Within the context of green advertising and ecological alternatives, the narrowing effects of ubiquitous advertising serve to make so-called green alternatives appear more profound than they actually are. If the public mind has been limited to the realm of inevitable car use, a hydrogen fueled car will appear to be a radical change. In a Toyota advertisement for a hybrid gasoline/electric vehicle, the ecologically benign nature of rapid acceleration is implied by green skid marks left on the road. The use of words such as 'introducing', 'revolutionary', and 'groundbreaking', provide a sense of utter newness and a break with the past.
Dominance of Public Discourse
Public discourse is always dominated to some extent by a single point of view. Language contributes to this dominance when it is debased and limited by those in power so that oppositional concepts become linguistically incomprehensible within the minds of the public.
This debasement of language is apparent in advertising, where “mountain dew” is a soft drink, “glade” is an air freshener, "ice cold" invariably refers to beer, and "escape" is an SUV made by Ford. By using language, as well as visual imagery, to create a social environment in which ways of thinking are limited, "advertising reinforces consonant messages in the social system and provides strong dissonance to oppositional or alternative messages [Corbett 2002].”
The concept of discursive dominance is essential to an understanding of the power and ubiquity of automotive advertising. By presenting a barrage of repetitive information and imagery, all of which come from the same point of view, advertising, with the help and consent of many other forms of media and sectors of society, weakens the ability of public discourse to effectively present other points of view. A population that is eager to own the advertised products and unaware of any alternatives to a system of consumerism will tend to be quite consenting to a reduction of theoretical possibility.
Hydrogen Powered Cars Are Still Cars
When viewed within a wider spectrum of possibility, the very spectrum that advertising attempts to eliminate, hydrogen powered cars can be seen as little more than a minor adjustment in marketing techniques on the part of car companies, particularly when the source of the hydrogen is unaddressed. The centralization and relative reduction of air pollution may be a positive step, but how large a step is it? If the limits of possibility are perceived as gasoline car or hydrogen car, it is a very large step indeed. If the limits of possibility are infinite, including the possibility of no cars at all, the change appears relatively minor.
Visual techniques within car ads such as showing only the advertised car, alone in an unpopulated world, emphasize the primacy of the private automobile as well as the difference between newer, greener cars and their 'obsolete' counterparts. Even if the newer, better thing actually is newer and better, it still requires purchasing and thus fits perfectly into the advertisers' needs. Those needs are based on purchase, not on ecologically benign cars.
Green claims by car manufacturers invariably position their solutions to ecological issues within the context of a market economy, a consumer culture, and of course, the continued and widespread use of private cars. Portrayals within the advertisements are usually of a single person, never more than a single family, using a car for personal fulfillment.
Bicycles, walking, or other alternatives to the car are never presented or mentioned. Wolfgang Sachs sums up the restricted nature of the car-based world view: "Once transit-intensive living conditions are regarded as unchangeable, once the transportation-industrial complex is judged untouchable for the sake of the national economy, then only one way out of the growth dilemma remains: better automobiles and better traffic flow."
Read more of Alan Foljambe's articles on automotive advertising:
- The Displacement of Nature
- Short Term Thinking and Nature as Optional
- Cars, Ads, and Individualism
- Making Friends With Nature
- Dominating Nature
- Cheerleader for Modernity
Sources
Corbett, Julia B. “A Faint Green Sell: Advertising and the Natural World.” Enviropop: Studies in Environmental Rhetoric and Popular Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.
Sachs, Wolfgang. For Love of the Automobile. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
