Sean Carton's Bad Blog

Wednesday, April 6, 2005

Sustainable Advertising

It's kind of hard to trace the history of sustainable design, the idea that buildings and landscapes and products should be designed to be environmentally friendly, but it's definitely been around since the environmental movements of the 60's and the realities of the first big energy crunches of the 70's. But what used to be seen as a fringe-y, crunchy-granola movement lead by hippies who wanted to live in geodesic domes has now become pretty mainstream. In fact, I found it pretty heartening and amazing that all the kids in the Industrial Design program at my school seem to have an understanding of it lodged into their brains to the level that it's just become second nature. Sure, they're young and idealistic, but as far as I can tell, they wouldn't dream of designing something that uses materials that won't biodegrade for a million years, clogging up landfills and leeching toxic chemicals into the groundwater for all of eternity.

But after talking to them over the past 9 months, I've begun to wonder if the same principles can be applied to other forms of design. Is sustainable graphic design possible? Is sustainable digital design possible? Of course, all digital design is created from recycled bits to begin with, bits which often go back to the datasphere way too easily, so maybe that's a rediculous concept. But musing on the subject more did get me thinking: is sustainable advertising possible?

The first time I thought of the phrase, I laughed. Aren't the ideas of sustainability and environmental responsibility completely antithetical to advertising? Advertising is about driving consumption in ever-increasing amounts. Advertising is about creating desire and selling you shit you don't need. Advertising is about appealing to baser aspects of human nature such as greed, envy, and lust. In the context of sustainability, isn't advertising the root of the problem, not the solution? Aren't the words "sustainability" and "advertising" mutually exclusive?

Maybe not. Sustainability has taken firm hold in architecture, that ego-driven profession that so often used to be about building monuments to stave off eternity and display excess to the world. It's also taken root in the minds of those who design products that we're all driven to buy via advertising. It's taken decades and we're still a long way from everyone realizing that raping the Earth is a bad idea, but the momentum is there. The concept of building green buildings isn't just relegated to some Mother Jones-type log-frame home stinking of compost anymore, but has gotten a lot of traction in the corporate world. Sustainability has become hip, and products coming out of companies with sustainable design in mind don't scream their environmental-friendliness as much as show off the fact that they're designed well to begin with and happen to also be good for the environment. They Toyota Prius is a prime example of this: people stand in line to get it not because it's some goofy looking electric car but because it looks pretty cool and allows people to feel pretty good about themselves. As Bruce Hannah told me the other day when he was down and giving a talk here, people wouldn't buy it if it didn't burn rubber when you stomped on the gas. And it does.

So what would a sustainable advertising movement look like? And is it even possible? I think that at heart, a sustainable advertising movement would have to recognize that advertising is necessary to the economy and isn't undesirable in and of itself. As much as I admire folks like those at Adbusters, I think that some approach that holds at its heart that capitalism is fundamentally evil and that some kind of collective approach where we all go back to hand-making our clothes, growing our own food, and stop driving cars is doomed to failure. Nobody will buy it and it runs completely counter to the kind of forces that have driven innovation and progress throughout the centuries. I learned as a kid who moved to a farm from the suburbs of Washington DC that the pastoral ideal is bullshit. Getting back to the land and living in small communities doesn't make people better. People in the coutnry have the same desires, petty problems, and prejudices as people in the cities...maybe even more. People are people.

No, I think that the idea of sustainable advertising has to be one that recognizes the bare fact that there are limited resources in the world, that we can't keep living beyond our means (environmentally and financially), and that everyone has a responsibility to make the world a better place. Those fundamental principles have nothing to do with censorship or forcing a worldview down anyone's throat but with an ethic that says "No, it's not right to keep getting people to buy tons of shit they don't need and can't afford."

In a world where global warming and peak oil are realities that we're all going to have to deal with, it seems massively irresponsible for those of us in the communications industries to continue to promote a system that can't work anymore. Just as architects have come around and have realized that designing buildings that don't suck up megawatts of energy doesn't make sense and product designers have begun to understand that building products that require vast amounts of petroleum and will stick around forever in our trash, advertisers and advertising agencies need to start thinking about what it means to do our jobs in a world of limits.

Can this make economic sense? I think so, because I don't think it means that the whole process of making and promoting and selling goods is a bad one. Heck, I like stuff myself! But maybe what it's about is the promotion of better stuff rather than more stuff. Maybe it's about an aesthetic celebrates responsibility.

These thoughts aren't fully formed yet (as you can tell), but it seems to me that the concept of responsibility is one that those of us in the biz haven't really spent nearly enough time talking about. We get judged by how much we sell, regardless of the impact of what we sell on the world and the people in it. The industry typically sees itself as a neutral party in the process, one that makes no judgements about the products it promotes and the audiences it promotes them to. Unfortunately that kind of thinking doesn't seem...well...sustainable anymore.

6:19:10 AM