No, Chevron, we will not join you.

Part of making advertising a force for positive change in the world is calling out our industry at its most disingenuous and destructive. Case in point, Chevron's  Will You Join Us? campaign. Among the umpteen ironies of this abject lesson in brand insincerity is the way it challenges us to do our part in reducing dependancy on fossil fuels. Excuse me? This from a company that has historically and vehemently resisted anything that would impinge on even the smallest percentage of their staggering profits. This knowing perfectly well that their prices will adjust accordingly to any decrease in demand. It's like they have us on the treadmill of petro-dependancy and now they're telling us how fast to run as they fine tune their price-at-the-pump Shell game (and BP and Exxon and all the rest). 

It's pretty obvious, but rarely discussed, that there's only one potential kink in the hose of the dinosaur driller's smooth running profit pipeline. It's the offhand chance that some brave politicians go far enough out of the mainstream to do the only thing that could conceivably create a financial incentive for sustained conservation - wrest away their power to set prices. Hence the campaign's ultimate but completely unstated target audience: lawmakers. The key message: Hey, we're part of the solution. See, we support technologies that threaten our monopoly and convince people to buy less of our product. Nothing to see here. Everybody just move along now. 

It's mass market lobbying is what it is. But instead of hookers and blow we get asked to make the little sacrifices that help us all. 

Okay. I'm venting. Thank you for allowing me to momentarily yield to one of the few indulgences that doesn't wreck the planet. Now let us rejoice in this encouraging display of media activism from the League of Conservation Voters. Too bad they'd don't have big oil's ad budget.

   

Comments

[Joshua-Michéle Ross]

I love this post -- you need to be cross linking with Umair Haque's Edge Economy Blog - http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/ - very aligned. The thing that personally kills me about this campaign (at a much shallower level of critique) is that Chevron buys up huge, lighted billboards with that character saying, "I will use less energy"

[Tom K.]

Good point, Josh. I gotta try to grab a photo of one all lit up. No headline required.
Oh, and Umair's blog is brilliant, thanks for the tip.
Great perspective on the current Macropocalypse, particular his focus on creativity vs. productivity.
I'm putting my money on ideas as the currency of the new economy.
Tom K.