The advertising industry is fuelling climate disaster, and it’s getting away with it | Andrew Simms
Overconsumption is inevitable when adverts are so ubiquitous and sophisticated, says campaigner Andrew Simms
UK spending on advertising almost doubled between 2010 and 2019 and, after a pandemic dip, the £23bn spend for 2020 is expected to rise by 15% in 2021.
Even worse, findings from neuroscience reveal that advertising goes as far as lodging itself in the brain, rewiring it by forming physical structures and causing permanent change.
Brands that have been made familiar through advertising have a strong influence on the choices people make. Under MRI scans, the logos of recognisable car brands are shown to activate a single, particular region of the brain in the medial prefrontal cortex.
That’s bad enough for adults, but children are now at the mercy of so-called “surveillance advertising”. It is estimated that by the time a child turns 13, ad-tech firms would have gathered 72m data points on them. The more data collected from an early age, the easier it is for advertisers to turn young children into consumer targets.
In 2018 the car sector is estimated to have spent more than $35.5bn on advertising in key markets globally, roughly equal to the annual income of a country like Bolivia. And, in recent years, advertising has pushed a major shift to people buying larger, more polluting SUVs.
Tackling “brain pollution” requires action equivalent to the campaign to end tobacco advertising. New checks and balances need to accommodate the natural concerns of councils and residents around climate, air pollution, environmental light pollution, the “attention economy”, mental health and the dominance of non-consensual adverts in public spaces.