The New Greenpeace Ad Is Too Important To Be Pulled

Channel Nine have pulled a Greenpeace TV spot that adopts the tone and aesthetic of a Coca-Cola ad to show the environmental costs of plastic usage. With Adrian Lux’s hit ‘Teenage Crime’ in the background, pretty young people sip from the iconic bottle on a beach – before dead birds start dropping from the sky.

Container deposit schemes (CDS) involve a small deposit – around 10c these days – being tacked onto the price of a bottle or can of drink, redeemable upon return of the empty container, which is then recycled. Non-South Australian kids have been planning to collect all the cans they can and take them to Adelaide for free money since 1975, when SA introduced the scheme. And it actually helps reduce waste. According to the 2012 Clean Up Australia Day Rubbish Report, half as much glass was collected in SA as there was in NSW and Victoria; 28% of the rubbish picked up in SA was plastic, compared to 38% in NSW. And there’s massive public support for the scheme is SA too: 98% of the state’s citizens are into it.

As a result, the Northern Territory instigated a similar scheme last year, which was challenged in court by Coca-Cola Amatil, Schweppes and Lion Pty Ltd (Tooheys, Bacardi, James Boag, Moove, Berri, loads more), and overturned in March. The legal basis for the case, according to Coke, was that CDS breached the Commonwealth Mutual Regulation Act, and created a “non-harmonised regulatory system”, where goods are sold under different conditions in different states. (The SA scheme is exempt because it predates the 1992 Act.) It was definitely, definitely not a massive overreaction to a tiny price rise that might hurt the bottom line of a company that has a 56% share in the soft drink market in this country.

The purpose of Greenpeace’s ad is to try and shame Coke into not opposing this scheme, by showing that their product has a cost that’s borne by innocent sea birds and their ecosystems – and that the schemes work, and are worth having. It’s a small part of a global push to have big businesses pay for the “natural capital” they use and push costs back onto producers, rather than the public purse (like the health costs incurred by air pollution), consumers and the environment.

The imagery is a little confronting, maybe — if you’ve never seen a dead bird on the side of the road before. But it’s not like they had floods of complaints about it – the ad hadn’t even aired yet. Nine took the $20,000 Greenpeace raised and agreed to screen the ad during Friday night footy; but once they’d seen the ad, they changed their minds and refunded the cash. Their sales and marketing director says that Nine deemed it “offensive to our viewers“.

Well, I just spent an hour viewing Channel Nine – Neil Patrick Harris was on Ellen, so it wasn’t too punishing – and found several ads that I was offended by.

• I was offended by an Allianz ad that showed a man hiding major damage he caused to the family car from his female partner, because bitches be crazy and you can’t tell them stuff or you’ll get in trouble!
• I was offended by an otherwise perfectly inoffensive Tic Tac ad, when it ended with a weirdly super-sexual close-up of the fun-loving candy-eating lady looking out from under heavy-lidded eyes and exhaling sensually.
• I was offended by ad after ad showing women being in charge of the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry and the maintenance of family togetherness, while men worked, ate and went to the footy.
• I was offended by ad after ad that suggested that what Mum wanted for Mother’s Day was a hair dryer or a frypan, or for you to buy a buttload of KFC so she could have one lousy night off from shoving packaged stir-fries in your ungrateful face.
• I was offended by the Bunnings Warehouse ads that had not ONE suggestion for what to buy my mother.

And I saw plenty of ads for the face-punchingly dumb reality shows and tabloid “current affairs” programs that pad out their local-content quotas, which made me realise that of course Channel Nine’s viewers would be offended by an ad promoting recycling – they prefer straight-up garbage.

Look, Nine, you’ve got the right to refuse to air anything you want, and Coca-Cola Amatil have the right to try and protect their profits (though I’m sure they would never do anything like use their influence to pressure a TV station into refusing to air an ad that makes them look bad…).

But when you fight an idea that would do a heap of public and environmental good and frame it as protecting the people you’re actually just hoping to sell things to, you end up looking craven, and pathetic, and weak.

Your whole system’s out of order, and I find YOU offensive.

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Caitlin Welsh is a freelance writer. She has written for The BRAG, Mess + Noise, FasterLouder, Cosmopolitan, TheVine, Beat, dB, X-Press, and Moshcam.