Take the red pill
An adman Googled ‘is advertising evil?’
Santa isn’t real. It’s not butter. Rolf Harris is a paedo.
Sometimes the truth is hard to swallow but who wants to live in the land of lies? Not me. I choose the red pill every time.
One day, in 2014, I was sitting at my desk in an ad agency when a question popped into my head: ‘is advertising evil?’.
By that, I suppose I meant ‘am I evil? or ‘is the contribution I’m making to the world, good or bad?’. Either way, it felt worth asking so I opened Google, typed ‘is advertising evil?’, and hit enter.
I nearly chundered all over my keyboard. The answer wasn’t ‘yes’ but it wasn’t ‘no’. I spent the rest of the day reading through pages and pages of Google results and falling deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole.
I looked down at the client brief on my desk and my head felt like it was going to explode. Where there were business objectives, I now read ‘SELL PEOPLE SHIT THEY DON’T NEED’. I knew what I needed: to get the hell out of there. I needed the time and space to reflect on what I’d learnt and to think about what to do next.
After I quit my job in advertising, I had a conversation with myself. It turns out that my brain is all kinds of confused. I’m learning to be OK with that. There’s this thing called the liminal space and I’m in it. It’s a place of transition, a place of waiting, of not knowing. It’s where you’ve left the tried and true, but haven’t yet been able to replace it with anything else.
There are other people here too, in the liminal space. They’re the only people for me. The mad ones. The good ones. The red pills.
I wrote this article in 2015 for ShellsuitZombie magazine and then bottled it at the last minute. Fortunately, the editors persuaded me to publish it under the pseudonym ‘Thea Thunderstone’, so it lived to see the light of day and I could pretend that I had a cool name. Since then, my views on advertising have matured, and I’ve learnt how advertising can be a force for good, but I wanted to republish this (slightly edited) article under my real name, and online, because it captures a moment in time that I want to remember.
More:
‘Am I evil?’, an article in The Drum about a talk I did at Creative Social, shortly after I Googled ‘is advertising evil?’.
Advertising itself is not evil, but it has certainly got out of control, by Jon Alexander for The Guardian. The first Google result for ‘is advertising evil?’ and where I started.
‘Think of Me as Evil? Opening the ethical debates in advertising’, by Jon Alexander, Tom Crompton, and Guy Shrubsole. The report that I based my talk on.
Beers for Good, a monthly event for people in advertising who want to use their skills for good, hosted by The Comms Lab.
