Northern Lights: Must we spend our lives being blasted with ads?

Must we spend our lives being surrounded with and blasted by adverts?

Too often it feels like there’s no escape from the endless stream of adverts. Whether on billboards and digital signs, on our TV screens, on websites on computers while we work, and on our phones, we’re being overwhelmed by corporations marketing at us.

There’s a reason the adscape might feel inescapable: in 2023, the UK’s advertising market was worth £36.6bn.

Lots of people are spending lots of money to ensure that we see what they’re trying to sell.

It’s sad that that’s part and parcel of modern living. We live in a society where there are very few spaces that you can exist in for free without either purchasing a product or being advertised one; our cities and towns are dominated by a proliferation of cafés while we struggle to fund libraries and community centres.

The glut of outdoor advertising in particular has been found to cause mental overload – when your working memory becomes overwhelmed with too much information – and bright digital screens can reduce sleep quality and lower people’s mood.

And the content of the ads they beam at us, which normalise overworking, overspending, and overconsumption, have the effect of making us unhappier.

There’s an important principle to uphold – that we should live in a society that treats people as people first, rather than as consumers – and that our societal worth is not down to affluence and ability to spend lots of money on the unnecessary products advertisers want us to buy.

The kind of city I’d like to live in is not one where I’m being constantly told I need more – and need to spend more – in order to be happy. And I don’t think that’s a radical position to hold.

We should also be clear that there are some products that simply should not be sold, some industries should not exist in the way they do, and we should take all available steps to try to achieve this.

Back in March, Sheffield City Council agreed an advertising and sponsorship policy that is revolutionary for the UK, meaning that council-owned ad sites will no longer allow adverts that promote gambling, cars, airports, fossil fuel companies, alcohol, weapons, and more.

This is, in part, about ensuring public health initiatives are truly interventionist again. The spread of the covid-19 pandemic through workplaces and care homes, or the Grenfell tower fire – both extreme examples – but examples nonetheless of what can happen in the absence of strong regulation and strong intervention.

We don’t live in a world where things automatically right themselves, and we can’t wait for the invisible hand of the market to save us.

We need to bring whatever social interventionism we can into play, and banning harmful adverts is a way of saying that it is far more important to try to improve lives than it is to bring in income in the short-term.

Greg Fell, Director for Public Health in Sheffield, has written that, ‘since the introduction of the ban on tobacco advertising, smoking rates, and rates of smoking-related disease and death, have drastically reduced, highlighting how effective restricting advertising can be.’

We know that advertising to be effective, otherwise corporations wouldn’t spend so much money trying to influence us the way they do.

And Greg has done much to highlight how effective banning “badvertising” is too.

Banning harmful advertising is one of those decisions we will all look back on and think only, “why didn’t we do it earlier?”.

And so, when there are adverts for products that are clearly toxic and harmful – ie those for smoking, for gambling, for fossil fuel companies and large polluters – it’s right to use whatever levers we can to lessen their harms.

Among climate justice and trade union circles, there’s the concept of a “just transition” – that refers to moving away from polluting industries in a fair and inclusive way, that doesn’t work workers and communities dependent on their jobs. I think this is a helpful concept to apply to the advertising sector.

In the long-term, I would love see changes to phase out the need for advertising and advertising spaces full stop – with those employed in the sector transitioned to more socially-meaningful work.

This would also mean our high streets and digital spaces could be reoriented for the benefit of people, rather than their use maximised by corporations in the pursuit of profit.

Imagine going for a walk in a city centre and not having messages bleating at you in capital letters – telling you to buy something – at every waking moment. We can only dream.

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