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There is no greater problem facing humanity than the environmental crisis (Hansen, 2009; Lewis & Boyce, 2009) and global warming is overwhelmingly attributed to human activity (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2014; Boussalis & Coan, 2016). If greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are left unchecked, people and ecosystems risk irreversible damage in the coming decades (IPCC, 2014). According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading climate change research group, the production and subsequent consumption of goods and services are central to the production of GHG emissions, and significantly contribute to the global climate crisis (Chancel & Piketty, 2015; Climate Change, 2014; OXFAM, 2015). Individual consumption in growth/consumer-oriented economic systems accounts for the majority of global emissions (OXFAM, 2015); the highest percentage of harmful emissions are “indirect” emissions, generated in the production processes of goods and services (Chancel & Piketty, 2015).
Advertising creates demand for these energy-using goods and services (Carey, 1960; Galbraith, 1969; Morgan, 2015), and continues to expand around the world. For example, global media owners’ net ad sales rose by 5.7 percent in 2016 (Handley, 2016) and roughly $500-700 billion per year is spent by global brands on advertising in order to persuade potential consumers to purchase more and more (Handley, 2016; World Federation of Advertisers, 2015). The global consumption of goods and services has also dramatically increased (on a per-capita basis) over the past several decades (Climate Change, 2014, p. 288), further exacerbating GHG emissions. Advertising’s power to stoke consumption (Simon, 1970) must be addressed in this perpetual expansion.
The IPCC recommends mitigative strategies that decrease GHG emissions by reducing product demand and extending product life (Climate Change, 2014). However, the IPCC also finds that there are currently no clear incentives to improve suppliers’ manufacturing processes or reduce product demand (Climate Change, 2014, p. 83). This is a significant policy knowledge gap. As a result, they call for new policy recommendations to address the needs outlined by the IPCC.
This paper rethinks advertising to propose a mitigative model that may begin to fill the much-needed gap in studies that directly address incentives for manufacturers of products and services to better control the GHG emissions generated by their production processes. Advertising is commonly understood simply as a service provided, in a business transaction; developing a new structure of advertising that considers environmental sustainability would help mitigation efforts and effectively complement the strategy of curtailing demand, as suggested by the IPCC.
While most advertising scholars focus on consumers or advertising content (Kilbourne, 1995), these variables are external to the purpose of this paper, which means the content of advertisements is irrelevant to its application. Instead, this paper emphasizes the transactional and distributive aspects of advertising as opposed to actual advertisements themselves. An advertising transaction is when an individual or organization arranges, usually by purchasing space, to have an advertisement appear in a medium of communication. Distributive aspects of advertising occur when the owners of the communication medium decide to publish and distribute the advertisement to an audience. Transactional and distributive aspects are under-examined in establishment advertising literature, which is unfortunate, as they can have a strong impact on the human and environmental consequences of products and services that are advertised through media. What little regulation exists for advertising generally focuses on content, and discounts transactional and distributive aspects.