Advertising is a Cultural Death Wish

Tobacco barons became rich. James Buchanan Duke (American Tobacco Company), for example, amassed a fortune of about $1.74 billion in 2023 dollars.

The good news is that the government is finally doing their job and starting to protect citizens. Per capita cigarette sales in the US fell by 58% between 2000 and 2020. (Data from the CDC.) Tobacco companies once plastered media with lies that even claimed that cigarettes were healthy. Now, a web search will turn up literally dozens of in-depth studies about just how deadly they really are. Convincing television ads drive the message home for those who don’t read a lot. Advertising is a tool like a gun. It depends on who is shooting and who is getting shot.

To steal a current ad slogan, “advertisers don’t care”. They have just moved on to new lies. One great example is plastics. Plastics have become the new tobacco, creating wealth for oil and chemical barons; pollution and death for the rest of us.

But recently, there have been a few government initiatives that, if expanded, might possibly threaten the profit margin of the people making these gazillions of tons of plastics. For example, in 1973 – over fifty years ago – the first version of an international agreement (MARPOL) to stop dumping plastic in the ocean was signed. Real results have been disappointing, but, Hey!, it’s a start.

Oil and chemical barons are acutely aware of what happened to tobacco and they’re fighting back! The companies selling sugary soft drinks, Pepsi, Coke, and Dr. Pepper, have joined forces with a big new ad campaign featuring an infectious jingle called “Made to be Remade”. There’s another one with clever computer animated gray plastic bottles being flipped over and magically becoming colorful new containers.

But the truth is that that the magic just ain’t happening. A few weeks ago on Earth Day, environmental activist Eve Schaub wrote in the Washington Post …

The time has come for us to stop “recycling” plastic. Plastic as a material is not recyclable.

National Public Radio – NPR – published an article titled, “Recycling plastic is practically impossible — and the problem is getting worse”.

It appears that the whole plastics recycling thing is just a shiny plastic bauble to distract us while they sell us more plastics.

The vast gulf between advertising by the plastics industry and the truth is a lot like what the tobacco companies did to us a century ago. Just lie. It works! It would be great if people could study and understand these issues and do the right thing. Unfortunately, that’s a goal that is even more impossible than recycling plastic.

I don’t have a solution. (Although what happened to create the gradual recovery from our tobacco addiction is worth thinking about.) But I do have a step in the right direction. Let’s get rid of the plague of advertising. We can outlaw that gradually. It can and has been done in various ways and places.

Start with road signs. Do you really want those monstrosities blocking your ability to see anything else? Then move in on various types of media ads. There was a time when ambulance chasing lawyers didn’t have ads all over TV. Let’s go back to that time. (I was hit by a truck in a crosswalk once. Ask me about it.) We could get serious about truth in advertising. Can you actually read anything in the tiny print at the end of an ad? Maybe if advertisers had to make the fine print at least as legible as the rest of the ad?

In our house, we make a serious effort to avoid buying anything that is advertised. It’s hard, but it helps to remember that you and I pay for all those ads. The cost to make them goes right into the price and they’re not cheap. It also helps to look for the lies. It’s a game we often play in our house. It can be more entertaining than Super Bowl ads.

There are lots of ways we might be able to encourage people getting rich in advertising to get an honest job.