Clear your conscience

This is what a million, billion and trillion look like compared to each other:

• 1,000,000 (a million)
• 1,000,000,000 (a billion)
• 1,000,000,000,000 (a trillion, or a million millions).

This past year, and for a few years running, we’ve been parrying more than a trillion dollars worth of advertising spend from companies who want us to buy shit that’s basically, just shit.

A trillion dollars.

Think companies like Shein, who openly admit to stealing ideas from indy fashion designers, mass producing them using child and forced labour, and pumping out between 30,000 – 100,000 items per day.

Or Temu, who have cut out the middle-man from the low-cost, low-quality electronics and gizmos made in China, so that we can get more cheap crap faster and more conveniently, then absolutely flooded the internet with ads for literal junk.

There are people on both sides of the overconsumption argument: those who blame us consumers for overspending and not resisting the advertising; and those who blame the advertisers for exploiting what they’ve learned about sales psychology, buying behaviour, etc, and pouring fuel onto that raging fire.

I don’t think anyone is without blame, but the reason I’m all ranty about it is because advertising is an industry that good people sometimes find themselves in.

Advertising is the industry that I ejected from when I couldn’t take the waste and greed anymore – and I was only working on campaigns for mobile phones and pizzas.

I simply can’t imagine what it’d be like to rock up to work with a Shein or Temu brief on my desk – but this is the stuff we can actually speak up about.

Creatives for Climate is a group that teaches exactly this – whether you work in house or for yourself, they’ll show you how to push back on briefs that advance damaging companies, and yank the rug out from some of that trillion dollars of advertising.

If you work for yourself, you have a lot of control over who you produce work for.

It’s sometimes very, very hard to remember that “No” is a perfectly legitimate answer… But it is.

And every firm no to a Shein or a Temu or similar, is a step closer to a much cooler client whose advertising need not be so manipulative.

Because we all need sleep, and a clear conscience is really helpful for that 🙂