For example, consider the product icons that companies use to create an identity for their products. Many imaginary creatures and personalities, from the Keebler Elves to the Burger “King,” have at one time or another been central figures in popular culture. Although these figures never really existed, many of us feel as if we “know” them. Check out the Icon Advertising Museum that will soon open in Kansas City to learn more. Even better, visit the museum’s Web site to see how many icons you recognize: http://advertisingiconmuseum.org.

To give you a head start, here are the most popular spokescharacters of 2008, according to research done by the research company Marketing Evaluations, which measures the public familiarity and appeal of more than six hundred characters featured in advertising campaigns:

Advertising pervades all of our lives, and its presence only continues to grow as advertisers expand the formats they use to reach us and as we try to slake our growing appetites for information and entertainment. The average adult is exposed to about 3,500 pieces of advertising information every single day—up from about 560 per day thirty years ago.

Here’s a statistic to chew on: American Internet users ages twelve and older spend an average of 6.1 hours per day interacting with video-based entertainment. About four of these hours are devoted to television viewing (live and recorded), while the rest goes to video games, Web and PC video, DVDs, and video on mobile devices. This sizeable chunk of time is projected to grow to eight hours per day by 2013. Where will the growth come from? One answer is online video; Nielsen tells us that in 2007 Americans watched 7.5 billion streams and 16.4 billion minutes in total of online video, and children ages two to eleven spend almost one-third of their online time watching videos. Expect advertisers to follow suit.^[31]

Figure 3.2. 

Children spend a high percentage of time online viewing videos.

So, is advertising a vapid cloud of superfluous fluff, or is it an efficient and entertaining process that enriches our lives? Obviously that depends on whom you ask. Let’s focus (first) on the reasons we should regard advertising as a glass half full. Then we’ll deal with the negative stuff.

Dr. Curtis, an anthropologist then living in Burkina Faso, was almost ready to throw in the towel (pardon the pun). Then she decided to ask some consumer goods companies how they would convince people to wash their hands using the same techniques they rely upon to sell vitamins or deodorant that people tend to consume out of habit. As she observed, “There are fundamental public health problems, like hand washing with soap, that remain killers only because we can’t figure out how to change people’s habits. We wanted to learn from private industry how to create new behaviors that happen automatically.”^[32] These companies know very well how to create and reinforce such habits. For example, a century ago it was rare for anyone to brush her teeth twice a day, but efforts by Colgate and others changed all that.

Public health campaigns have had limited success in changing unhealthy habits. For example, evidence suggests that antidrug campaigns actually increase drug use, presumably because they remind people about the drugs to which they’ve become attached. It’s sort of like telling someone, “Whatever you do, don’t think of an elephant.” Did that work?

Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, and Unilever accepted Dr. Curtis’s challenge and joined an initiative called the Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing with Soap. The group’s goal was to double the handwashing rate in Ghana, a West African nation where almost every home contains a soap bar but only 4 percent of adults regularly lather up after they use the toilet.

When participants started to look into the issue, they had the insight that the problem resembled one Procter & Gamble first encountered when it introduced Febreze, a product it developed to remove odors from smelly clothes and furniture. Its ads initially focused on smelly situations, like pets, sweaty teenagers, and stinky minivan interiors. The launch flopped, and P&G was ready to kill the product. Then its researchers found that consumers liked Febreze when they used it, but that many customers simply forgot that it was in the house. P&G’s ads needed to give them the right cues to use the product. The company identified one: the act of cleaning a room. So, it created commercials showing women spraying Febreze on a perfectly made bed and on freshly laundered clothing instead of in smelly areas. The ads worked well—and the more people sprayed Febreze, the more automatic the behavior became. Now consumers buy $650 million of the stuff each year.

Back to handwashing in Ghana: studies showed that while about half of the people washed their hands before they ate or after they used the bathroom, only about 4 percent of Ghanaians included soap in this process. They also found that mothers often didn’t see symptoms like diarrhea as abnormal but instead viewed them as a normal aspect of childhood. But they also unearthed an interesting tidbit: Ghanaians did use soap when they felt that their hands were dirty, for example, after they cooked with grease. This habit was prompted by feelings of disgust, and they applied soap to eliminate this bad feeling.

So the team came up with a big idea: create a habit to instill a feeling of disgust when people use the toilet, so that the emotional reaction would cue the use of soap. While many of us don’t hesitate to grimace at the thought of a less-than-sparkling bathroom, in many places in the developing world any toilet is a symbol of cleanliness, because flush toilets have replaced pit latrines. So the task was to create commercials to teach the audience to feel disgust after they went to the bathroom. The solution: the team shot ads of mothers and children walking out of bathrooms with a glowing purple pigment on their hands that contaminated everything they touched. These spots didn’t sell soap use, but rather disgust. Soap was almost an afterthought—one fifty-five-second television commercial only showed soapy hand washing for four seconds. Still, the link between disgust and its removal via soap was clear: the team’s follow-up research showed a 13 percent increase in the use of soap after the toilet, while the number of Ghanaians who reported washing their hands with soap before they eat rose by an impressive 41 percent.^[33] This is no soap opera: advertising can save lives when it’s used creatively and when it thoughtfully applies what social scientists understand about human behavior.

PSAs

The Advertising CouncilThe Advertising CouncilA private, nonprofit organization that marshals volunteer talent from the advertising and communications industries, the facilities of the media, and the resources of the business and nonprofit communities to deliver critical messages to the American public., a private, nonprofit organization, is one of the most important and influential organizations in the advertising industry. The Ad Council coordinates advertisers, advertising agencies, and media in its efforts to create effective public service messages and other forms of advertising and deliver those messages to the public.^[34]

Advertising agencies enhance society’s well-being when they create (usually pro bono, or for free) public service announcements (PSAs)public service announcements (PSAs)Not-for-profit advertising messages designed to change the society’s culture as they focus awareness on specific issues that address the public as a whole. like the “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk” campaign. PSAs intend to change the society’s culture as they focus awareness on specific issues that address the public as a whole. For example, after the anti–drunk driving campaign, its creators reported that 70 percent of people said that the ad helped them to stop someone from driving drunk.

SS+K Spotlight

On May 29, 2008, SS+K launched a PSA they’d produced pro bono (for free) in support of United Nations Peacekeepers.

Video Highlight

UN Peacekeepers

The spot, featuring U.N. Messenger of Peace George Clooney, is entitled “Peace Is Hard.” It is being distributed primarily online via social media outlets such as YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and others.

Local governments use advertising to attract new businesses and industries to their counties and cities. Even states are getting into the act: We’ve known for a long time that I ♥ NY, but recently Kentucky and Oregon hired advertising agencies to develop statewide branding campaigns. The official state motto of Oregon is now “Oregon. We love dreamers.”^[36] A publicity campaign to select a state slogan for New Jersey generated a lot of questionable entries, including “It’s Jersey: Got a problem with that?” “New Jersey: We’ll look the other way,” and “New Jersey: Be sure to pick up a complimentary chemical drum on your way out.” The state went with something a bit less colorful: “New Jersey, Come See For Yourself.” ^[37]

In particular, some marketers single out a type of consumer they call LOHASLOHAS (lifestyles of health and sustainability)Consumers who worry about the environment and spend money to advance what they see as their personal development and potential; also called cultural creatives.—an acronym for “lifestyles of health and sustainability.” This label refers to people who worry about the environment and spend money to advance what they see as their personal development and potential. These so-called “Lohasians” (others refer to this segment as cultural creatives) represent a great market for products such as organic foods, energy-efficient appliances, and hybrid cars, as well as alternative medicine, yoga tapes, and ecotourism. One organization that tracks this group estimates they make up about 16 percent of the adults in the United States, or 35 million people; it values the market for socially conscious products at more than $200 billion.^[39]

Just how widespread is conscientious consumerism? In a 2007 survey, eight in ten consumers said they believe it’s important to buy green products and that they’ll pay more to do so. Corporate responsibility is now one of the primary attributes shoppers look for when they decide among competing brands. Consumer research strongly suggests that this awareness often starts with personal health concerns and then radiates outward to embrace the community and the environment. Predictably, advertisers have been quick to jump on the green bandwagon. Green marketinggreen marketingAdvertising and marketing that emphasizes how products and services are environmentally responsible., which emphasizes how products and services are environmentally responsible, is red hot. Established agencies are setting up divisions to specialize in green campaigns and a host of new agencies (with names like The Green Agency and Green Team) are opening to meet the demand.

Figure 3.3. 

LOHAS represent a great market for organic foods, energy-efficient appliances, and hybrid cars.

The advertising industry has the potential to radically change people’s attitudes and (more importantly) their behaviors as we face the real consequences of environmental contamination. Unfortunately, there’s also the very real potential that it will “poison the well” as it jumps onto the bandwagon a bit too energetically. It’s almost impossible to find an ad for virtually any kind of product, service, or company that doesn’t tout its environmental credentials, whether the focus of the ad is a detergent, a garment, a commercial airplane, or even an oil company. As a result, complaints about greenwashinggreenwashingAdvertising and marketing that misleads consumers about a product’s environmental benefits., or misleading consumers about a product’s environmental benefits, are skyrocketing. One egregious example is an ad for a gas-guzzling Japanese sport utility vehicle that bills the car as having been “conceived and developed in the homeland of the Kyoto accords,” the international emissions-reduction agreement.

To prevent a greenwash backlash, it’s imperative for advertisers to act responsibly. There’s nothing wrong with trumpeting the environmental value of your product—if the claims are accurate and specific. Or you can suggest alternative methods to use your product that will minimize its negative impact—for example, Procter & Gamble runs an ad campaign in the United Kingdom that urges consumers of its laundry detergents to wash their clothing at lower temperatures.^[40] The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) provides guidelines to evaluate green advertising claims; for example, it suggests that “if a label says ‘recycled,’ check how much of the product or package is recycled. The fact is that unless the product or package contains 100 percent recycled materials, the label must tell you how much is recycled.”^[41]

The advertising industry can help us heal our toxic environment: please don’t poison the well.