EmailNothing should really surprise us about 21st-century advertising.
The industry of original Mad Men who conspired with their clients to persuade us to buy stuff we don’t need, to supposedly impress people we don’t know, who largely don’t care, has hardly been a paragon of honest virtue over the years.
So Scottish and Southern Energy’s new campaign shouldn’t make my blood boil. But it does. It stars ‘Maya’, a CGI orangutan, exploring a city and apparently marvelling at all the wonderful things that energy can do for us.
What has an orangutan got to do with Scottish and Southern Energy? This is a culpably crass example of cheap lazy advertising thinking, that exploits innate human biophilia and connection with nature in the most cynical way possible. Lingering shots of twinkling brown higher primate eyes conjure empathic reactions within us. In the same way that Cadbury’s Phil Collins-obsessed CGI gorilla did a few years ago. Basically we’re suckers for cute, beautiful, or emotive animals. Where are the image rights for biodiversity as their personas are hijacked for commercial gain yet again?
This wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was actually a meaningful link between Maya and SSE. Except possibly for the perverse twist that the ancient civilisation she’s named after also dissolved because of a failure to deal with climate change of their own. At least when Greenpeace used the notorious ‘Orangutan finger’ campaign to challenge Nestle’s KitKat there was a direct connection.
Perhaps SSE are considering burning palm oil in one of their power stations? No, poor Maya is a shameless award-seeking, endangered species co-opting, lunge at mawkish sentimentality, an attempt by SSE to generate an emotional connection between customers and their business. As a generic brand engagement piece it will probably be very effective.
That’s no problem in itself. That’s what advertising does. Lord knows if we’re going to get concerted, co-ordinated and coherent action on climate change we need to change our relationship with energy. From mindless to mindful, invisible to visible, transactional to collaborative, as we drive down demand and drive up renewable energy. Might I suggest that a better way of emotionally engaging customers, creating some ‘brand warmth’ in the ad-speak jargon, might be to actually do something noteworthy, impressive, inspiring?
A quick look at SSE’s energy mix and activities does not suggest it is doing anything special to warrant differentiation in the energy market – especially not compared to pioneers like Ecotricity, Good Energy and even new insurgent Ovo. Its carbon footprint per kilowatt hour is almost 27% above UK average thanks to a high coal component. To justify super shiny slick and expensive but woefully unimaginative advertising such as this, gracing our high streets with soft focus billboards of wind turbines, improbably hosted by the ethereal visage of a benign orangutan, SSE needed to do something distinctive. Instead they’ve opted for style over substance.
As Jerry Seinfeld pointed out at the Clio Awards the other week, ‘I love advertising. Because I love lying’. This is a deeply manipulative campaign that trades on a wide range of superficial and tenuous eco-imagery to misrepresent what is actually a very ordinary and conservative business in a virtually monopolised market. I wouldn’t go so far as the late, great legendary Bill Hicks, whose opinions on advertisers and marketing teams were well known (‘kill yourselves’), but those involved in this campaign should be asking themselves some deep questions.
Of the advert, an SSE spokesman told me:
We want to find new and innovative ways to engage with our customers and in turn encourage them to engage with the energy they use; that’s what the ad is about, and most people agree that this is exactly what we should be doing as a responsible company. We’ve had overwhelmingly positive feedback so far from customers, who understand the message the ad is communicating.
We are in an era where the supine nature of agency-client relationships has to change. In the same way that the PR industry has been shaken up by being forced to clarify whether it would take climate sceptic client briefs, the advertising industry is ripe for disruption.
The team behind the campaign at Adam and Eve/DDB should be asking: ‘What value is my creative work adding to the world? What difference is it making?’
If the answer to this is a dispiriting, rearrangement of Titanic deck-chairs that is woefully unimaginative, greenwashes the status quo and changes nothing, then it’s really time to drop the ‘dead monkey’ (before the pedants descend, I’m aware she’s a great ape not a monkey, and that given Maya is CGI she can’t technically be dead).
We, and the involuntarily co-opted and endangered orangutans deserve a whole lot better.
• Ed Gillespie is co-founder of Futerra Sustainability Communications and author of Only Planet – a flightfree adventure around the world
