I was sitting on a train on my way to talk about Wellbeing yesterday and by coincidence listening to Rufus Wainwright’s wonderful poignant Want One album. Listening to the words of Vibrate the song seems to be about how life seems to be roaring ahead and yet things get no better, or perhaps worse – OK maybe that’s just my obsession these days (getting old?) but maybe not…
Anyway Wainwright sings the line ‘Pinocchio is a boy who now wants to turn back to a toy’ and it made me think of the protests going on around advertising to children in the US and regulation in Scandinavia etc. I also remembered the shocking scene in Joel Bakan’s brilliant The Corporation film and book where the cynical marketing woman explains how clever she is in using psychologists to help getting kids to want/’need’ her products and nag their parents.
Of course this is just the thick end of the wedge which is the negative effect of advertising and the ‘brandscape’ on our ‘brainscape’. We talk about this in Citizen Renaissance in Chapter Six in the section ‘The High Priest of Materialism Recants’. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these issues. It seems that parts of the advertising world are waking up to the effects of their industry. We quote Sir Martin Sorrell who seems to have read some of Lord Layard’s work on happiness when he (Sorrell) said recently ‘Our view, which is counter to what you expect our industry to argue, is that conspicuous consumption is not productive, and should be discouraged’. I am very much hoping we can encourage Sir Martin to take a look at Citizen Renaissance and my wife Vicky Moffatt (who used to work for WPP) is going to send it to him but if you are in contact with Sir Martin do ask him to drop us a line with his thoughts.
I’ll leave you with another top Wainwright track – I love the line ‘Oh what a world, why am I always on a plane or a fast train, oh what a world our parents gave us – travelling but not in love’… seems to speak to the heart of the Wellbeing Imperative and less is more etc.
