Day 524: Swedish Advertising

Advertising. It's the bane of existence...right? The comedian Bill Hicks once asked people who worked in Marketing to kill themselves, such was his hatred of people trying to sell us stuff.

But today during my commute I realised that, actually, billboards here in Sweden aren't always trying to sell me stuff. I've accidentally stumbled upon this subject before, while talking about the Feminist Initiative spreading awareness and Anarchists trying to destroy adverts using counterproductive methods. In these posts, the adverts mentioned were spreading information for public awareness rather than for sales purposes, and this seems to be fairly common. Here are a few pictures I took today in the tunnelbana in Stockholm, all of these are next to, or opposite, each other:

"Recycle if it's beyond saving! Do an Electrical cleanse!"

"We must be better at economising the world's resources"

"Choose the right fish for the future"

So there's the proof, public awareness campaigns are, indeed, common.

"But just how common?" I wondered. "And how likely am I to see some interesting information instead of being encouraged to buy something?"

That's when I did some very low intensity research. A sample you might say. I made a tally of every single advert I saw for the rest of the day and put them into categories; "Selling" if the advert wanted me to buy a product, "Public Info" if the advert wanted me to make more ethical/environmentally friendly choices, "Education and Training" if it was a school or college being advertised, "Gym/Public health" as a separate category (because even though they're businesses I feel it's a bit more public-health orientated than being encouraged to drink coke) and "Event" for concerts and sports events. The results are in!

Predictably "Selling" has the majority. But interestingly it doesn't even make up half of all the adverts I saw. And even more interestingly, there were very few different companies which actually make up that block of 39%. Around a fifth of all adverts I saw in the "Selling" category were from Coca-Cola  while a further sixth of the adverts were from Volvo. There were none, or very few, of the adverts I would describe as common in England, such as for McDonalds.

The "Public Information" category weighs in at around a quarter of all the adverts I saw. For someone desensitised to seeing them, perhaps this does not seem too high a number. But for me, coming from a country with next to no such adverts (and more importantly, a country which doesn't invest enough money in such projects to allow widespread advertising) a quarter is A LOT. I'm impressed that everyone is told to save the environment, consider the chemicals they put down the drain, recycle, eat sustainably and god only knows what else on a daily basis.

All this being said, I can appreciate that some of the adverts I've labelled as "Public Service" are still, implicitly, trying to get people to buy things, albeit more environmentally friendly things. So that just raises the question, are Swedes obsessed with saving the planet because their adverts encourage them, or do the adverts target the enviro-conscious Swede because that's just the way they are?