays a role. Investors and shareholders demand that companies grow revenues. Growing revenues means selling more products. Selling more products means enticing shoppers to buy more products—and that work is the raison d'être of advertising agencies. For this reason, John Sterman, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, likens advertising to a form of pollution. While Sterman does not let individual consumers off the hook for unchecked consumption, he argues that marketers encourage that behavior even as they shirk responsibility for doing so. If you're going to have a decarbonization, you have to couple that with reduced consumption.Vincent Stanley, director of philosophy, Patagonia “Advertising shows you everything that's shiny and new that you can go out and spend money on and boost the top line of all these companies,” Sterman said. “But with almost no exceptions, you're not going to see a company saying, ‘please don't buy this product.’” Not for now, anyway. But if it’s true—as legendary adman Leo Burnett said—that advertising “penetrates the public mind with desires and belief,” it raises an unavoidable question: Since advertising has long encouraged consumers to shop ’til they drop, is it now advertising’s ethical responsibility to tell them to cut it out? The 2023 Economy Will Test Advertisers’ Commitment to Sustainability Can innovation allow for consumption? As chief sustainability officer at ad giant Dentsu, Anna Lungley is one of the leading agency minds pondering this question. Lungley concedes that advertisers have played a role in creating a culture of consumption. “We have an industry that has spent the last 70 years creating lifestyles that demand more and more,” she said. But when it comes to a corrective response from the industry, Lungley believes that’s happening already. “The good news is that we have refined that superpower—that skill of persuading you to go out and buy a particular brand of shampoo even though you don’t quite know why you’re buying it,” she said. “It’s something that we have behavioral psychologists and creative and media and design working towards doing.” Lungley is referring to something called demand-side mitigation, an abstruse term that basically means nudging consumers’ desires and buying habits in a more sustainable direction. For example, ad campaigns were able to get beef-loving Americans to embrace plant-based burgers—which her agency helped Burger King to do. Advertising also transformed the perception of electric vehicles from dorkmobiles to cool rides—which her agency helped GM to do. Even so, messages like these might encourage people to shop in more ecologically responsible ways, but that’s not the same thing as telling them to buy fewer things. For now, however, Lungley doesn’t believe that it’s necessary to tell consumers to do that. The issue of making consumption more sustainable, she said, invariably prompts “some people [to] naturally jump toward: ‘Well, that means we have to sell less.’ But that’s not necessarily true.” Brands that have learned to innovate on the supply and production side—conserving resources, using recycled raw materials, creating operational efficiencies and so on—are rolling out greener products that advertisers can market without having to tell people to buy fewer goods, Lungley believes. “It’s innovation, it’s smarter thinking,” she said. “It’s not always about less.” The moral responsibility of agencies But the idea that more sustainable production methods will allow people to keep consuming as they have been—that technology, in essence, can save the day—isn’t central to the role that Jonathan Wise sees advertising agencies having to play. Based in London, Wise spent 15 years on the agency side, most of it with JWT, until he concluded that his profession was having a measurably negative effect on the planet. “Sixty percent of all greenhouse gases are caused by household consumption, and my job was to drive consumption,” said Wise, one of Adweek’s 2023 Sustainability Honorees. “So the better I did my job, the more damage I caused.” In 2020, Wise co-founded Purpose Disruptors, a network of 4,000 ad industry pros whose stated goal is to “start the conversation and help create change from within.” Wise believes the advertising industry has first to acknowledge that, by encouraging unchecked consumption, it has been a cause of climate change. If a creative is “going to take credit for the incremental growth you create [for your clients],” Wise said, “you have to therefore take responsibility for the carbon emissions associated with that growth.” Does that mean that the advertising industry should therefore encourage shoppers to shop less? In an ideal world, yes. But Wise doesn’t consider that strategy realistic. “The skill of advertising and advertising agencies is to manipulate people. So if you wanted them to convince people to consume less, we can do that,” he said. “The question, of course, is who’s going to pay for that?” Well, probably nobody. And because brands can’t be expected to foot the bill for advertising that discourages consumption of their own products, Wise contemplates more of a harm-reduction approach. He believes it’s possible for ad agencies to distance themselves from companies whose products constitute the biggest ecological threats, moving their relationships away from “high carbon brands” in favor of clients “whose business model is geared to serving a 1.5°C world.” (The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change mandates that global warming be halted at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures.) Wise’s strategy essentially contemplates a reversal of the traditional brand/agency power dynamic, placing agencies in a leadership role and then pushing corporations to cut and eventually eliminate carbon emissions—even if that means refusing to take the laggards on as clients. To those who charge that turning away a carbon-spewing but deep-pocketed client is akin to agency suicide, Wise argues that, in due course, the practice will pay off. The agency that fires a fossil fuel client “will gain significant competitive advantage because clients that are committed to net zero will then see [them] as a leader. There is the moral case, but there’s also an increasingly powerful business case.” The self-regulation myth Whatever stock one might put in Lungley’s or Wise’s approaches, MIT’s Sterman remains deeply skeptical that the advertising industry will halt its mass-consumption messaging on its own. “We can’t expect them to self-regulate and deliberately take actions that would limit their sales,” he said. “I’m not saying they shouldn’t do it; I’m saying they can’t be expected to do it, given the incentives they face.” To Sterman’s thinking, the only feasible way that advertising would encourage a lessening of consumption is through legislation. History, he said, bears it out. “It took laws and regulations to get tobacco advertisements out of television,” he said. “It took laws and regulations to get hard liquor advertisements off television. These are issues—the toxic negative effects of companies’ efforts to promote, through advertising, more and more consumption of their products—[that] are not going to self-regulate. It requires public policy.” The dreaded R word, regulation, is bound to be a nonstarter for most companies. But it’s worth looking at the historical lessons it teaches. Read Our 3-Part Series on How Advertising and Marketing Can Spur Climate Action Lessons from the past Apart from Patagonia’s “Don’t Buy This Jacket” ad, the other prominent test case for what happens when advertising actively discourages consumption of a specific product is Big Tobacco. In 1998, the four largest tobacco companies signed the Master Settlement Agreement with the attorneys general of 46 states. The MSA created the Truth Initiative, a nonprofit whose mission is to “achieve a culture where young people reject smoking.” In other words, tobacco companies were compelled to advertise against their own product. And how did that one turn out? So-so at best. These are issues—the toxic negative effects of companies’ efforts to promote, through advertising, more and more consumption of their products—[that] are not going to self-regulate. It requires public policy.John Sterman, professor, MIT’s Sloan School of Management Brian Quigley is the CEO of Qnovia, a pharmaceutical startup that’s developing an array of products to deliver prescription medications via inhalation. But prior to taking that post, he spent 16 years at Altria, the brand name that Philip Morris took in 2003. In Quigley’s experience, years of advertising that discouraged people from consuming tobacco products did a good job in raising awareness of smoking’s harmful health effects. (Incidentally, tobacco is a global warming issue, too, since smokers emit 5.7 billion pounds of C02 and 11 billion pounds of methane yearly.) But the messaging didn’t make a big dent in overall usage of the product. “What’s interesting is the percentage of Americans who smoke today is a lot lower than it was 20 years ago,” Quigley told Adweek, “but the absolute number of smokers has kind of stayed the same. It’s still about 40 million smokers.” Another way of putting it: Even if the advertising industry decided to tell consumers to cut down on consumption, that doesn’t mean that shoppers would be receptive to the message. Indeed, in the weeks following Patagonia’s “Don’t Buy This Jacket” ad, sales of the R2 jacket did increase—slightly—even though that wasn’t the ad’s intention. Making it cool to shop less There is one other strategy for brands and advertisers that might be more palatable and perhaps even more effective than ads that discourage consumption—making the idea of buying less new stuff cool. Recently, the LVMH-owned luxury brand Rimowa, luggage maker since 1898, quietly began a test program encouraging consumers in Germany to bring old and discontinued Rimowa cases back to the store. The customer receives €250 credit for their trouble, while Rimowa’s artisans recraft the piece and sell it on the company’s site for an attractive price. The pilot program, explained Rimowa CMO and svp of marketing and products Emelie De Vitis, grew from the question of “what more can we do from a sustainable point of view?” Refurbishing old luggage not only keeps those pieces out of landfills, but it also adds the cachet of LVMH to the idea that you don’t need to run out and buy a brand-new suitcase when a used one will do. “It sends a hugely positive signal,” De Vitis told Adweek. “It’s a suitcase that has aged, that looks super cool, and people are eager to buy them.” Lola Bakare, a CMO adviser and author of the upcoming book Responsible Marketing, believes that more marketers can learn from a model like this. “As consumer sentiment continues to trend toward meaningful action toward addressing environmental existential crisis,” Bakare said, “smart brands will see an opportunity to ‘luxury-ize’ their offerings to make more per unit sold. It decreases dependence on consumption volume and wins via market share and consumer preference instead.” It was reasoning like this—buy better, and you won’t have to buy as much—that motivated Patagonia to place that nervy ad in the Times 12 years ago. And even if some customers didn’t see the logic behind encouraging shoppers not to buy a jacket, Stanley believes enough of them did. A few weeks after the advertisement ran, one of his colleagues was home visiting her family for the holidays when a neighbor trooped to the front door with the ad in hand. “She thought, ‘Oh god, now I’m in for it,’” Stanley related. “[But] he just said, ‘Listen, I just want you to know that I’ve been thinking [about] this for a long time.’” This story is part of Adweek’s The State of Sustainability digital package, which spotlights climate-focused marketing solutions across the beauty, experiential and media spaces, and examines how an industry that was built to drive consumption is adapting to reduce its impact. Adweek’s 2023 Sustainability Honorees Are Setting Advertising’s Climate Agenda

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Advertising Drove Consumption to Unsustainable Levels. Can It Reverse Course?

Saving the planet isn't just about buying 'green' products, but a lot fewer of them

Robert Klara

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Robert Klara