By Luce Renaud Frigiotti

Trying to make advertising better 

I guess what really triggered this urge to write this Scab was the climate strike we all attended, here are my thoughts about Friday morning. 

First I am not sure that this kind of walk will make a real change. Especially since more than half of the crowd had paper board, so I’d say a hundred of dead trees in total ? 

That’s why focusing on real changes like eating less meat, season veggies, food from small producers etc is probably more useful. 

Nevertheless I could still have honestly enjoyed the walk, I probably would have if we were not all crooks. I mean, I do not understand that we did not even slightly talked about it. Especially after having listened to the girl with the mic and seeing all those signs about socialism. In a way I am not sure we are better than those imbeciles who shouted at us « funck climate change » in their big car. 

Because like Marc honestly said : we are here to learn how to make people want to buy things. 

Yes, I feel wrong with going to that protest. Like a wolf in the sheepfold. Here’s what we heard at the protest. We can not continue like this. The elite (government and big companies) needs to acknowledge that. What they meant by change I think is changing our way of consuming. No more consuming society and capitalism. Well friends, that is not good for us. At least not good for ours careers. 

I truly see two very different futures offering to us : 

In one all those strikes continue on until it just faints away and we keep living our lives like nothing was going on, like our behavior is not having tremendous effects on the earth and the weakest populations. As a matter of fact it seems to me that this future is the most likely. It’s not like if this environment issue was new, we’ve been hearing about this for a moment now and still not much have changed. So in the future where this strike was for nothing, our jobs are safe ! Hurray ! 

But in another future, somehow governments from all over the world start to wake up, the populations as well, we all change our way of consuming. All meat and dairy industrie crash down because no one wants to eat bacon, milk or burgers anymore ! All the clothing and luxury industrie crashes too because who wants to profits from modern slavery right ? I guess in that scenario we would also give up traveling because if I travel using the plane and my car my neighbor will do the same so no, we stop all that. And we also try to use less tech, because most of our tech is not recycled especially all the ore technologies (my english start to lack me !) so goodbye to planned obsolescence. Will Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and all the big ones resist that ? So on and so on. 

You get my point. When the lady on the mic spoke about revolution, I think she had something like that in mind. It is very complicated, probably why it takes so much time. Rome wasn’t built in a day right ? Still, I can hardly imagine that future, maybe because it so far from what we know today but also because it’s not profitable to all the big companies, GAFA & others. Also, in that future the advertising economy is most likely dead or almost. 

So for which future do we stand for ? A weird in-between ? Awkward isn’t it. 

I imagine us in the strike « What do we want ? Change ! But no extreme change just regular change you know .. When do we want it ?! Now I guess but you know take all the time you need… » 

So today I feel a real discrepancy between my environmental awareness (basically the end of human specie, no biggie) and my career. Saying that you can do both, working in advertising and being ecologic is a non sens to me. It’s like being in a climate strike with a board from amazon delivery, wait I actually saw that. 

I don’t really know where I stand in all that mess. For now I tell myself that I don’t believe in a revolution any time soon so I might just as well keep living my life. But it’s an excuse to keep it easy. I acknowledge it. Meanwhile I do what I like : a mixte of art and sociology : advertising. 

If you ever wonder if advertising is really that bad you can watch this documentary which is in french or look at who Edward Bernays was and did. Here is a little teasing from what I picked up from it : 

When you have people like Edward bernays who see themselves as engineer of consent, democracy becomes a sham. What are our goal ? Do we work for big companies ? Government ? And if that client is not representative of most population then we have a problem. Because that means small group of people, private interests create public fictions that soon become facts, are shaping fictions which allows them to funck with our heads. 

Of course all this is the fruit of my imagination and the little informations I have, I do not pretend knowing anything, just thinking about it. I would really like to know what you all think about that. 

And since the tittle of this SCAB is Trying to make advertising better I re-focus on my first idea. During those last years advertising has done more bad than good (from the tabaco industry to the whole consuming society). Yet we find so much talent and creativity in this industry, it feels like it almost goes to waste. So, what if we used a little bit of our creativity and talent (Marc himself said the class is filed with it, plus his help we should be unstoppable) to try finding creative alternatives, solutions to nowadays issues. If we can make people buy some stuff they don’t need, that is bad for them and other people, we must be able to make them do great stuff. So we could do 1 hour of brainstorming every week, just give ideas like we did last friday. 

1 hour per week trying to make the world a little bit better. 

Maybe it is the sweet revolution that we need. 

P.S. plus it would be good for SCA’s image, I’d call it SCA’s redemption