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Badvertising: Polluting Our Minds and Fuelling Climate Chaos
Advertising is selling us a dream, a lifestyle. It promises us fulfillment and tells us where to buy it - in international flights, beef from (what was once) the Amazon, and a vast array of goods that we consume like there was no tomorrow. And if advertising succeeds in keeping us on our current trajectory - there may not be a tomorrow.
In Badvertising , Andrew Simms and Leo Murray raise the alarm about an industry that is making us both unhealthy and unhappy, and that is driving the planet to the precipice of environmental collapse in the process.
The book explores the psychological impact of being barraged by literally thousands of advertisements a day. How does the commercialization of our public spaces weaken our sense of belonging? What are the pitfalls of regulation? How are car manufacturers, airlines, and oil companies lobbying to weaken climate action? And most crucially of all, what can we do to stop it?
In Badvertising , Andrew Simms and Leo Murray raise the alarm about an industry that is making us both unhealthy and unhappy, and that is driving the planet to the precipice of environmental collapse in the process.
The book explores the psychological impact of being barraged by literally thousands of advertisements a day. How does the commercialization of our public spaces weaken our sense of belonging? What are the pitfalls of regulation? How are car manufacturers, airlines, and oil companies lobbying to weaken climate action? And most crucially of all, what can we do to stop it?
- GenresNonfictionEnvironment
272 pages, Paperback
Published September 20, 2024
13 people are currently reading
253 people want to read
About the author
Andrew Simms
39 books5 followersAndrew Simms is policy director of nef (the new economics foundation) the award-winning UK think-and-do tank, and head of nef's Climate Change Programme. His latest book is Ecological Debt: Global Warming and the Wealth of Nations published by Pluto Press.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 3, 2025
“Badvertising: Polluting Our Minds and Fuelling Climate Chaos” by Andrew Simms and Leo Murray is a poorly executed piece of climate propaganda. The authors’ writing lacks engagement, and their overt agenda overshadows any potential insights. While they attempt to critique the advertising industry’s environmental impact, the book offers little substance beyond two marginally useful sentences. Overall, it fails to provide a balanced or informative perspective on the subject.
April 7, 2024
I bought this after watching a cracking podcast by the two authors, one of whom I remembered from the 'infinite hamster' animation - a truly disturbing thought experiment about exponential growth.
The book's basic premise is this: in a free country, unless some object is out-and-out destructive and has no other use, for the most part you can't get up and outright ban it. What you can do, if you want a lot less of it about, is prevent it being advertised.
But would that make any difference? For us jaded people who've seen it all before, adverts don't really work, right?
Well, apparently they do - and the first two chapters descibe exactly how, citing some mind-bending findings of both the psychological impact of adverts and their sheer quantity in our lives.
The authors then take us in detail through the tortuous tale of how, in the UK and then elsewhere, over the 60 years roughly corresponding to my own lifetime, tobacco advertising finally came to be banned. Remember ASH, the health campaigners? And FOREST, the deceptively-named pro-smoking lobby? They and many others feature here, and in the book's comprehensive index.
The upshot of all this activity, we are reminded, has been a dramatic reduction in smoking both here in the UK and in most of the western world.
Why, then, not apply what we have learned from tobacco to some more recent bad habits that we have fallen into - like buying obese vehicles to driver around in, or flying too often? This, after all, isn't going to stop us from indulging: instead, it will relieve us of that nagging feeling that we are somehow 'missing out' if we don't - which is the basic premise of every advert.
My only beef with 'Badvertising' is that in places you can feel the writers' haste to get all this down on the page as soon as possible! This shows up particularly in the chapter about the sponsorship of sport, where the thread flips back and forth between listing which sports the high-polluting industries sponsor, and going into technical detail about what damage (not to the sport, but to health and society in general) they do. But perhaps it was just me.
Where this book really shines is in the final chapter. 'A World Without Advertising' sounds utterly fantastical, right? Well, er, wrong! It is so well within the realms of the possible, nay, the absolutely-easy, that many places have 'taken down the billboards' (and by the way it has taken this long for that Ogden Nash quote to appear) and benefitted as a result. In a refreshing change for an eco-campaigning premise, 'Badvertising' is not asking for the Moon with Brass Knobs on: merely for one straightforward piece of legislation.
I recommend 'Badvertising', firstly to people looking for a simple but effective step that we can take to help our beleagered environment and our quality of life, and secondly to anyone who has ever seen an advert and wishes to look after their brain.
The book's basic premise is this: in a free country, unless some object is out-and-out destructive and has no other use, for the most part you can't get up and outright ban it. What you can do, if you want a lot less of it about, is prevent it being advertised.
But would that make any difference? For us jaded people who've seen it all before, adverts don't really work, right?
Well, apparently they do - and the first two chapters descibe exactly how, citing some mind-bending findings of both the psychological impact of adverts and their sheer quantity in our lives.
The authors then take us in detail through the tortuous tale of how, in the UK and then elsewhere, over the 60 years roughly corresponding to my own lifetime, tobacco advertising finally came to be banned. Remember ASH, the health campaigners? And FOREST, the deceptively-named pro-smoking lobby? They and many others feature here, and in the book's comprehensive index.
The upshot of all this activity, we are reminded, has been a dramatic reduction in smoking both here in the UK and in most of the western world.
Why, then, not apply what we have learned from tobacco to some more recent bad habits that we have fallen into - like buying obese vehicles to driver around in, or flying too often? This, after all, isn't going to stop us from indulging: instead, it will relieve us of that nagging feeling that we are somehow 'missing out' if we don't - which is the basic premise of every advert.
My only beef with 'Badvertising' is that in places you can feel the writers' haste to get all this down on the page as soon as possible! This shows up particularly in the chapter about the sponsorship of sport, where the thread flips back and forth between listing which sports the high-polluting industries sponsor, and going into technical detail about what damage (not to the sport, but to health and society in general) they do. But perhaps it was just me.
Where this book really shines is in the final chapter. 'A World Without Advertising' sounds utterly fantastical, right? Well, er, wrong! It is so well within the realms of the possible, nay, the absolutely-easy, that many places have 'taken down the billboards' (and by the way it has taken this long for that Ogden Nash quote to appear) and benefitted as a result. In a refreshing change for an eco-campaigning premise, 'Badvertising' is not asking for the Moon with Brass Knobs on: merely for one straightforward piece of legislation.
I recommend 'Badvertising', firstly to people looking for a simple but effective step that we can take to help our beleagered environment and our quality of life, and secondly to anyone who has ever seen an advert and wishes to look after their brain.
December 19, 2023
In their book, Andrew Simms and Leo Murray tell us that ‘the enabler of [a] great shift in expectations and attitudes has been the advertising and marketing industries. Advertising is selling us an imagined lifestyle – the premise is that we can only we feel we are all living our best lives by flying around the world, driving ever bigger SUVS [sic], eating beef from cattle raised on cleared rainforest, and enjoying a vast array of consumer goods like there was no tomorrow.’
This book covers two of my interests, climate science and influencing the brain, so I thought it would be right up my street, but I found it depressingly bad. It's a polemic by enthusiasts that isn't really science driven. I don't like advertising, I think it can be manipulative - but the whole story was wildly overplayed here. I am certainly not aware, for example, of advertising making me eat beef from cattle raised on cleared rainforest, I have rarely seen advertising for beef per se, and only buy British beef – the UK is not famous for its rainforest (it does have some but it isn’t threatened by cattle so much as invasive species, disease and wild deer). Of course, I have seen advertising for companies that sell beef, such as fast-food chains, though many of those only claim to use British or Irish meat.
A lot of claims made in the book seem to be poorly substantiated. Some aren't backed up by evidence at all, for example 'what is clear is that [adverts] have an effect whether or not we are consciously aware'. Is it clear? Others rely on dubious data. Like, I suspect, most of us I don't usually check references that back up claims in a book, but several looked dubious - and when I checked there were some real problems. For example, we are told that we are 'estimated to encounter between 6,000 and 10,000 ads every single day' - but the source is a blog that appears to pick the statement out of the air. Worse, Simms and Murray say this is the figure for 2023, even though the blog was written in 2021, and seems to have been updated simply by changing the year in its title.
One statement had me rolling on the floor laughing: 'As Freud's nephew, Bernays knew all about psychology…' I'm sorry? Freud was not psychologist and very little of his work had a scientific basis. But even if he had been… My uncle was a sailor, so I presume I should know all about life at sea ? I don't. (I'll let them off calling Tony Benn, 'Tony Bevins' - who was a journalist, not a politician - a page or two later.)
It's such a shame, because we need to do more to combat climate change, and to limit inappropriate advertising. But this isn't the way to do it.
This book covers two of my interests, climate science and influencing the brain, so I thought it would be right up my street, but I found it depressingly bad. It's a polemic by enthusiasts that isn't really science driven. I don't like advertising, I think it can be manipulative - but the whole story was wildly overplayed here. I am certainly not aware, for example, of advertising making me eat beef from cattle raised on cleared rainforest, I have rarely seen advertising for beef per se, and only buy British beef – the UK is not famous for its rainforest (it does have some but it isn’t threatened by cattle so much as invasive species, disease and wild deer). Of course, I have seen advertising for companies that sell beef, such as fast-food chains, though many of those only claim to use British or Irish meat.
A lot of claims made in the book seem to be poorly substantiated. Some aren't backed up by evidence at all, for example 'what is clear is that [adverts] have an effect whether or not we are consciously aware'. Is it clear? Others rely on dubious data. Like, I suspect, most of us I don't usually check references that back up claims in a book, but several looked dubious - and when I checked there were some real problems. For example, we are told that we are 'estimated to encounter between 6,000 and 10,000 ads every single day' - but the source is a blog that appears to pick the statement out of the air. Worse, Simms and Murray say this is the figure for 2023, even though the blog was written in 2021, and seems to have been updated simply by changing the year in its title.
One statement had me rolling on the floor laughing: 'As Freud's nephew, Bernays knew all about psychology…' I'm sorry? Freud was not psychologist and very little of his work had a scientific basis. But even if he had been… My uncle was a sailor, so I presume I should know all about life at sea ? I don't. (I'll let them off calling Tony Benn, 'Tony Bevins' - who was a journalist, not a politician - a page or two later.)
It's such a shame, because we need to do more to combat climate change, and to limit inappropriate advertising. But this isn't the way to do it.
January 2, 2026
The writing in this makes it so hard to read tbh. Lots of interesting facts & the chapter about car advertising is particularly enlightening, but the writing makes it all sound a bit bland. Some chapters can feel like an info-dump, and it could've used more focus onto tangible actions (which it kept more for the final chapter).
March 9, 2025
Made me look at billboards and ads differently but some arguments seems non applicable to those living in other parts of the world besides where the author is from. Still a decent read that made me think
January 2, 2024
Great book that takes a very important angle!
March 23, 2024
I really enjoyed learning about the climate crisis from an angle I haven’t heard before! Just a note to any American readers: it was written in the uk so stats about the US are sparse.
September 16, 2024
Very eye opening and got me thinking. As a marketer who considers themselves someone who cares about the environment, there's a lot of self reflection to be had.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews