What has inspired you in the last seven days? What motivates you and what do you value?

There aren’t many places, in my academic, professional or personal life where I ask or am asked these questions. But today I was in luck.

I went along to a workshop to discuss values and campaigning run by my good friend Casper ter Kuile who helps to promote the thinking around Common Cause.

We were discussing the role that promoting values which positively benefit society and the environment can be promoted through campaigns run by NGOs.

The sub-group that I split off into tackled the issue of advertising.

We began to look at the question of whether advertising is a problem in itself or just a symptom – a tool of the massive industries and businesses that dominate our economies and markets.

After the session, I began to think about bubbles, and realized that our relationship with products for consumption and the adverts we see for them is much like the way macro-economic bubbles work (albeit with my limited understanding of economics).

Adverts lie to us in two ways: they use metaphors to tell their story and get their message across – they don’t merely convey information but they wrap it up before they give it to us. Think about it – that footage of a pricey, solid saloon car cruising around hairpin bends on an open mountain road doesn’t represent your actual commute to work, it’s a metaphor for how you’re supposed to feel if you drive the car.

BUT, you won’t feel this way, because… this first form of lie facilitates the second – adverts sell us over-inflated expectations. They tell us that we will have happier marriages, look more attractive to others, and be better people, all through buying their product or service. But having Microsoft Windows doesn’t automatically improve your family life, and buying one of McDonald’s healthy range of fast food doesn’t instantly make you thin.

But we buy into this – we accept the myth of these expecations, and allow our hopes to balloon.

This is rather like the bubbles in the wider economy – housing bubbles, the dotcom bubble, the bubble in finance and credit – they are wilfully allowed to grow, against our better instincts, until they burst with depressing effects. 

I’m reading a book right now which is examining the record of the Labour Party in office. It states that “In presiding over a bubble in prices, Labour did not even pretend that the wider economy benefited… Labour were never going to challenge the national passion for house-price inflation” (Toynbee, P., Walker, D., The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain).

The same is true in our miniature, much shorter relationships with adverts and products and services. Only when we splash our cash, finally giving in to the pressure of so many signals, and experience that anti-climactic lack of fulfillment, do we enter the “depression” phase. Like an economy which bubbles, and then dives into recession, so do we. Having convinced ourselves that this item was the last thing we needed to make ourselves complete, the last piece in the jigsaw of our existence, do we then realise that we lied to ourselves as much as the advert lied to us.

But, thinking about it more, maybe there’s an even bigger advertising bubble. Evidence shows that advertising not only imparts information, but what’s more it reinforces the core values that drive consumption in the first place. And the more we consume, the more resources we use and the less sustainably we live. Our whole economy is a marker pen drawing on the wafer thin bubble of finite natural resources, and this bubble is ready to crumble like the last Pringle from the tube crushed between the roof of my mouth and my lower jaw.

So what can we do about it? Well, addressing advertising which sexes things up, promotes malignant values or targets the young and impressionable would be a good place to start. We also need to call out lies and dishonesty where we see it.

But for me, the kind of advertising which increases overall consumption and promotes negative values would begin to fall away if we saw a transition to the more sustainable, local and meaningful lives, communities and businesses we should be striving for. While targeting advertising must be part of what we do, we can combat it best if we win big, and change the wider economy.