Agencies should search hard for answers to climate crisis

AFEW times a year, I meet up with an old college friend for a few drinks, some food and a chat about, well, life, the planet, the universe and, occasionally, the wacky world of marketing and advertising. From time to time, she winds me up by delivering a carefully crafted diatribe about how marketing, and its evil offspring advertising, is wholly responsible for the climate crisis in which the world now finds itself.

Knowing that I can’t resist a good argument, she bangs on about how slick marketing manipulates consumers into thinking that they need something when, if logic prevailed, they actually don’t. Voracious and conspicuous consumerism is the end result of marketing on full throttle and is largely behind the steep rise in carbon dioxide emissions over the past 30 years, she adds.

She tells me that marketing tricks people into parting with their hard-earned cash, in return for goods that are often made by manufacturers who couldn’t give a flying fiddle about whether or not they are contributing to the rise in carbon dioxide emissions.

Modern marketing techniques, she points out, are one of the worst excesses of a broken system of capitalism that is now responsible for the mess in which the planet finds itself.

But marketing and advertising, I chip in, also provides useful and often important information to consumers, and promotes consumer choice.

It also stimulates competition and fosters innovation. Both of these trigger economic growth, and help companies grow, hire staff and pay the wages of the billions of people around the world who have to feed their families, pay their mortgages and, yes, buy often non-essential (and essential) goods made by firms that have wooed them with slick marketing.

In self-defence, I add that advertising euros also keep the media industry ticking over, create employment in every county in Ireland and, most of all, fund important content creation and journalism — which holds the powerful to account and, as such, is an important bedrock of any worthwhile democracy.

Thankfully, these conversations only happen a few times a year because they tend to go round and round in circles. Marriage guidance counsellors often refer to them as never-ending arguments, and very often both parties are right.

Marketing and advertising, I believe, can also be a force for good, and the many positives greatly outweigh the more cynical excesses. Good marketing can indeed be a force for change, whether it’s changing people’s habits or their behaviour.

The debate about how marketing and advertising can be a force for good in the ongoing climate debate acquired an additional degree of momentum when Extinction Rebellion took to the Cannes Lions Festival earlier this year, in an attempt to spread their message to the wider marketing community which, they also believe, is part of the problem.

In an open letter to the industry, Extinction Rebellion said “one of the reasons we’ve got here is because you’ve been selling things to people that they don’t need. You are the manipulators and architects of that consumerist frenzy”.

Not surprisingly, this sent creative, media and design agencies around the world scurrying back to their offices to engage in some serious soul-searching. If they are part of the problem — and many have now admitted they are — how do they go about changing all of this? And can they seriously make a difference?

One of the first Irish marketing firms to sign up to an international, industry-wide climate pledge earlier in the year was the Dublin-based youth marketing agency Thinkhouse, which is headed up by Jane McDaid. “Climate change isn’t just a threat to our planet, but to business too. A slow response — or no response at all — puts brands and organisations at risk of becoming extinct themselves,” says McDaid.

“Agencies can provide razor-sharp human insight, stand-out creativity and exceptional communications skills, and these are the skillsets we need to change habits at every level within business and society, in response to the climate emergency.”

She says that most brands have woken up to the need to actually do something. “For the most part, the climate emergency is one of the highest things on their agenda right now,” she notes.

So how can agencies contribute meaningfully to a crisis that affects all businesses and all departments within them, and not just marketing?

“Meaningful action is working with them, and to help them navigate these tricky times by providing insights, solutions, connections and the kind of marketing ideas that can truly impact the future of their organisations, in a way that doesn’t cost the Earth,” she says.

Let’s hope she is right because, as it transpires, it has already cost the Earth quite a lot.