Marshall McLuhan is reputed to have said that ‘the medium is the message’. Whether or not he was being serious or cheekily provocative isn’t entirely clear but it’s certainly been exercising a lot of minds from the 1960s onwards. Is the medium, the carrier of the message, more important than the message itself, or is its importance more like that of a train delivering a key speaker to a conference? There’s an argument that some vehicles carry no message at all. Light, for instance. Does a lightbulb carry a message or does it simply illuminate a circumscribed area in which it might be possible to look for one?

With that in mind, I’m looking here at the difficulty there seems to be in getting the climate message across to enough people to make a difference. Admittedly, there are powerful influences working against that message, people with vested interests in maintaining the status quo with apparently no appreciation of its shifting parameters. That or they think it won’t happen to them. And there are undoubtedly others who can see how things are going but, feeling powerless, simply ignore the warning signs. Nothing to see here. Keep calm and carry on.

Adverts though, are hugely influential, which is why advertisers pay top dollar for a slot on prime-time TV, catch-up no longer allows you to skip through them, and even Netflix is introducing them. But how many times do we see something about the climate crisis in these slots? And where would it be positioned? Between the ads for fast fashion, cheap products from farms barely able to make a living, face cream that will prolong our youthful looks? Pending disaster is a hard sell and there’s no profit to be made from it.

So, amongst the Halloween and Christmas videos and while I’m on a roll, here’s one to put a proper damper on all that frivolity. You can eat your kettle chips while you watch the earth flicker out of existence to a cheery adverty tune.

Normal service will be resumed shortly, with the caveat that normality is under revision.

References

These are the best UK advertising time slots. https://www.impressvideo.co.uk/vlog/best-advertising-time-slots-uk/ 2024. Accessed 21st October 2024

SCH 2024