Andrew Simms

Bo Peter 00:13
Hello and welcome. My name is Bo Peter London. I am your host for this marketing for what matters podcast. And today we have on Andrew Sims, co director of the new weather Institute. Andrew is incredibly prolific in the environmental advocacy space and has a strong background in economics, which you’ll hear us discuss today. In a main focus, we’ll be discussing his campaign bad advertising, which is all about getting advertisers and the marketing agency as a whole marketing agencies as a whole the whole industry, as well as regulators to stop allowing the fossil fuel polluters to advertise it all of our spaces out of sports, and lots of different areas. It’s quite a fun topic. So get ready. You’re gonna learn a little bit more about Andrew in a moment, and I hope you enjoy this podcast. Thanks for listening. Welcome to the marketing for what matters podcast today I have Andrew Simms. Andrew is a prominent figure in the field of environmental sustainability and climate action. He’s the co director and founder I believe, of the new weather Institute, a think tank focused on addressing climate change and promoting sustainable development. He’s a research associate at the Center for Global political economy at the University of Sussex and coordinates the rapid transition Alliance, definitely check out their website. Andrew, you’ve got a rich background in environmental advocacy, which is why we’re here today to discuss bad advertising, which is the focus of today’s discussion. Now Andrew and I met at the ethical agency summit in Amsterdam just a couple of weeks ago. And like I said to you, then I wanted to use a Marketing Pro matters platform to share the advertising message further. So without further ado, Andrew, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.
Andrew Simms 02:01
credibly Nice to be here and lovely to have an opportunity to go over what we were chatting about in Amsterdam.
Bo Peter 02:08
Absolutely, I’m glad that we have the opportunity to go over by advertising a little bit further your presentations at the ethical agency Summit, we’re certainly inspiring. And I hope that listeners today will hear that message as well and be inspired likewise. So before we jump into bed advertising though, of course, I’m always super interested in know from the people joining us on the show, you know, how did you develop? Or what inspired your passion for environmental sustainability and climate action? So Andrew, how’d you get here?
Andrew Simms 02:39
Well, I think I was probably always a bit of a nature freak when I was a kid. And I grew up at a time when the big problems that the world was talking about were the Cold War, great problems like acid rain and a hole in the ozone layer. And it was just at the earliest stages when people were realizing about the climate problem. So I sort of threw myself heart and soul into working on campaigning on these issues over a very long time. And I think I went through quite a long period of time where I saw the fundamental issue driving all the problems driving the ecological degradation driving the fact that we were living beyond our planetary means we’re actually economic. So I’ve done a lot of work over the years in in economic justice and social justice trying to get a more equitable deal in the global economy between the global north and the global south. So over the years worked on some of the big issues like Third World debt relief, like trade rules, and trade and trade relationships between North and South. The functioning and how the international financial institutions did and did not work for countries in the Global South, and have always been looking to try and find a way that we can achieve the kind of changes in consumption patterns in the global north at the speed and scale that would meet what the climate science tells us is necessary because we’ve got this kind of crazy situation now that I think I’ve lived with my entire life have a high and rising level of awareness about environmental problems, and a complete seeming inability to align our economies or our lifestyles, with what we know. And although it’s jumping ahead a little bit too quickly. I think one of the reasons why I ended up working on the issue of advertising is to try and find an answer to that question of why is it with everything that we know that we’re still not changing in the way that’s needed? But yeah, I kind of grew up working on the big, the big global issues. I was there for the original Earth Summit in 1992. A very long time ago. And I think I became aware of the environmental issues at a time also, which was after that big first wave of environmental awareness. As in the 1970s. And it is quite shocking when you go back and look at what was known then and for example, the critiques of economic growth that happened at the bias hot, very highest level, in, in, in politics, I think back to the American politician Bobby Kennedy who back in 1968, was saying that, looking at the obsession people have with economic growth, that economic growth gives you everything in life apart from those things, which truly matter. And we’ve had the kind of be the environmental critique of growth from the limits to growth, which has been proved and reproved. Time and time again, as the sophistication of our ability to monitor the Earth’s environmental crisis has got better, we’ve realized how much they got it right all those decades ago.
Bo Peter 05:49
And so this, this inability to align all that knowledge going back all the way to the 60s Until today, it’s been, yeah, more than 60 years where we’ve known some of these things especially become more clearly known, especially in the last 3040 years, at least as long as I’ve been alive, it’s always been a message that I feel like I’ve been hearing. So where does this inability to align come from? Or what do you think is a source of this and perhaps this goes directly into bad advertising? And and and where that this campaign makes a difference? No,
Andrew Simms 06:25
very much so. Because the thing, the only thing that’s really changed with the science over the last few decades is the level of certainty level of understanding the sophistication of the models the basic trajectory we have known about. So there’s been this kind of pretty consistent voice coming from the scientific community about the fact that we need to change, we need to change immediately, and we need to change comprehensively, rapidly and radically. And every time there is a new piece of science on not just the perilous state that the climate finds itself in, but all the other planetary ecological boundaries that were transgressing or close to transgressing. The message is consistent from science, this is the one voice coming into one ear. But those voices only get so many seconds or minutes or news programs, so many column inches in papers or on or on websites. And at the same time, a much louder. Voice. Many, many voices, we hear from the commercial culture around us from advertising, open, a watch TV program, travel on your city transport system, open a magazine, listen to the radio, watch TV, and we’re surrounded by a commercial culture of advertising, which is basically saying, no, no, it’s okay. Just carry on consuming as you are, by the SUV. Take that, you know, long haul flight for your holiday or one of several holidays a year. Just keep living as you are. So we’ve got science telling us one thing in one year, but being drowned out by this volume of advertising and sort of commercial messaging, which is saying no, it’s okay. Your high carbon lifestyle is just fine. Just keep doing what you’re doing. So you get this kind of cognitive dissonance. And I think if you ask the question, why it is that we are not seeing the changes that you expect from people is that at the very least, people are getting a really mixed message. And at most what they’re getting is an extremely partial view of the world from one particular part of the economy, which has got much bigger resources in terms of spending on influencing you. And he’s got much more sophisticated techniques in terms of encourage you to behave and to shop and to buy in to live in a certain way. Ben has the voice from the scientific community, which has been saying, Actually, guys, we need to change, we need to change quick and we need to change comprehensively, we need to change now.
Bo Peter 09:00
So I think you’ve done a really good job of at least clarifying to me how high carbon advertising influences consumer behavior by essentially just being omnipresent, constantly telling us, it’s okay to live a life in a certain way to, you know, order stuff on Amazon, get it on demand, whenever you want, doesn’t matter what it takes to get there doesn’t matter how much waste goes into that process. It’s okay, because you deserve it, et cetera, et cetera. So this very much clarifies I can imagine some of the motivations behind starting to advertising campaign, but just like perhaps on a personal level, or maybe you can just tell me a little bit more about how did this come about? I’m talking about the advertising campaign. Where did the origins and motivations behind that advertising campaign come from? Yeah,
Andrew Simms 09:47
no, absolutely. And I think just saying again, about the way that it works, think, why it’s so influential is, you know, on a day to day basis, people are busy, we’re easily distracted. We make choices from available options. And I think what advertising does very effectively and in a negative way, is to make the bad options easily available to make them appear normal to make them sort of like very close to hand there, you’re always adjacent sort of options which you reach for because they’re the ones that are put in front of you. And I think I became aware of this acutely when I was working for another organization, another think tank called the New Economics Foundation. And almost on a whim, one day, I decided, from the moment I woke up in the morning to the moment I went to sleep at night to count, the number of adverts I came across could be on billboards in the street, or in the newspaper or on radio, whatever. And I compared those, these were things that were speaking to me that were kind of telling me to define myself first and foremost as a consumer, and telling me that I will be a happier and more fulfilled person, if I bought whatever it was the advert was saying I needed and I thought well, I’ll also compare that with the messages I come across in the public domain, which speak to me as a citizen as a sort of a human being with wider extended responsibilities. And by the end of the day, I’d come to a situation where the commercial prompts were somewhere between like five and 600. And this remember, this is pre digital advertising, this is pre smartphones, this is pre internet kind of gone crazy. And, and the number of messages that spoke to me as a citizen with other responsibilities on that day with three. So the imbalance between the sort of the messages activating certain behavior patterns in my environment, well, wildly out of whack with what might be a sort of balanced existence. As a citizen, I thought this is like a, this is a major problem. And then it’s not just the fact of the advertising. It’s the fact that it seems that some of the dirtiest industries have the heaviest advertising budgets, and on one of the issues that we work on, for example. And the other thing which put this whole issue into my mind, I suppose, is that I was acutely aware that there had been an occasion, in the fairly recent past, when as a society, we’d come to the conclusion that a certain type of act of advertising was was so toxic, then it needs to be heavily restricted and completely banned in some areas. And that, of course, was the long struggle to get tobacco advertising banned. And I became interested in the process that had brought us to that point, because when you look at the mortality from just the air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels, and when we say the burning of fossil fuels, it’s kind of important to remember that fossil fuels get burned in your cars, when you take a flight somewhere, it’s not just those oil rigs and off in the off off offshore or something like that. It’s in the middle of our cities, that the the mortality rates, depending upon which bit of research, you look at just from the air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels, somewhere between sort of like five and over 8 million people a year, and which is at least comparable, if not more than the fatalities and mortalities, or the early deaths resulting from smoking. So I thought, hang on, there’s something there’s something here. And we should really, at the very least, when you think about how difficult many of the things we have to do to tackle the climate crisis are like retrofitting all our homes to make them energy efficient, completely rewiring our energy systems, completely changing our transport systems. It just struck me that at the very least, what we should do is stop making the problem worse, in effect by sort of promoting our own self destruction by selling options, which are heavily polluting, and that make it worse. And one of the examples that really brought it home to me is that when I first started looking at this in detail was the point when the kinds of cars people were buying, were changing very rapid rapidly because car makers decided that worked out that they could make a lot more money by selling sports utility vehicles for wheel drive cars and selling them to people who live in cities, not farmers who might need them, you know, up a hill somewhere. And when I looked in detail at how the these patterns of consumption were changing, you saw that the carmakers through their marketing had created a situation in which in less than a decade round about a decade, we’d gone from a situation where about one in 10 of new cars bought with these more polluting heavier and more dangerous SUVs to around about half of all new cars being these more polluting options. So just at the moment, when we should have been changing our behavior patterns to reduce our climate impact, to take better and arena options. You had an advertising lead marketing push from a really big industry from the carmaking industry that was actually getting us hooked on more polluting and worse options. And I thought, well, you know, we learned the lesson from tobacco that if you want to stop a lethal, toxic problem, the first thing you do is to stop promoting it. And Remembering of course, that if you ban the adverts, it doesn’t actually stop anyone doing it. But what it does do is perhaps stop more people taking it up or taking that option in the first place. So that why can’t we apply that to the really big ticket items that are most polluting in our environment? And that’s things like, well, when you get the greenwash propaganda from the fossil fuel pump companies themselves, the big car makers that are selling us SUVs, and the airlines that are selling as the prospect of you know, unlimited, round the world, long haul flight travel on leisure breaks.
Bo Peter 15:54
Thank you, Andrew, for that really detailed explanation of what not just what motivated you to want to start the advertising campaign. But some of the facts and figures behind why this matters so much. I think at this point, a lot of listeners might be saying this all sounds like a pressing problem. And clearly, advertising is creating an issue here. But they might still be rubbing their head and asking themselves. Wait a minute, what is the best advertising campaign? So maybe you could just outline for us? What is the campaign and what are you trying to accomplish here? Oh,
Andrew Simms 16:27
no. That’s just the kind of question I love to get. So all right, we are in the middle of running our rapid transition Alliance. And the rapid transition Alliance just for context is a network of 200 plus campaigning and community type organizations, advocacy organizations, whose strapline is evidence based hope. And that is all about looking at real world examples, both historically, and currently, where we’ve shown the ability to make the kinds of changes that we’re going to need to make to tackle the climate crisis. Now, when we were doing that work, I was thinking about the issue around advertising. And I was acutely aware of the history of the precedent of the ban on tobacco advertising. And I thought, yeah, well, this could become, that took quite a big mobilization to delivering the tobacco ban happened over decades. It involved health professionals, media professionals, many, many different people. And I thought, well, actually, we need something similar now for the climate crisis. And with a friend and colleague of mine called Leo Murray, who I worked with on this. And if anybody’s interested back in the day, some years ago, he was a professional animator in his first training. And if you want to look up the impossible hampster, it’ll give you our first piece of work together, available on YouTube, which is a critique of economic growth, which involves a 9 Billion Ton hamster. If you look it up on YouTube, you’ll find out all about it. He and I sat down and said, there’s one issue that’s not being looked at here, in all the mobilizations around the around the climate crisis. And that’s the active promotion of lifestyles and products and services that are making the problem worse. And the word advertising popped into our conversation. And we said, that’s a campaign. And we thought, by a modeling on some of the work that was done successfully to achieve the tobacco advertising ban, we should be able to deliver the same for heavily polluting products and services in the context of climate change. So we started the campaign, and we always had a number of different levels that we wanted it to work out. Now, ideally, I live in the United Kingdom, we’re now outside the European Union. So we have to pursue the kind of regulation and legislation that would apply in the UK. But at the same time, we’ve been working with colleagues trying to deliver a tobacco style law to bring about an end to high carbon advertising across the European Union. And we’re doing the same at the national level in the UK. But there is another level there are other levels at which you can achieve progress. Because very often it’s the case and this is pretty common in the world of climate action, but it’s city level action. And city level authorities are often pioneers, they often are able to do things that national governments find it more difficult to do. They’re more fleet of foot they’re more agile, they can deliver change. So we’ve also been speaking with local authorities and city councils and the like to see controls on the most polluting kinds of adverts brought in at the city level. When you look across Europe, from the Netherlands, to Sweden, many other countries, including the UK, or Australia, on the other side of the world, we’re beginning to see at the local level at the city level, exactly these kinds of new policies brought in where say, for example, a city council might already have some controls so that you can’t, you know, advertise junk food outside of school, they will have on sites that they control, they can control the kind of advertising that goes there. So now we’re beginning to see, for example, most recently, Edinburgh, the capital city of Scotland has introduced a high carbon advertising ban on sites that it controls within the city parameters, you’re seeing similar things happening in cities like Amsterdam, and The Hague, in the Netherlands, Stockholm region, in in Sweden, and many, many other places is beginning to build some momentum around this, there’s also beginning to be debate at the national level in some areas. And we hope to see that happen much quicker.
Bo Peter 21:03
That’s excellent. I mean, this leads to so many questions that I have for you. First of all, I love seeing that at the local level that people, individuals have actual agency that they can go, I imagine, speak to their local authorities to their governments, and try to demand these these changes take place. And of course, also that you’re trying to implement this on a legislative level, both at the your European Union, and then the United Kingdom, for people listening, and maybe they don’t work for a sustainable organization, or nonprofit, etc. How can they take that first step to find out if their local authorities are already doing this or what they can do? In this case, if they’re not in a campaign against their local authorities to set up these restrictions. If
Andrew Simms 21:50
you’re in the UK, for example, you can pop on to the advertising website, which is adverts.org. And you can click on a link that will allow you to write to your local counselor. And they’ll be able to tell you what their policy is already whether or not they have one. And if they don’t have one, that’ll put you in a position where you can direct your counselor towards we’ve got a toolkit, which has got some model motions in it, that can be adapted for the local circumstance. And that can begin the process at the local authority level, to see these kind of policies passed. Now, in our experience, it’s most often the case that it will be one individual at a local level, who gets the ball rolling, that might be a local citizen who starts a conversation with their counselor, or it might be a counselor themselves. But it’s really important to know that it always starts somewhere. And you might think, oh, surely somebody else has already thought this will probably they won’t have done. So if you find this interesting, and you take the first step, you could be the person who triggers a real change in policy at your local level. So I’d really, really encourage people to get in there and do that. And we’ve got briefings and and background information that can give you both all the bits of history that I’ve been talking about, but also the practicalities about how you go through that process with your local authority.
Bo Peter 23:12
Absolutely. And I think it Yeah, at least, I’m used to live in the United States. So I know that it’s often from these local levels, that added starts to bubble up, it really makes the change. So I can only imagine that it will happen in the same way. At least, it’ll put on that additional pressure on a national level to get some of this going. So with that in mind, I know that France has become the first country back in 2022, to pass some legislation on prohibiting some type of advertising. I know that, like you said, you’re focused on the UK, and the EU doing this, what’s the likelihood that other governments, especially at these national or international levels, will make these changes or what still needs to be done to get there? Yeah, France
Andrew Simms 23:56
is a very interesting example. Because what they’ve done is to put more requirements on advertisers both to put warnings about the impact of the thing being advertised whether it’s a kind of a flight or a car. And when it’s to do with transport options. They also have pressure on the advertisers to make people aware that there are also other ways of getting around. So if you’ve got a car advert that might be that they’re required to have something that highlights the possibilities in an urban setting of using public transport or cycling or walking, taking one of the kind of the active travel options. I think the likelihood of action at the national level has become much more likely only in the last few weeks because we had a groundbreaking moment quite recently, when the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres stood up for the world and has called upon governments international IE, to ban fossil fuel ads, and to recognize the fact that we need to radically reduce demand for the most polluting products and services. It has been, it was the most clear, the most specific and the most unambiguous call from the world’s most senior, sort of independent diplomat, if you like. So I think we’ve actually, although this conversation has now been going on for the last few years, it’s broken through at a level where someone who, whose whose mandate is to be a moral voice for the world, and has been speaking out sort of very actively on the climate crisis, in particular, has made the connections about how this is one of the most obvious things that we must address, because we’re in this kind of crazy situation where we’re allowing a situation where we are ineffective, promoting our own self destruction. And because there hasn’t been at the national level, apart from those kind of few examples kind of mentioned, mentioned France, where you’re offered some additional information, which is a good thing, but it actually the removal of the active promotion of the heavily polluting product or service is key. We found in our own research, that merely putting wording or warnings on adverts for particularly damaging products and services. Isn’t that effective? Because the advert itself tends to drown out the public health messaging, if you like, what is effective is the removal of the offending advert, so that it’s not there in the first place. And I think the problem with just having a few warnings, if you you can see this on adverts for gambling sometimes that that, you know, the small print at the bottom is completely drowned out by the overall advert itself. And research tends to show that those kinds of warnings are not terribly successful. So the key thing is to take those adverts away,
Bo Peter 27:10
right, because that’s really going to be the only thing that’s going to stop getting early stimulating us all the time, so consistently to want to buy into one to live these high carbon lifestyles. And it’s it’s not going to be easy, I imagine just because we are so conditioned to to once all of these things to do that travel all over the world. And I think many people in my generation have truly believed that it’s, you know, their their right or their likelihood or it’s that they’re that they should be traveling and seeing all the destinations. And I you know, I’ve been guilty of that myself. So there’s a lot of work to do, you know, to try to step back from that a little bit. Now, I want to go back to what Antonio Guterres said the UN Secretary General, he said, Indeed, that the fossil fuel industry has been shamelessly greenwashing, especially with massive ad campaigns in that advertising and PR campaigns have been the madmen fueling this madness. Now, I wanted to highlight that because many of the people who will be listening to this podcast are also going to be other marketers. And I, Andrew, what you and I met, we were at the ethical agency site, which was all about agencies and marketers and advertisers stepping forward and saying enough is enough. We need to find ways to either avoid working with these types of clients, or to ally and ideally be promoting clients who are going to be doing more stable action and working out the other direction. But it’s not easy. And it gets I just wanted to highlight that because, yeah, we got to do more and especially in this industry. I think it’s easy for us to be very attracted to the money and wanting to continue having our client work. But sometimes we really have to ask is this is this all there is and can we do something more? So thank you for bringing for bringing up Antonio, your tears. I do think it’s a remarkable statement. And what I certainly didn’t see coming myself. I know like sometimes it seems to me that this is a David versus Goliath story, right? Where, you know, like, like Antonio Guterres said there’s this huge advertising campaigns, lots of money being pulled in, pulled and thrown in by high carbon polluters, and the fossil fuel industries. So this seems like a pretty big challenge. What is and I would add on that, I know that most advertising bodies are self regulatory, so that certainly doesn’t make it much easier. How are we going to make these changes happen and in the face of face it all of this stuff, all of this money on the other side?
Andrew Simms 29:52
Well, I think I mean, the comparison, again, holds true that we have been here before we We’ve been through this process in the run up to the widespread bands that now exist on tobacco advertising, all the arguments, and all the tricks of the industry and the David and Goliath nature of it were present, then. And when people are in the middle of campaigning for bans on tobacco advertising, it was there was never any guarantee that it was going to be successful. So as with many campaigns like this, I think you have to believe in the possibility of success. And I think a lot of people who were very tenacious, a lot of health professionals were very tenacious over the years and all the same sort of up both arguments and tricks of industry that were used by the tobacco industry back then, have been and are being used by the fossil fuel industry, and the delaying tactics that we’ve seen also on climate action in both the vehicle industry and the aviation industry. They’ve all been, they’re all there, too. But there is a pathway, there is a logic, there is a moral force and a practical necessity to achieve change to prevent climate breakdown. And I think what is so attractive about the option of removing the pressure to consume the most polluting products and services is that from a political perspective, it’s much easier than doing a lot of the other hard lifting, that’s going to be required in the climate sphere, is not as if you need to have massive public investment for the retrofitting of homes, something that nevertheless we have to do. This is something whereby waving the policy wand of saying, actually, this is no longer acceptable, you’re making a bad problem worse. And in doing so you’re undermining people’s health, you’re making it harder for us to achieve energy security, you’re worsening the climate problem, et cetera, et cetera. I think at a time when governments are finding it very difficult to do things, something like this, which doesn’t involve a direct obvious cost or sort of investment cost, and is, but is quite a good way of taking the pressure off people feeling that they need to consume, well, there’s a huge number of wins there. And then there’s a whole lot of other areas that we haven’t had time to go into as well, about some of the well being and psychological and health issues related to exposure to advertising. And so especially exposed to the advertising of the products that also themselves create a health problem. But there’s lots of wins, there’s lots of benefits that politicians can see in terms of pursuing public health and mental well being goals, as well as energy security and climate goals on top of this, that you can achieve in this way. And I think, also part of the problem is what do you what are the good things once you start talking about this issue? You make people a little bit more aware of how insidious and pervasive many of the advertising techniques can be? So why is it that it suddenly feels normal to see in your supermarket carpark a place full of two ton SUVs for people to nip out and buy a pint of milk or you know, a can of beans or whatever? How has that been normalized. And I think people aren’t aware of the many sort of subtle ways in which advertising gets under your skin to make you feel that something is normal, when obviously, it’s not very normal. And I think especially with the way that social media, and sort of so called surveillance advertising, where your your social profile gets tracked and targeted across multiple platforms, how those sort of things have been emerging when people realize the way that they are being subtly manipulated to think that they would, you know, be happier if they had a certain thing. I think once we go down that journey, nobody is out there campaigning saying we want to be exposed to more advertising. It’s not as if there’s a kind of like a big public demand to have this advertising and most people, given the choice, would you rather use an ad blocker rather watch a film that is not interrupted by by advertising? I think from a political perspective, this is an attractive, a piece of low hanging fruit in terms of achieving lots of goals simultaneously. So I see that it can be something that can gain pretty widespread political and public support.
Bo Peter 34:34
I think you make a very compelling and convincing case, I especially find that the argument of very little investment needing to take place from governments to be quite compelling because indeed, like you said, compared to everything else, this isn’t a pretty easy win to start getting consumer behavior to align more with the scientific facts and things that we’ve known for so long, actually align a little bit better. So I really I really They find it very compelling. Now, you have with mostly talks about adverts. And when you and I met in Amsterdam, you also spoke about sponsorship. So I saw that on your website, it’s, we’re right now it’s the middle of June 2024, the Euro Cup has just begun. And the advertising campaign recently scrutinized all the sponsorships at the Euro 2024, of course, a major football tournament watch all around the world. So despite trying to claim that it’s going to be the most European Championship of all time, there still have lots of political sponsors like Qatar Airways, Coca Cola, which is the biggest plastic polluter in the world, as well as I believe even just fossil fuel companies themselves gas, and etc. Types of companies. So I just wanted to bring this up, because very clearly, this isn’t just about advertising. But as you were just saying, just very insidious ways that we connect things that are cool, such as sports to these high fuel, like high carbon lifestyles, and that that that that connection in our brains might always be obvious, but we’re certainly going to, to keep this in mind. What else can you tell us about a campaign like this to just really clearly points out some of these, I guess, companies that are being linked in, in sponsorship? Absolutely.
Andrew Simms 36:26
I mean, this is something which is quite personal for me, because I’m, I’m quite into sport, I’ve always been sort of very, very much into sport. And when I was a child, being English, I used to go and watch the glorious game of cricket. And I used to go and watch cricket competitions that were sponsored by tobacco companies. And if when you look again, at the parallels between the way that tobacco advertising used to work, and the advertising of high carbon and polluting products and services worked today, I think of the words of a marketing executive, big tobacco, who posed the question. The problem is how do you sell death? You know, how do you sell a poison that kills so many people a day a year? And the words that he used is that you do with the great open spaces, the mountains, the open places, the lakes coming up to the shore, they do it with healthy young people, they do it with athletes, how could a whiff of you know a cigarette be of any harm in such a situation like that? And now I think that that that that benefit the polluting industries seek by sponsoring sport is because well, firstly, it gives them access to some of the biggest global audiences that exist if you think of a major sporting competitions like the Olympics or the World Cup, or or indeed, the euro 2024. You’ve got audiences in the hundreds of millions and in the billions when it comes to the biggest the biggest events. Now, every major sporting competition that includes the Olympics and the World Cup, and now the year is 2024. But each one promises to be the greenest yet. And yet, when you look across sport at the moment, from the fossil fuel companies themselves to the car makers and the airlines, you see sport floating on a sea of fossil fuel use, whether that is Middle Eastern sort of Petro state sponsoring competitions, or major oil companies like Aramco sponsoring the World Cup, we’ve got Qatar sponsoring euro 2020 For as you met, as you mentioned, so you’ve got this great incongruity at the moment when sport is being sponsored by the kind of polluters, who because of the impact that they’re having on fueling global heating and climate breakdown, or actually destroying the conditions for sport to flourish in there actually polluting the very air that athletes breathe and rely upon to function. So there is a massive contradiction. But the other thing about sport is that we know, sport is a place where big conversations happen, whether it’s to do with racial prejudice, and black lives matter whether it’s to do with child poverty, in in the UK, or whether it’s to do with gender inequality, sport has been a place where major issues, raise their heads and move up the political agenda. And I think once people realize that these major polluters who are sponsoring these competitions are taking sport and athletes and the fans for a ride in the sense that they’re selling them products, which are destroying the very climate, the sport it depends upon, and of course that we all depend upon, well, then I think this is a way in which we can talk about this problem, we can bring a lot more attention to it. And if you can see action by the governing bodies within sport, the FIFA is of this world, the International Olympic Committee’s of this world, the UAE Firs of this world, the major clubs that also draw, you know, huge audiences for their players in their games, if they can take action because, you know, if they were put on the spot in an interview and say, you know, do you care about environmental sustainable Do you care about the climate? They would all say yes. Would you cannot say yes to that question. And then allow your sport to be used as a billboard as an advertising hoarding, for the very activities for the very products and services, which are making the climate crisis worse. So at the moment, there’s a huge contradiction out there that we need to address. And sport is in a position where it can address it. And where most of the clubs, the big global clubs, the big, or, you know, sports governance bodies are, at least rhetorically committed to action, but at the moment, they’re allowing, they’re allowing their sport to be used as an advertising hoarding for some of the most polluting products and services. And that has to stop.
Bo Peter 40:43
I absolutely agree with you. Now, I want to play devil’s advocate for a moment. And I know that FIFA and these organizations have been in the past been accused of, of bribery of, you know, ticking of not always being the most ethically oriented organizations, I can very easily imagine these companies or rather these organizations, the governing bodies, the World Cup, the Euro Cup, et cetera, and even for the Premier League, and what have you, they are going to, I imagine that they would look at a suggestion to ban these types of advertisers as an attack on their revenue streams, because it is largely where they do get their revenues, and, and so on. That’s one side, you’ve got revenue streams. And on the other side, you’re gonna have these companies screaming, I imagine that they’re being infringed on their free speech, and that this is going to harm their businesses. So those are going to be two I imagine opposing forces that even politicians might listen to. What do you what do you say to that? How do you respond to such critics?
Andrew Simms 41:50
Well, of course, they would say that, but let’s just point out again, we’ve been here before, these were exactly the arguments used by the tobacco industry back in the 80s, and the 90s. And before the regulations on tobacco advertising came in, they all said sport would fall apart, it wouldn’t survive. Well turn around and look at what’s happened to sport in the last few decades, it has flourished. The other thing to point out, of course, is that we’re living through a necessary economic transition, in which the old fossil fuel based economy is slowly too slowly being phased out. But you’re seeing the rise of renewable energies of green collar sectors in the economy. So the obvious thing for clubs that want to show leadership on this and governance bodies that want to show leadership on this to do is to start looking to shift their sponsorship packages, to have a transition plan in place so that they’re moving to cleaner sponsors now on arguments around free speech. Now, just picture the scene, if the same argument were applied to a cigarette company that wanted to advertise outside of school, you know, you could argue it’s their free speech to put up a banner outside that school? Well, I would say it’s just as insulting to the next generation to think that you should be advertising the very products and services that are going to destroy their future. In the same way, we’ve had all these arguments before we’ve been through them, we know that change is possible. The point is to have both practical and moral leadership because it’s both those issues. The international community has signed up to climate targets, that we’re not on target to hit at the moment, one of the easiest things that we can do is to stop that amount of pollution that would not happen, where it not being promoted and advertised. Now, you take away the adverts, it doesn’t stop people doing things, but it stops promoting that activity so that there will be less of it. This is the easy step. This is the this is the simple thing and the way forward. And the other thing to say of course, were sport is concerned that it’s entirely possible for people to enjoy all the benefits of sport, without having sponsors names all around the stadium. And you know, on all of the players shirts, some of the best sport takes place at the grassroots at the local level, where you’re not seeing adverts for Middle Eastern Airlines or sports utility vehicle makers, etc. So let’s get away from the idea that sport has to have these things to exist sport at its best is not like that at all.
Bo Peter 44:28
Once again, a very compelling argument, Andrew, so to come back to it is tobacco set style stand on advertising. We’ve been here before we can do it. And sports, you know, well actually, I think we were you really pointed out is that we need to have this moral leadership to take these decisions because this is where we’re at. We’re at a crossroads. And this transition needs to happen one way or another. So let’s start making those decisions and do the right thing. Now, I imagine that you and I are have the ability to go back and forth We’re gonna talk about advertising and all the different ways that we can implement these things. So I am going to, to move us forward because we’re starting to run out of time. And we’re, but I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, Andrew, and I really appreciate everything that you’ve shared, I imagine that this is not the end of these conversations for us, and certainly not for you. I do want to ask you, you know, again, this podcast is mostly going to go to marketers and entrepreneurs, who are or in this field, what advice would you give them to be able to better promote sustainability and climate action?
Andrew Simms 45:38
That’s a really, really good question. And it sounds sort of very, kind of Goshen forward of me to say, because I’m not someone who works in the industry. I’m not I’m not a marketer. I’m not an advertiser. And, you know, Far be it for me to tell the industry you know what to do, and how to do it. But it does seem to me at the moment that the industry might be missing a trick, an obvious trick of one source. And that is, if we think about how the fossil fuel companies themselves operate, they’re extremely good at getting subsidies from government or getting money from government, they get a mixture of tax breaks and direct investments, which are worth hundreds of billions every year. One of the biggest challenges at the moment is to have a flow of information, which lets people know both about the problem of the climate crisis and the ecological crisis, what it will mean for them what it will mean for their children, and the urgency of immediate action in the next handful of years. That also links the benefits of action to the other good things that can come from that, like cleaner air, like better transport systems, like better insulated homes, like more jobs in the green collar sectors, etc. What’s missing, it seems to me at the moment, is the flow of information or public information that can balance all of the advertising over the bad stuff, it strikes me we need to do two things, we need to drop the brief on the bad clients on the polluting clients. And we need to persuade government to put money into getting the message across about the rapid transition in systems and behavior that we need. Now, what does that look like? If you think to any moment of big international crisis over the last several decades, whether it was during the pandemic, or whether it was during the energy crisis in the 1970s, the yo pet crisis, or whether it was thinking back to times during the Second World War, where people have to come together, for the public good for the public benefit, and do things differently? That was always accompanied by major public information campaigns. I think the industry at the moment should be writing to government saying, we’re in a crisis, we all need to change. People are confused. We don’t know what actions to take, we don’t know which ones are most effective. We don’t know which ones will bring most benefit. Help us with that. We know that when people are given good, honest, clear information. They’re up for doing things differently. We saw that during the pandemic, when people willingly change their lifestyles to protect the health of their neighbors of their friends of their loved ones. But that was accompanied with comprehensive messaging across all channels. Now, what we need is the same kind of thing. For the long climate crisis for the coming years, we should be seeing significantly larger public budgets to help with information to help people find their way through this issue. So the industry, the creative industries, the advertising industry, is that people have got skills in comms out there. Your skills have been called on in times of crisis before they need to be called on now. And I think the industry should be writing to government saying, Where are the budgets to do this? I mean, when you look at it in the UK, at the moment, there’s been a few paltry little bits of of public information, campaigning around energy efficiency, but no really comprehensive and thorough messaging going on, which lets people understand why we’re being asked to change what the threats are, and what the benefits of action can be. Now, that’s what we need to see. We need to see that comprehensively. And we need to see that year in year out for the coming period where we all have to go through transition. It will help us it will make the process of change easier. It might just keep a few people in the creative industries in a job as well.
Bo Peter 49:54
So it’s a one two punch we can stop the bad advertising and do more of the public ads. realizing or public information campaigns to get the right information out there. So remove the bad and put in more good. Exactly. today. And so do you have a potentially a resource or something like that that people could look to on how to lobby governments for this type of budgeting? Or is that something we still need to create?
Andrew Simms 50:16
I think given that we raised this as an issue for the industry just a couple of weeks ago, in Amsterdam, let’s just say there’s lots of conversations going on, about what it might look like, I think that the first thing is to see, you know, who’s who’s, who’s up for it, who wants to put the message to government from within the industry, it’s, and I think we’ll be seeing over the coming weeks that there will be some movements afoot around that. And also just to kind of go through, because because there’s been this great absence of that kind of information, we felt the need to step in with our own modest resources, and try and imagine what it might look like. So we actually created what we call the Ministry for the climate emergency, which you can find on bad verts.org, where we have one or two, what you might describe as counter advertising campaigns of the sort of thing that might turn heads and make people think differently. Now, it’s slightly tongue in cheek, but we kind of mean it as well. And we try to imagine what it might look like if several different governments had similar departments. But that was to kind of plug the gap. But if you want to get a little whiff and a flavor of the sorts of things that we could play with, then yes, let’s, let’s, let’s look, let’s look there, too. But I think if the if the, if the industry is clever, it will see this as both a necessity, and an opportunity, and something where they can demonstrate what they’re good at. And where we can take the techniques of explaining people inviting people to go on a different kind of journey, in a way which we can look forward to it. And I think in that way, the industry will begin to play its part in the necessary process of transition that we all know we’re going to have to go through sooner or later. And the longer we leave it, the harder it gets. So let’s start as soon as possible.
Bo Peter 52:04
All right, let’s get started. I’ll be looking for that link on the bad verts.org site and make sure that we have it in the show notes. Andrew, this has been a absolutely fantastic conversations are so many snippets of information that I’m so excited to share with a wider audience. And I hope that people listening have gotten a lot out of this conversation, as well. Share bad verse.org As far and wide as you can people who are listening. And again, Andrew, thank you so much for being here. Before we close off this call. As people who listen to the show, often we know we have a partnership with one tree planted in which we are planting trees on behalf of the guests. And so again, entra NGOs are thank you for being here today. I just wanted to quickly ask you what your motivation was for choosing the Malawi area for planting these trees?
Andrew Simms 52:58
Well, I choose Malawi because through my reading on the challenges that the whole continent of Africa faces and Malawi in particular, over the course of the last few years, the pressure on natural resources have been huge. The way that many sort of multinational companies and other governments have sort of predated on the natural resources of Africa, it seems to be a really, really good place to go for putting this kind of this kind of positive energy. I should also I should have mentioned earlier, actually, that if people want to do a little bit more of a deep dive with some of the references and examples that I was being I’ve been talking about over the course last hour, but you can also get the book of the campaign, which has the same title. It’s called advertising and you can find it and all the usual places that you find books.
Bo Peter 53:48
Absolutely. And, of course, get the book, go to rapid transition not org. Is there anything else that that you want to point people towards Andrew, here in the last moments of the show? Well,
Andrew Simms 54:00
I think given the sort of people who might be listening here, and keep an eye on the creatives for climate community, some of the ways are taking forward these issues, we hope to be working in partnership with creatives for climate. And there will probably be information about the sort of initiatives about putting pressure on government to stump up and invest in public messaging on the hub with the creatives climate community.
Bo Peter 54:22
Excellent. Great. So Andrew, once again, thank you so much for being here. You can follow Andrew on Twitter, he is that Andrew Sims, that’s a n d r e WSI, mm s underscore UK. I got that right. Right, Andrew. Yes. All right. Cool. So, thank you all for being here. Thank you, Andrew for this enlightening conversation. And, again, go to Bedford Sutter. Org or rapid transition.org to learn more. Thanks very much.
Intro 54:53
Thank you for tuning in to our podcast marketing for what matters. You can find us on Apple, Spotify, Google or Pandora fora love the show leave us a review and follow us on social media at peaceful media to stay up to date about new episodes and as always thank you to this earth for giving us all we’ve ever needed See you next time