Government adverts don't deserve public money

Government adverts don't deserve public money | Zoe Williams | Comment is free | The Guardian

It probably won't be as unpopular as axing playgrounds, but the government's cuts to the Central Office of Information have their opponents: the number of jobs is being cut from 737 to 450, and redundancy payments have been capped, so obviously the union is against it. And as the advertising budget has gone down by 52% since the spending freeze, wider questions have also been asked about the future of the advertising industry, along with the state's ability to communicate with the public.

Ad men will be hard hit since this is not one of those fabled moments when the private sector will grout in the cracks left by the withdrawal of government money. The cracks are more like fissures, for a start. It's hard to sympathise, given the sense that behind every negative social trend, every inadequacy dressed in Prada, every self-esteem issue smothered in Dove, every niggle of consumerism that makes us all consume so much, there's an adman directing us gaily towards idiocy, then laughing. I suppose Mad Men offset this a little bit – now it's an incredibly glamorous adman, laughing and pissed.

Consternation nevertheless surrounds that other question – how, without public information campaigns, does the government communicate with the public?

The example that's often given by opponents of the cuts is that of emissions legislation, which businesses wouldn't be familiar with unless they had had ads targeted at them. This kind of communication is relatively cheap. You don't need the brightest minds of a generation to alert people to changes in the law. VAT is a good example, too: small changes are made all the time, and leaflets duly go out, filed under "communications", and they look like something a vicar might photocopy if he made a really nice chutney and just everybody wanted the recipe. If it's on the statute books, and people need to know, it is not expensive to tell them.

The pricey advertising is in the messages that are a bit more nebulous and a little less statutory – campaigns aimed at changing behaviour and/or mindsets. The obvious areas are public health: smoking and diet now; taking heroin and getting HIV in the past. Those heroin ads in particular are always thought of as very effective because everybody remembers the image, and the strapline "Heroin screws you up". In fact, the ad was a classic example of a very widely propagated message that didn't have very wide application. Heroin was a problem because the number of users was on the rise: it wasn't such a problem that the entire nation needed to think about the ramifications of opiate use the whole time.

But at least heroin does screw you up, and at least Aids is definitely the result of HIV, which is definitely the result of unprotected sex. And while we're here, at least smoking is certainly bad for you, though opinion would be divided, I think, on whether or not the main driver behind the change in public behaviour was the advertising spend by the government, the ban on advertising by tobacco companies, or the change in the law governing smoking in public (which was driven by unions, protecting the health of bar staff: governments often compare unfavourably to unions as custodians of public health).

Diet initiatives, especially the Change4Life campaign, are much more controversial, even though this one looks cute and straightforward, with its multicoloured morph men telling you to eat more sweetcorn. On a food-swap wheel distributed in GPs' surgeries and children's centres, it told people to swap squash for a smoothie, when smoothies are 57 times more expensive than squash and also much more calorific. What it ultimately looked like was an attempt not to improve national health but to replicate the middle-class diet across the entire population – to say, in other words, that the reason you are obese is that you are insufficiently middle-class. Likewise, the Start4Life campaign attempted to recreate the "middle-class habit", although only 1% of the population does it, of exclusively breastfeeding their baby for the first six months.

These are potently reminiscent of the Protect and Survive campaigns of the 70s and 80s – the intention was not to make sure that everybody had a table and four doors to lean across it in the event of a nuclear war, any more than the intention today is to make sure everybody has a ready supply of hummus for better household health. The intention is more of a "Hands up, this is your problem. We are a nuclear state: this is your problem. There is an obesity epidemic: this is also your problem". In time, I'm sure, it will become obvious that obesity is no more about personal behaviour than is surviving a nuclear attack. It will become obvious, furthermore, that those advertising costs were defrayed with the precise intention of shunting responsibility around and creating some static, some debate, around an issue that would otherwise be chalked up to government failure. So finally, some money well saved.