Recently I discovered an initiative called the Purpose Disruptors. A group of climate- informed advertising and marketing professionals. I attended a talk in Dublin from one of their collaborators, Thinkhouse. I also watched seminars and meetings from the group on YouTube where they disclosed their motives and intentions.
Their intentions? To use their ‘skill sets of imagination’ to change how their clients interact with audiences and to alter or offset the waste created by their advertisement outputs. To sell the merits of a better life and to use their ‘critical skills’ to become a major voice in how the conversation around the polycrisis is communicated. ‘To push and to lead.’
I was astonished by how angry and grief stricken these undoubtedly well-intentioned people made me. I was absolutely apoplectic and hopeless at the same time.
Why? It wasn’t these specific individuals and certainly not their wish to change.
It was the advertising and persuasion industries. It seems these caring individuals had persuaded themselves in the righteousness of their actions and somewhat blinded themselves to a holistic view of the nature of their industries.
‘The moment we want to believe something, we certainly see all the arguments for it, and come blind to the arguments against it’ – George Bernard Shaw
Their industry has a Voice. An unavoidable legacy. The DNA of advertising is not to inform but to persuade. Without manipulation and persuasion advertising would just be akin to a public service announcement.
The voice of advertising is ever present in our lives. Everybody’s brain is constantly remodelling itself for social coherence and the voice tells that we are worthless but if we buy X we will then have value in the eyes of others. It’s the voice of control, coercion and of shame. A voice that lives at the front of everyone’s mind. The voice that bends meaning, that creates want where there is no need. The voice of neoliberal capitalism. The voice of the dominant system.
Is this the voice to speak to change?
Why would I trust this voice? The voice of naive progress that has been at odds with nature, historically mutating the whole idea of progress and success into accumulation and desire. The voice of exceptionalism. The voice that has impoverished everyone’s self regard, value systems and lived experience.
The voice that grooms. That fuels the beauty regime, body dysmorphia, mental health and suicide. That models a world we dont need and convinces us to behave against our own interest.
A voice that distracts with desire while reinforcing inequality.
‘Beat stress and rebalance your life,
Make those dreams come true.
Cover up all the pain in your life
With our new product range.
Feeling sad is no longer allowed.
No matter how worthless you are’
– ‘The Beauty Regime’ by The Divine Comedy
The voice that sold us spray for crops that cause ecological collapse, cigarettes and endless gambling. That misleads us on health and financial products. That greenwashes, sows fear, and targets vulnerable populations. The voice that sold us leaded petrol that took a billion points off our global IQ and made us more violent.
It did all of this in the knowledge of the harm it was to create. This is the voice of deception, that nobody trusts.
The voice that estranged us from community by encouraging judgment while feeding us inauthentic narratives and representations of inclusion.
Listening to the Purpose Disruptor seminars you get the feeling that they genuinely want to change their industry.
The Purpose Disruptors are eager and sincere in their quest for change, they have done the research on the damage of their industry and know the figures for carbon. They know that they are in a great position to make change because their industry built our prison and controls the diet. So they can change the diet. They can have a huge effect because of this and their industry will continue to imaginatively sell us the good life, as they have always done.
Except this time it’s authentic, brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
The advertising industry is a service industry, serving clients. We are the audience.
But what about the craven and shameless advertising and marketing executives who share none of the Purpose Disruptors’ good intentions? Will they not co-opt any legitimacy and integrity and market products to us thereby delegitimising the efforts of Purpose Disruptors? Is there anyone gullible enough to assume that this will not happen.
Why should we permit advertising to be our representatives and spokespeople anyway? Why are they entitled to this privilege? Who gave them permission to be in our lives, following us around, whispering and redirecting our thoughts?
Why do we allow the advertising industry and persuasion media saturation to be such a massive part of our lived experience? It’s everywhere. We are exposed to it for 5 hours a day. Its messaging is anchored in our ‘front of mind’, mediating our decisions. It’s possible that at the end of our lives we could have lost a decade of our lived experience to media saturation.
Humanity’s cumulative time being exposed to branding and advertising over the last century may add up to more than three times the age of the cosmos!! Maybe advertising has had enough of our time and attention?
What would happen to our well being and decision making if we cut this exposure drastically?
Can we please find out? It is a glaring opportunity. Can we reclaim some agency in the collective resource of humanities time?
How can the voice of the persuader be the voice of healing when it’s the disease?
To survive, the persuasion industries will need to persuade us of their worth. They would say that because they have all the tools for capturing our attention that they can leverage it. Can we just have our attention back?
If we are pattern making creatures that need inputs to process for solution can please eject the effluence of advertising messaging from our mental states?
We want to own every experience a person has. We want to brand it. Every smell, every texture’
Ad Executive, recruitment event, Dublin, December 2023.
This cuts to the heart of my emotional response. That the ideas and wishes of caring humans trying to find a new path and an authentic sense of worth will be pushed aside by a louder more polished voice, the voice of the system that wants to regulate itself.
This era is going to be difficult, we need trust and new habits. Reality not fictions.
Advertising will necessarily work for clients from weak sustainability models (Green Growth) rather than the preferred models of environment NGOs and academics who advocate for significant de-growth.
We must resist comforting narratives, fables of responsibility and instead have frameworks of care. Advertising’s legacy is that of an architect of psychological and systemic harm. We’ll reach for denial and comfort in troubled times, it seems like the Purpose Disruptors are on our side and well-intentioned but they are still from a dominant legacy industry not a transformational one. Disruptors are still within the machine of persuasion, tethered therefore, to the worst of advertising, which nullifies the proposition of trust.
Also we cannot forget where we see advertising the most, on social media. Which is a wasteland of performance, monetised hate, ungluing rationality and is a cruel engine of mental health issues across the globe.
Social Media mainly benefits a few billionaire hyper-hoarders with disordered minds. Funded by advertising.
This nightmare is pretty much the operating system societies now run on. Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
Endless advertising is spiritually exhausting. Why listen to a performative voice that exhausts us, that diminishes us.
When performative virtue signaling is used to define our problems and propose solutions it creates despondency.
The persuasion industry knows that it has been exposed as an enemy of the planet.
The people who work within the industry face difficult questions, I’m sure it has been tortuous for the Purpose Disruptors.
Depending on the psychology of the individual Disruptor these questions will be different:
How do I atone?
How do we save the industry?
How do I justify my actions?
Can my sins be eaten?
Can I buy indulgences?
I genuinely want to change things – is it possible within advertising?
What is the free market solution?
Where is the money?
What do my clients need?
How do we own this new space?
How do we convince and persuade people to trust us to own the space?
How do we keep our audience dependent upon our services?
How do we disguise our manipulations?
Can the space of care, of authentic humanity, be ours?
How do we convince people it’s solely about their own behaviours and not our clients industry?
OOO..How about this tagline ..’A good and meaningful life’…brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
#becauseyou’reworthless #badabababai’mloathingit #shoplikeabillionaire #jinglehelljinglehelljinglealltheway
