Former Burnett CD John Newton: “I want you to help stop Paul Ehrlich jumping out the window”
By John Newton
I used to be in advertising. Last century. My last job, creative director at Leo Burnett. More recently I’ve been writing books and journalism and now I’m doing a Master’s thesis by research at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS)
And it was there that I attended a seminar where Professor Graham Pyke (near left) and visiting Professor Paul Ehrlich (far left) – remember The Population Bomb? – spoke on the subject of Ethics and Sustainability.
After the seminar, I sent an email to Professor Pyke. Here is what it said:
Last night, after the talk you and Paul Ehrlich gave, I was waiting for my wife and daughter. Next to me was a man with a melancholy face. He looked European.
“I don’t know why he doesn’t jump out the window,” he said. I asked him what he meant.
“Ehrlich” he said, “I’ve been listening to him talk to people who agree with him for forty years and nothing changes. It gets worse.”
I had to agree with him. What have we got? Abbott in Australia. The Tea Party in America. And denialist Stephen Harper in Canada.
As I sat in the audience with all those people who understood what you were talking about and agreed with you, only one man made any sense.
He got up during question time and asked, over and over “How are you going to convince the ordinary Joe?”
The ordinary Joe/Joanna who listen to the shock jocks, who voted for Abbott and his denialism, who aren’t convinced that the science is real or – worse – don’t care.
How do you get to them? The same way the people who get them to buy all the stuff they don’t need get to them. The people who sell them the flat screen television, the four wheel drives, the McMansions, the junk food.
The people who are paid big money to communicate with and persuade people to give up their cash.
The men and women who create advertising. They know how to do something that scientists have proven to be very poor at doing.
Communicating and persuading.
You don’t need social scientists as was said last night. You need copywriters and art directors and the people who make television commercials.
Many years go, I used to work in that world, and I can tell you that there are, contrary to what you might think, some very concerned and right-thinking individuals there, who would be only too pleased to be briefed on a very big project.
To help save the planet.
If you find this idea interesting, get in touch with me. I can help put you in touch with these people.
Surely it’s worth a try.
I got a reply almost immediately from Professor Pyke and Professor David Booth. They said, sure, go ahead.
So that’s what I’m doing. Looking for strategically minded advertising people – writers, art directors, strategists -willing to work for the UTS School of the Environment to get the message that climate change is real, and we can and have to do something about it quickly.
But you’re going to have to be damn good to cut through the fog. The Australian Centre for Independent Journalism has just published a report on the reporting of climate science in Australian newspapers.
The report’s author, investigative journalist and researcher Professor Wendy Bacon, said along with previous research the findings of this study suggest that Australia may have the highest concentration of scepticism in its media in the world.
“Our analyses of three months of coverage in ten major Australian newspapers revealed a decline of 20 per cent in coverage of climate science between February to April 2011 and the same period in 2012. More disturbing was the finding that the overall coverage became decidedly more sceptical in 2012,” Professor Bacon said.
Can you help stop Professor Ehrlich from jumping? Do you want to be involved in what could be a campaign that could help save the planet?
Email me and we’ll take it from there.
John Newton
2 Comments
what’s the budget?
How wonderfully idealistic of you, John. Delegating this to others is one way of acting on your insight. You may find, however, that today’s creatives are exhausted just trying to the ‘real’ work urgently requiring their attention, they probably don’t have the level of altruism required, they don’t necessarily have a ‘left’ view of politics and anyhow, there’s unlikely to be a Cannes award in it for them. Perhaps they’re just a bit too pragmatic to be bothered: The words of 12:39 are instructive, and possibly representative: “What’s the budget?”