Ethical Advertising?

Jillian Kowalchuk
Nov 1 · 2 min read

The ‘rule of 7’ in advertising says that we need to see a particular 7x before a simple call to action message, such as ‘buy those bedsheets,’ will begin to sink in.

In a 45-minute commute in London, you will see around 130 ads, and have 3,500 marketing messages targetted to you. Compound that we on average 5 seconds of an attention span less half of these ads will get and that the marketing goal is to drive preferential consumerism to their product.

Unsplash Jonalyn San Diego photocredit

There may not be anything fundamentally wrong with these statistics- about how competitive it is for our attention and saturated by messages we are but are they the real messages we need to be shown?

Do we really need people to buy more clothes, or do we need them to know how the fashion industry is one of the largest contributors to global warming and millions of infractions on fair and work conditions for adults and children? Can we not call out these facts and give a marketing advantage to the brands taking action against this?

Couldn’t we all normalise the types of messages that promote the net gain to society, rather than a short-lasting individual benefit? What problems could we solve, cost to save, victims and lives spared, if this became the message we could engage people with?

I’d like to hear your thoughts, is ethical marketing possible and an enabler for us to solve societies and our world’s greatest challenges?

Written by

Founder. Speaker. Business coach. Find out more about how we can work together www.jilliankowalchuk.com

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