GoodGeist
A podcast on sustainability, hosted by Damla Özlüer and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network. Looking at sustainability issues, communications, and featuring global guests from a wide variety of sectors such as business, NGOs and government.
GoodGeist
Calling Time on Fossil Fuel Ads, with Viki Harvey
In this episode we talk to Dr. Victoria Harvey as she takes us deep into the conflicted heart of the advertising industry, where creative professionals increasingly find themselves torn between profit-driven briefs and our shared and planetary future.
Our conversation with Viki comes just two weeks after she published an expert briefing as part of a UK parliamentary debate on banning fossil fuel advertising. The debate was sparked by a petition led by Chris Packham that generated over 110,000 signatures.
Viki talks about how her disillusionment with advertising's climate inaction led her to pursue groundbreaking research at the University of East Anglia and then onto becoming active in influencing the entire sector. And she doesn't mince her words about the industry's moral responsibilities, delivering the powerful challenge: "If your brand is contributing to the climate crisis, change it. If you can't change it, ditch it."
Follow GoodGeist for more episodes on sustainability, communications and how creativity can help make the world a better place.
Good Geist, a podcast series on sustainability hosted by Damla Özler and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network.
Speaker 2:Hello, hello everyone. You are listening to Good Ge Guys, the message on sustainability which is brought to you by the DNS Network, the global network of agencies dedicated to making the world a better place.
Speaker 3:This is Damla from Mira Agency, istanbul and this is Steve from Creative Concern in Manchester. This podcast series explores global sustainability issues, how they're communicated and what creativity can do to make positive change happen.
Speaker 2:So in this episode we're going to talk to Dr Victoria Harvey, a researcher at the University of East Anglia who has been doing pioneering work on sustainability in the advertising and media sector our sectors. So Vicky has a master's degree in international development and is an IEMA. Is that right, steve?
Speaker 3:You did very well there.
Speaker 2:Practitioner. She also is a consultant at the Small World Consulting.
Speaker 3:And just to wrap up, the impressive bio, vicky. Your PhD at the University of East Anglia explored the ways in which the advertising industry can pursue climate-focused objectives rather than solely capitalist and consumption-driven goals. So goodness me if that doesn't strike a resonant note on this podcast. Nothing can so, vicky, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to Dan and myself.
Speaker 4:Thank you very much. Lovely to be here.
Speaker 2:Lovely to meet you too, Vicky. First of all, let's find out about you, your wider work and your journey to becoming a campaigning academic and researcher. Tell us your journey, Vicky.
Speaker 4:Yeah, absolutely so. I have worked in advertising production for many years. I co-owned a post-production editing house. We worked on big advertising campaigns with all the advertising agencies that was based in London and the UK. After that closed after a number of years and during that time, actually, I also did a master's in international development, which was a real eye-opener, and I think that was a bit of a turning point for me. I wanted to focus more on ethics and sustainability.
Speaker 4:I moved to another post-production company and as time moved on, I just realised that the advertising industry, especially in the UK, was really not doing anything to address the climate crisis. We came to COVID and still nothing happened. And after COVID, which I think changed a lot of things for many people, there was just really there was just nothing. Nobody was addressing the elephant in the room. There were fringe groups starting to come about and I thought you know this is is ridiculous.
Speaker 4:I've been speaking to the trade bodies, I've been trying to push for change. Nothing was happening and I just thought this is, this is crazy. Why? Why isn't anything happening and what can I do about it? So I did actually find a really fantastic scholarship for a PhD out of UEA, sponsored by an organisation called CAST, and this was a real clear focus for looking at organisations and institutions and how they can shift to meet climate goals, and I thought this is just perfect. I can spend three years really researching this. So, yeah, that's. That was more or less my journey into and to where I am now well, it's a very cool and goofy journey.
Speaker 3:The key, we've all been on it. So there you go, the so getting to your work. I mean we can pan out to sort of some of your wider work in a minute, but your work on fossil fuel advertising has been having a serious impact this week, including in the UK Parliament, so do you want to tell us what's been going on?
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's been a really interesting time. And just to slightly backtrack on that, what I was going to add is that you know the UK advertising industry, as I'm sure many of your listeners know, is just so important. It's the third largest in the world, behind you oh, do you want to start that again?
Speaker 4:vicky yes, absolutely so. Um, just to slightly backtrack for a moment, and why the focus on the UK advertising industry? Apart from the fact that's where I live and work, it's super important that we look at UK advertising. It's the third largest market in the world, as I'm sure your listeners know £43 billion a year. It's the first for creativity having won more Cannes Lions, I think, in Europe since something like 2005. And what the UK does, this means it's just so highly influential what the UK does, all the other markets around the world follow. So the work with looking at fossil fuel advertising.
Speaker 4:This has been a super interesting week and of course, it was kicked off by Chris Packham doing this petition to ban fossil fuel ads, which started last year, and he managed to gain 110,000 signatures, which was really monumental and really exciting. Just to be clear, my contribution to it was was small. I helped Chris a little bit. I wrote the briefing for the MPs for the debate which happened on the 7th of July. But this is obviously building on the shoulders of the likes of Ad Free Cities and privatising and all of those kind of activist groups which have, you know, been working tirelessly full time to get to this point.
Speaker 4:So when we attended the debate, which had a good turnout, I think some of us were expecting to hear oh, you know, we can't ban fossil fuel. Oh no, it's ridiculous. You know, advertising is fine, but actually what happened? Was it got really really good cross-party support? I mean, almost all the MPs that stood up to debate it were in support of it, apart from one Conservative MP, of course.
Speaker 4:So this just goes to show that the groundswell of support in banning advertising for these kinds of adverts, for this kind of product and service, and that's repeated over academia you know countless huge public quantitative surveys that support restrictions here in the UK and in Europe. So it was a really good moment, I think, for all the groups and everybody working towards that. And certainly that was something that in particular came out of my research is that very senior individuals in UK advertising really really support specifically a ban on fossil fuels, other interventions on other types of products and services, but certainly for fossil fuels they feel like this is. You know, they've done everything that they can to try and pivot their agencies away from working with these clients. They've been unsuccessful in that. They feel like a government intervention now is the thing that's needed.
Speaker 2:Amazing I mean hearing this from here, it is really amazing and your journey and your actually stability and stamina to make this happen, it's amazing. So what I hear, vicky, was the representatives are listening and also the higher steps in the advertising industry in UK they are also listening the executives and they do want to do something about this, listening the executives and they do want to do something about this. And in your briefing for the debate, you quoted Antonio Guterres' call on all advertising agencies to drop their oil and gas clients and stop acting as enables to planetary destruction. Well, that was very, very, very strong and, coming from the head of UN, that was actually really an amazing moment for us. But my question is I mean, my question was does the sector listen? But now I'm changing it because you've already answered it do you think there is a ground internally, globally, that we can make this happen step by step?
Speaker 4:yeah, I mean it is a good question and, as with everything, it's really nuanced. So it's a yes and a no. So that was an amazing call from Antonio Guterres and overall the industry, everybody is listening, right, everybody is tuned into this. So I would say the industry is listening, but who acts on that is a very different question and I guess, from what my research showed, is that the blocks to action on that point really come from two main places that's, the CEOs at very global level of the agencies, not just UK level, and essentially in the UK, the trade bodies. And so both of those things were identified in the data and, to be clear, that was research that came from really in-depth interviews with very senior people in the industry over a course of a year and a half, and then looking at content analysis over lots and lots and lots of documents and media over the course of 10 to 15 years. So you know, those two bits of data are fairly well researched and shows that it wouldn't matter if God himself called for a ban on fossil fuel advertising. They wouldn't take any notice because you know it's not happening.
Speaker 4:So it's that very concerned senior people in advertising, but not senior enough to make the decisions and, I'm sure, a groundswell of other people in the industry that are listening and are trying to create change, but they're coming up against these barriers and we can see that. For instance, you know the Clean Creatives organisation and pledge, which you guys probably know about and specifically I think it's around about just over 400 UK agencies have signed that pledge, as well as thousands of agencies worldwide. So those agencies are listening. Of Creators for Climate, you know over 6,000 individuals around the world have said you know they're not going to use their creative input for this type of work. So people are listening, there's a willingness from all parts of society, but there are just these, this institutional inertia that exists, which means that we can't quite get it over the line yet, but it's coming.
Speaker 3:So that suggests to segue beautifully onto what I was going to talk about. Vicky, if God herself can't, make them change.
Speaker 3:Well, I don't believe in any God anyway, so it's all a bit ridiculous. But if an omniscient being that somebody might have made up, I won't know. I'm going to start offending people now but I shall reform, Reform. So if we are going to make this happen, you've described again in your briefing and your wider work, which I followed for a while since it was flagged to me by a good friend of a fellow friend, a researcher of ours. You've described the existing safeguards against misleading advertising as being pretty much toothless here in the UK, and certainly we know from our network of agencies that's a similar picture in other countries. So what reforms do you think we need in terms of advertising and marketing to actually make that shift happen?
Speaker 4:yeah, I mean it's a. It's a difficult one, right? Because the apa here in the uk is funded by a fee from the advertisers. I'm sure we're all familiar with that, and I think it's similar in France with the ALPP and other models that I've seen across Europe and wider. You know their job is to not allow the public to be misled. It's really pretty simple.
Speaker 4:But when it comes to the sophistication of oil and gas adverts, the budgets that they have, this is just outpaced with any regulator. You know they just don't have the resources or the time, and that's really evident when you look at the rulings. You know it takes them six months, eight months, sometimes a year or more to even make a decision whether the advert that went off air six months ago should be banned or not. I mean, you couldn't actually make it up for any other process that is so unfit for purpose to protect the public. It's actually, you know, when you think about it it's hilarious. Why would you even have that as a process?
Speaker 4:So you know, these are the reasons that we need to look to government intervention and regulation, because if the regulator is completely outpaced, outwitted, outgunned by the sophistication of these adverts, and very senior people within the industry can't make a move and a decision to not service these clients, what else is left? So I would just go back to especially in the case of fossil fuels, the only thing would be regulation. They've done it in France. Fossil fuels, the only thing would be regulation. They've done it in France. There's absolutely no reason why we can't do it here. I guess, because that's going to take a bit of time. The one intervention that I could think of and I'm sure there are others is that the fees that fossil fuel advertising pays to the ASA be 10 times higher than any other Radford, to give them the resources to be able to actually do their work in a timely manner For just hope's sake.
Speaker 2:Once upon a time in our history, globally, we managed to do that with the tobacco companies. So I think there is hope and I think you do think there is hope too. But in frame of this conversation, one particularly controversial practice you highlighted is the work the fossil fuel industry does on sponsorships, and particularly in culture and heritage. All around the world, not only in UK, this has become so toxic for some major cultural brands. Why on earth do you think they still say yes? I mean, why Is this desperation or what, what it is?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think it's. Yeah, it's desperation, it's money, it's lack of imagination, it's ignorance, and when I say ignorance I don't mean their ignorance. They, they know what money they're taking. I think they rely on the the ignorance is too strong a word the general public being unaware of the harms of sponsorship and advertising from fossil fuel companies, and they, just, they just rely on that right. You know, there's such huge amounts of money being thrown at all different kinds of organizations so that they can launder their reputation. It's particularly nefarious when it's aimed at our children and our kids and, you know, convincing them that these brands are part of the future. And this is just an even more insidious type of advertising. To just instill that kind of brand awareness into, into the younger generations. It just feels actually just really flipping evil.
Speaker 4:Essentially so you know, I don't know, it's just again, this is the work of culture, and stains are doing such a brilliant job of highlighting all of this. Um, and I mean essentially, it needs to stop. Look at the way tobacco advertising was, you pick, it was everywhere, wasn't it tobacco advertising? And that's, you know, you wouldn't really think you're doing and you can't do that anymore. So it's, it's not unimaginable that that can stop, and I think it, I think there's been really good progress, but we just, you know, we just need to get rid of that kind of sponsorship.
Speaker 3:It's horrible well done on restraining yourself and not dropping the f-bomb there, vicky, because I thought it was coming. You should have done it. I've done it before on the podcast. I don't mind, it's okay. We just have to tick a little box on the podcast server to say explicit material in this episode.
Speaker 3:Uh, and I feel like I ought to come clean on this one, actually, because I've got I've got a bit of a track record with the advertising standards authority and I am the proud owner of a number of judgments against me and I found and I so I was in that process that you've just described and I found it absurd. I found it extraordinary because I put out with for the vegetarian society at the time where I worked, I did an ad on vegetarianism. It's controversial, I don't want to shy away from that. It shocked a few people, but the judgment this is what I was judged against it wasn't that it was factually incorrect or wrong. The ad was banned from being used in the future because it only put one side of the argument and I should have included that there were reasons for people to eat meat on the advert. And I said with a vegetarian site, you loony people. What's what the fuck is wrong with you and and so it is a complete there and the the complaint, of course, came from the Meat and Livestock Commission.
Speaker 3:So it's just, it's an absurd process and it's completely broken. That was years ago, but it's still the same. So, staying with this kind of broken industry, which is the way I would view it and there's a bigger picture, isn't there, vicky? Of you know, know, rampant consumerism, that is, you know, fueling a nature crisis as well as a climate crisis, and and that cascades through to lots of the other things. What do you say to the libertarians in the pub if you get cornered by one? God help you that that think a ban on fossil fuel advertising is some kind of woke stepping stone to many more advertising bans on things like cars, meat products which I totally think we should ban or cheap flights. What's your view there? Is this a stepping stone to, you know, the future where we have ad-free cities, for example?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean I have heard that actually from some people in the industry that there are some brands that are nervous about getting behind any kind of brand because they feel that they're next, or that is your brand and it's making you feel nervous that you might be next. That just shows that you have fundamentally not done the critical thinking necessary to really examine your part in the climate crisis. You need to give yourself a good talking to and ask yourself is your brand or product or service contributing to the climate crisis?
Speaker 4:And if it is change it, it. And if you can't change it, then ditch it or get out, because this is coming for you and your brand. Unless you you can change your brand to you know be, you know, have a positive force in in the climate narrative. If and if you can't do that, you should, you shouldn't be producing that product, brand or service, I mean. But it's the climate crisis and the non-linear effects which we are already experiencing and which will get far worse means that if you're not doing that kind of risk analysis and you're not asking yourself these questions and if your conscience is being pricked, then you know you need to do something about it. So my advice would be to do that either fix it or get out.
Speaker 2:It's either. Or I love it when our guests give us the headlines, don't you, steve? If you can't change it, ditch it. I love this. So we're almost there and coming to the end a little bit. I mean so soon. But before we close, could you give us a heads up on your wider research work and what you're going to be working on next?
Speaker 4:Yeah, absolutely. And you know just actually one thing before I do that. It's interesting, isn't it, when people say, oh, you know what will be next, fast fashion or frequent flying, you know those adverts should be banned because the cost of a 20 quid return flight is not the environmental cost of that flight. So that's inherently misleading the public, that flight, so that's, that's inherently misleading the public. So when people say that that's that's, the other answer is that we're not looking at all the costs of these adverts, we're just looking at the financial cost, which is which is rubbish. So you know it's. It's now morally indefensible to do that kind of advertising. And if you're defending it then, as I say, you need to take a good look at yourself.
Speaker 3:Vicky, just before you do the next bits, though, if I don't mind, if you have my jumping in, because that is you just opened up a perfect moment for us to do a, a regular questioning of whether capitalism is a viable model for how we should run our planet. And it's interesting, isn't it? Because that 20 pound, which is about £10 cheaper than the rail fare, would be for us to do the same journey, which just enrages me. Every time, it's a kind of it's almost like a I don't know what. Would you call it A sonnet lumiere of why capitalism is failing us. We just see it expressed through these grotesque adverts, but they actually speak to a deeper truth, don't they? Which is we don't value the things that we should value in the way that we ought to yeah, I mean, and that's it.
Speaker 4:And that's why we need to really understand what we want.
Speaker 4:Do we want clean air, do we want to be healthy or do we want a really polluted environment and money in the bank?
Speaker 4:I mean, it's absolutely, completely ridiculous and it just goes back to that really horrible inequality that we live with all the time. You know, the consumption that advertising drives in the global north is at the cost of people's lives right now in the global south, at the cost of people's lives right now in the global south, and and that's, I think, is one of the most disgusting things about the climate crisis is that this isn't. You know, we feel like we have a right to continue to consume all this stuff, and yet if it was right in front of us, right in front of our eyes the suffering that that causes to everybody in the global south, not just women and children then it would. It would be really offensive to us if it was right here in front of us, in our front room, yet we don't see it because it's hidden, partly by advertising, by glamorising this consumption, and you know, yes, capitalism and this drive for continued growth is just really at the heart of that and the heart of of what's causing the problems.
Speaker 3:I agree anyway, I derailed the conversation. Fleet there with it sort of take down capital at the moment. So back, vicky, back to the question what, what are you up to next?
Speaker 4:yeah, well, I'm continuing with.
Speaker 4:Actually, there's a lot of really exciting initiatives that I won't name that are going on at the minute in the advertising industry, coming from lots of different corners and lots of different parts of the industry, so I'm trying as much as I can to be involved in those and contribute to them and that's really interesting.
Speaker 4:I think overall, you know, my contribution is small. I do want to constantly highlight the relentless work of advertising and ad-free cities and clean creatives and Creatives for Climate and DeSmog and Culture and State all these organisations that we know because they're in this full-time working away all the time. So anything that I can do to support them, I and purpose disruptors, of course, and all these people and and possible. So, yeah, it's that it's. On a practical level, I work for some really brilliant post-production companies, such as Film Locker, who are doing practical actions to decarbonize the supply chain and advertising. That's really important and some possible new academic research, which would be really interesting, and also just continuing the work at Small World Consulting, which is really interesting and inspiring, working with the team there.
Speaker 2:Inspiring is the word I would use for you, victoria. Well, brilliant so, but we have to end this. And our final question our network is ironically called do not smile, because we need to make sustainability a subject that brings happiness into the world. What place or person always makes you smile?
Speaker 4:Oh, my goodness, that's so difficult. It's just nature. It is just wherever that is, it's just being in nature. That's the grounding thing for me.
Speaker 3:It makes me happy. Wow, see now and for those of us who can see our faces on the screens because this is an audio-only podcast Damla's got a really quiet, mesmeric, natural background to her Zoom window. So well done, damla. Vicky, it's been lovely talking to you on a week that's been really exciting in terms of actually breaking new ground on this critical debate that you played a part with, obviously driven forward by Chris Packham, and, for international listeners who don't know, quite a big celebrity here in the UK driving all this forward. So it's been pretty amazing, vicky. Thank you, good luck on that future research gender and make sure you come back and talk to us again. Damla, do you want to wrap us up?
Speaker 3:So thanks to everyone who has listened to our Good Guys podcast, brought to you by the Do Not Smile network of agencies podcast brought to you by the Do Not Smile network of agencies, and make sure you listen to future episodes, where we'll be talking to more amazing people about the work we can do together to create a more sustainable future.
Speaker 4:So see, you Damla, see you Vicky. Bye, vicky, thank you, thank you, bye.
Speaker 1:Good Geist, a podcast series on sustainability Hosted by Damla Özler and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network.
