Bad advertising – How dirty businesses are buying their social license operate through sports
Advertising is supposed to be a way for businesses and entrepreneurs to show you how good their products are. But what if many of the products in adverts are actually bad? They could be bad for you or potentially bad for this planet and its delicately balanced biosphere.
We are talking to researcher Freddie Daley who works as a coordinator for a tremendous organisation called Badvertising. As sport holds a powerful place in the hearts and minds of fans and athletes around the world, it is a potent tool for advertisers. According to Statista, in 2022 the global sports sponsorship market was worth an estimated 66 billion U.S. dollars and is expected to grow to 107 billion U.S. dollars by 2030. It is one of sport’s biggest revenue streams, dwarfing that of merchandise and tickets.
Freddie and his colleagues know this and therefore must dedicate a lot of time calling out and campaigning against adverts that contain false information or normalise businesses whose operations are harmful to people and the environment.
This nexus of sport, sustainability, and advertising is a complex and, at times, arduous topic but his pragmatism and belief in the possibility of a better system makes it very much worth a listen!
You can also find more research and work on this at the Rapid Transition Alliance.
Episode 32 Transcript
Ben 01:45
Welcome, Freddie, to the Sustaining Sport podcast.
Freddie 01:48
Hey Ben, thanks for having me on. You're so welcome.
Ben 01:51
As I like to do with everyone now, let us begin at the beginning. How did you enter this space?
Freddie 01:59
Well, I guess my journey into the world of climate and sport is quite an interesting one.
About five years ago, I started working as a researcher at the University of Sussex, and through that work I was exploring topics such as sustainable behaviour change and trying to answer questions such as how we scale certain behaviours up, what are the barriers to that, and what role does culture and other institutions governing institutions, what role do they play in sustainable behaviour change?
02:32
And then another project that I was working on was looking at the fossil fuel supply around the world basically oil, coal and gas infrastructures and the policies required to regulate them, to curtail them and to hopefully phase them out in line with emissions reductions required under the Paris Agreement.
02:52
And through this work I started looking at fossil fuels and fossil fuel interests, how they buy social licence, how they sustain their social licence, and inevitably this led to sport, which is arguably the biggest area in which fossil fuel interests try to improve their image, to garner brand recognition and just to hijack off everything that makes sport great. So this inquiry led me to Andrew Sims and the wonderful people at the Bavaritising Campaign, and that's where I've been working for the last year, specifically within the remit of sport and also as a bit of a facilitator, through the cool down network, which is an organisation and a network of individuals, campaigners, sporting bodies that are all concerned, either in a personal capacity or a professional capacity, about climate change within sport and all feel that sport is a very untapped but vital vehicle through which we can accelerate climate action through wider society.
Ben 04:02
And would you say you were a sports fan before, or is it more that your research has just led you inevitably to the relevance of sport?
Freddie 04:10
I've always been a sports fan, and the key in that sentence is fan. I'm not much of an athlete myself, but sport has always been something that I've had one eye on, in the sense of not only enjoying sports and being a spectator, but on the power of sport to, not only in terms of climate change, but also organisationally how fans interact as individuals and as collectives, the demands they make upon clubs and the governing bodies. I think it's a really interesting institutional structure that is quite unique.
Ben 04:46
I think it's fairly obvious that for a long time, companies have realised that sport has this power and that's why they've been trying to sell things via sport for that long. But now they're going that one step beyond it. I like the term you used earlier in terms of social licence. Can you unpack the term social licence just a bit more and explain why that's quite relevant.
Freddie 05:05
For sure. So social licence is predominantly an academic term and it is usually applied to large corporations and it is quite literally the licence that they get from society to continue operating. So an example would be a big coal mining company that's operating, let's say, in the global south. Their operations continue to pollute waterways, the natural environment around, and this starts to affect the lives and livelihoods of the surrounding communities. The communities organise, they demand for this facility to close. They thereby are challenging that social licence for that company to operate.
05:47
We see companies like Big Polluters using sport to improve their social licence to operate, because we do know quite empirically the damage that they cause on the environment and on our climate and they need to find avenues that they can use and leverage to improve their standing, both in terms of social circles, in terms of wider society, the great general public, but also in political circles as well right policymakers, decision makers, regulators, the people that have some power over how these companies are either reigned in or allowed to continue. So social licence is a term which is meant quite literally. It sounds a bit more technical, I know, but it is literally the licence to operate socially.
Ben 06:39
It's such a useful term because I think and without getting too deep into like political and economic philosophy we need, when we have a society at the scale we need, certain mechanisms of agreement on what is acceptable and what is not, and I think too often we rely on money and money being this vessel not just of exchanging value, but as an acknowledgement that something is legitimate, and obviously in the case of something like fossil fuels, but it applies to many other things If the money is going in, that is one indicator that it is legitimate because it's making profit, but of course there's more than that.
07:12
You've rightly mentioned regulations and political processes, but now we see this shift where these organisations that have leveraged a huge degree of money are putting money back the other way to say well, hang on, we haven't maybe got the political legitimacy or, as you say, social licence that we were like, and we definitely are having this issue with a social legitimacy across various sectors, whether it be on the ground, on those sides that you mentioned, or in broader society, and so they're trying to use one to facilitate the other. And then, once again, we come to sport. Talk to me about examples of this that you've seen. I mean obviously the most famous one, I would say, would be the use of World Cups and maybe Olympic Games to legitimise regimes, legitimise certain operations, with the spectacle of football. Have you done any work on that kind of thing?
Freddie 08:01
Not personally. I mean, it's a really established area of literature. I think a lot of people point to Olympics and World Cups because of they are real moments, both politically and in terms of the media, in terms of international stage. They are pinnacle moments and with that they hold a lot of soft power and they can be a way of creating and generating a lot of diplomatic relations that maybe weren't there. So, of course, the one that everybody points to is obviously the Hitler Olympics, the Olympics that took place in Nazi Germany, which is obviously an over show of what fascism would be and what it could be.
08:43
And then, of course, we saw it with Argentina as well, with the World Cup. The data escaped to be in the mind there, but an autocratic regime using sport as a vehicle to show the world that maybe their ideas aren't so radical or maybe their ideas aren't so bad. And obviously we saw a lot of backlash around that at the time. Some teams tried to boycott it. A lot of fans boycotted it. There's some wonderful posters that you can look on up online, the fan designed posters that around boycotting the Argentina World Cup really, really cool graphic design, but also a real sense of what fan mobilisation looked like at that time and how people were very much having the same conversation there around states with very questionable politics and quite disturbing track records in areas like human rights. They were having those conversations then and we're still having those conversations now, really in terms of the states and they're getting involved in sport and hosting of these tournaments and how they're going about that in terms of the soft power that this gives them.
Ben 09:46
I always get a bit almost frustrated with myself when I inevitably ask about things like football or the Olympics, not because I don't think they're good examples. I think they're just such good examples that the listener if they're regular listeners this podcast inadvertently has to hear similar themes being raised. You know I've already done multiple episodes on this show about this either, referencing my interview with Jules Boykoff last week, with Michael Hardy and the Game Changer pledge. Even some of my earliest episodes that were doing like my solo episodes were investigating directly into the Olympics. But yeah, the point is that they are the best illustrations of what's going on. But this is happening at a regional level, international level, but even at the local level similar things happening.
10:22
But I like the term you used earlier about saying, look, the thing we have is actually good, it's actually okay. Let's pivot that towards advertising, because this is kind of what's happening at a product level. Right, sometimes they're taking products that are necessarily good for the consumer they're not necessarily good for, maybe, the environment or somewhere on the supply chain and they're saying, look, this thing is associated with sport, therefore it's good. Can you unpack a little bit of the work you've done, maybe with advertising and that kind of thing?
Freddie 10:50
Yeah, for sure. I mean the area with it. I mean sport is obviously, in terms of its reach, it's kind of unrivaled, right Like the Premier League. We use that as an example the amount of homes around the world it's beamed into and the amount of football fans you know around the world we're talking like nearly four billion, supposedly. Premier League is watched and followed all around the world.
11:13
So in terms of its reach and the legitimacy it has in terms of the companies that are going to partner with it, it's almost like a marketeer's dream, really an advertiser's dream. So, first and foremost, these companies want to partner with sport because sport has got what they want. They've got a captive audience, they've got a great brand, they've got all of the sort of characteristics that these companies love to piggyback on, you know the high performance, the teamwork, the collective joy, the competitiveness. These are highly aspirational characteristics that products and companies want to leverage, and sport is an understandable choice for which they would do that. The reason they do it also is because it works Like there's a you know, quite a lot of emerging research that shows that companies that have maybe questionable track records on environmental standards or on human rights standards, by partnering with sporting bodies that have dedicated fan bases or clubs, football teams. Over time fans begin to associate all of that collective joy and those really intense emotions that come with sport with that particular company, all that particular product. And you know, over time that gradually means that they begin to discount or ignore the more questionable side of that business's practices because of the association that that specific company or product has with their club. So it works and you know that's empirical evidence of points towards that being an effective means of marketing and advertising. And I mean you only need to take a look at how big the industry is. Right, the sports marketing industry is absolutely gigantic and it's growing at something like seven, nearly 8% a year. So there's money flowing into this space because it works.
12:59
And you know, and I think we'll probably continue to see this, this sort of aggregate growth, unless you know clubs or leagues or tournaments take a stand on it. And you know you mentioned Michael Hardy and the work that he's been doing with Game Changer. These are the sort of initiatives that could potentially provide a platform and a foundation for moving the dial on that sort of issue for clubs and leagues to say, actually we're not going to partner with you guys because of this reason, or we're not going to take money from you because of this reason and you know this might sound quite radical, but it's not that radical. You know, we see clubs, sporting bodies, even whole tournaments, turned down specific companies on because of concerns over that company's operations or where that company's operations are located. Obviously, the one that will probably come to the top of your listeners' minds is UEFA ditching Gazprom in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine. You know, of course, the grounds of doing that were very different in terms of the climate change, but in 2022, we saw tennis Australia ditch Santos, the oil and gas giant, after a really hard fought campaign. And just recently, bayern Munich are not going to continue their sponsorship deal with Qatar Airways, citing human rights concerns, again after a really hard fought fan campaign.
14:12
And then, obviously outside of sport, lots of organizations, particularly in the arts and culture sector, saying no to oil and gas money to fossil fuel companies, because they see it as a reputational hazard. They see it as a risk. And I think it's interesting because, especially as a concept of risk right, because I think when you're looking at commercial strategies and commercial partnerships, risk can be cut a few ways. There's reputational risk for partnering with these organizations and let's you know, let's remember that some of these companies like fossil fuel firms. They don't really sell products that are ready to consumers. They don't have that much of a brand identity. Of course, some of them have offshoots where they're providing charging points and petrol stations and stuff like that, but the core of their operations is not going straight to consumers, so they haven't really got a brand. So they're using sport to hijack that and sport takes the money benefits from that so they can do their operations, etc. Etc.
15:09
But the risk doesn't go away by partnering with these organizations. You're at risk, you will get called out. I mean, we've seen, you know, real uptaken in campaign efforts targeting sporting events this year and I don't think we're going to see that slow down because there is a definitely a big flow of money from fossil fuel firms into sport for the reasons that you cited, and there's real risk for these sporting bodies and organizations and clubs associating with them and partnering with them. They both look bad. And also, you know, when we're talking about reputational risk, if these sporting bodies have to end those deals shortly, there's financial risk as well. They're going to have a, they're going to have to feel short, for if they cut five year deal short by three years, where are they going to find that money from? So this is something that sports organizations should be starting to acknowledge and, I'd hope, actually embed in the way that they are vetting potential commercial partners or sponsorship partners and, you know, it should be something that they're definitely building into their sustainability strategies as well.
Ben 16:08
Yeah, I think the best example of that right now is Wimbledon, where they've I mean Wimbledon had two problems going in. They had their sustainability on the ground in the tournament that day, and then they had the flights element of it all that you have to fly to Wimbledon to get to Wimbledon, kind of thing you know if you're a fan from overseas and that was already quite a tension thing. But I must say they were doing a pretty good job. They were like listen, it's the biggest tennis tournament in the world, but it's a once in a lifetime trip for many people. You can kind of make that justification.
16:36
We've got vegan food across the tennis club, refillable water bottles, etc. Etc. And then they took on Barclays as their main sponsor for the season and obviously the Barclays has, you know, a massive amount of investment into fossil fuels and is profiting hugely from emissions, and it's funny that everything else seems to have gone away. No one's talking about the reusable water bottles at Wimbledon right now, because they're like what does it matter if, as you say, you're offering Barclays funding of fossil fuels a social license?
Freddie 17:06
For sure. Yeah, I think that's a really good example, Ben, and I think not only because it's so prescient and immediate, but Barclays is I think the campaign is that works on this like hats off to them, because I think it's really difficult sometimes to make the case for banks that are bankrolling fossil fuels right, I think in terms of the public mind. We can clearly see that oil and gas companies, they are bad. Airlines they have a huge environmental impact, suvs, equally huge environmental impact, but banks they're little, they're sort of one step removed there. So I think a lot of people maybe fail to make that connection. But the campaign is around Wimbledon a fantastic job of pushing this is up the agenda and, from what I've heard, wimbledon have listened and I feel quite sorry for a few of the you know the members of staff internally because, as you said, they laid out a really comprehensive sustainability strategy. Of course it could be more ambitious. It always can be really what we're talking about, sort of establishment sport events like this, you know, really really cemented in the sporting calendar.
18:07
But Barclays is the biggest funder of fossil fuels in Europe. I think it's something like 160 billion or 100. It's like just under 200 billion since, you know, they signed the site, since, all you know, most countries in the world signed the Paris Agreement. So it's a huge amount of investment and those investments have a lifespan, you know they're locked in. They're continuing to pump money into oil and gas and coal and those infrastructures will be operating for 15, 20 years, you know. And then we get into a point where climate scientists have told us we need to be nearing, you know, net zero. You know emissions need to come down radically and these guys are still pumping obscene amounts of cash into the, into the infrastructures that are going to push us further and further away from that target.
Ben 18:52
Yeah, I think the other slight difference with that is exactly what you said earlier. The oil companies don't necessarily have a consumer facing brand, but Barclays does. Barclays is a bank that you can go down the road and bank with, so it's funny that if they weren't investing in fossil fuels it would seem like a fairly standard sport advertising model. Local bank sponsors British tennis tournament and therefore increases its number of customers. Fine, I guess. But then, yeah, there's this investment of it all. What do you think about the advertising of products that aren't necessarily just a fine product, like the normal services of a bank, for example? You mentioned some good ones SUVs, airlines, but even other products. I think the elephant in the room with sport is maybe like sports gear, like do we need another jersey, shoes, all this kind of stuff. What do you make with that relationship between you? Know they don't want you to just buy one pair of shoes, they want you to buy lots of pairs of shoes.
Freddie 19:47
For sure. I mean, I think you can. If you were to go through every sort of industry that is using sport to advertise its products and to build a brand, you would be able to find flaws in all of them. I think the reason that my work particularly focuses on high carbon, like you know, fossil fuels, airlines and SUVs these are obviously emission sectors that are growing, despite what we need to do In particular. Air travel and SUVs, you know these things are going in the they're really going in the wrong direction and more so, the way that these products are advertised. It normalizes their use and also encourages their uptake. So I think there's key areas of consumption that you have to look at when you're talking about this issue, but they're obviously the broader economic and cultural arguments around consumption, which obviously you're alluding to. Like you know, fast fashion, a lot of sportswear probably does have, like synthetic polymers, in which is obviously are made by fossil fuels as well. So you know you can. You can sit here all day then, and we could go through and list all the companies which and we'll be able to find problems with all of them. But I think you need to be pragmatic in your approach with this sort of work, especially from a campaign perspective. So you go like go for the big hitters first, the fossil fuel firms, the airlines, the SUVs, I mean the fossil fuel firms are the most obvious one, right, because we know, like we know how, how they use sport to buy their social license and we know how they've deceived the public around climate change and how they have failed to adjust their business models and their operations after decades of knowing the damage that will be done. And they're still, you know, they're still digging their heels in now. So I think going for those makes perfect sense.
21:28
But, of course, the other side of that is, you know, the potential shortfall in commercial income for sporting bodies, and you know there are. When we talk about commercial partnerships and sponsorship and advertising in sport, we're talking about sports organizations as a homogeneous thing, right, like they're not. Some clubs, some governing bodies are far richer than others and there are, you know, requirements that they need to meet. There are services they provide for their members that they need income to be able to execute. So it is a really difficult area and it's a really difficult conversation to have, because there is always that financial imperative to take the big deals and not ask too many questions because you are, institutionally and organizationally, you're thinking about your own survival, you're thinking about being continued to put on your events and provide for your members, but it's I mean. This is why I think you know the work that Michael is doing with Game Changer and the work that we're doing at advertising is important work because we don't want to just shift the norms around advertising and how those high carbon companies are perceived, but we also want to engage people inside of these sports organizations, you know, help them navigate it internally, give them the best guidance and advice that we can do to push this up the agenda internally and help them build capacity to incorporate matters of commercial partnerships and sustainability into their broader remit of climate action. And I think that's really important.
22:57
But I'm not saying it's easy. You know there are big questions, there are big shortfalls and we saw that, you know, in real time with the British Cycling Shell deal. Right, like British Cycling massive membership organization, the backlash was huge and British Cycling they said, yeah, we okay, we understand, like this debt shell, they're problematic, they're a possible company, they're going to continue to be a possible company for the next 20 years, but we haven't got any money and we need to continue, you know, serving our members and putting on our training and stuff like that. So they were very honest and brazen almost about the almost the flaws in this and how sports is funded, and you know that opens up more questions of inquiry.
23:37
You know what is the role of central government, what is the role of local government? What is the value of sport? Why should it be funded by public bodies and should it be funded in different ways? It's a really interesting area and I'm sure you've had speakers on this podcast that could talk to it in more elegant ways than I can. But you know, talking about commercial partnerships and sponsorship is just the first step. I think you know, because then I'm sure we'll talk about it a bit more. But you have to talk about ownership as well, and I think in some areas of sport Premier League is a good example the line between ownership and sponsorship becomes blurred, really, when you're talking about big petro states. But yeah, it's a fascinating area and I mean it's only going to grow in importance, I think too.
Ben 24:21
I think you've inadvertently basically referenced application of game theory to how these leagues, clubs, institutions operate, because, as you said, the sports as a whole are thinking about it from a individual perspective, so they're always going to take whatever deal that they can that maximizes their benefit, and obviously with the minimum amount of shortfalling. This is why, probably, british cycling originally signed with Shell. It's why, I think, like Africa, a couple of nations have such a close deal with Total, because that's the biggest amount of money they could get from anyone. It's very similar to UEFA and Gasprom. It's a total, obviously French, but benefiting hugely from fossil fuels in Africa. The problem I think we have, though, is that and I think Bayern Munich will kind of perfectly resolve with being stuck in the middle with this German football obviously has the 50 plus one rule Fans blocked a certain degree of quote unquote bad money coming in the Premier League.
25:10
Did not the Premier League let as much money come in from as many places? And it's not just. Obviously, the Gulf States were talking, you know, american hedge funds, who made their money from various sources, were talking from East Asia, from all over. Money is just coming in from all these places, and, of course, there is a bit of. I don't necessarily believe in trickle down economics as a broader concept, but there is some element in that with the league itself that every time Lester buys a player from Watford for however much money via, you know, the king power and all that, that's money going into the league, which then they can spend on maybe a foreign player, and the talent comes in and the attention comes in, and then they can reinvest that money into marketing.
25:46
What happens, though and we're seeing this now what happens when the money, the source overseas says hang on, I'm not going to put money into the league, I'm just going to put money into my own league and attract players there? And I think we are about to see a very funny trend from Premier League spokespeople who, for so long, have been like money is good, we need to compete. If we don't take money, then someone else will do it. That decision has been taken away from them, and what I'm referencing is Saudi Arabia basically saying we're going to build our own league and we have the money to do it. What do you think about that, where the game theories so always suits the winner until they're not the winner anymore?
Freddie 26:20
Yeah, I think I would agree that it is a good example of game theory. I also think that Premier League clubs in particular is an arms race, right, like the wage bills are ever increasing, the price of talent is ever increasing and how competitive the actual league is is ever increasing. So I think clubs are always playing catch up and that means that, you know, especially, clubs aren't backed by Gulf States or by billionaires. They are constantly searching for highly lucrative and long term commercial partnerships. And I do think, from conversations I've had with some people inside Premier League clubs and the commercial departments, there are some screening tests. You know they wouldn't do anything that would be perceived as is too unsavory or would attract too much reputational damage. But I think that is, you know, in terms of their lists of imperatives is quite far down.
27:14
And Saudi example I agree with you. I think it's going to be fascinating to see how it develops and I think you're probably right that we are going to see a lot of pundits. You know swivel and start, you know maybe saying things that they work they wouldn't have said maybe a year or two, and you know, and a few critics are going to come out of the woodwork. But I mean we don't know how the Saudi League is going to develop either. It's quite interesting to see, obviously, the sheer quantity of money they're spending but also the amount of talent that's going over there from from the UK, obviously.
27:43
I think they've obviously got a strategy of bringing in older talent. You know that they have to people that are at the end of their careers in Europe but still have huge recognition amongst football fans and will, you know, obviously be able to help, you know, with training and bringing it through their younger players. But it's, it's, the game's on and the race is on, and these states have ungodly amounts of cash, right? I mean, we don't actually there's no empirics on how much they have in unsecured our sovereign wealth. It's obscene, and they want to spend it and they want to spend it in ways that gives them longevity as a regime, I think, and as a state, improves their image overseas and shows them that they are part of the international sporting community and therefore a big player in international politics as well and geopolitics.
Ben 28:32
I think it's tough when, obviously, we can raise questions of what? Was it always fair that the Premier League became the biggest league in the world? There's definitely legacies of the British Empire. There's legacies of the global North. There's legacies of why there was wealth and community enough to build these institutions in the first place. One of the areas I like I'm trying to do a bit of research in myself is the legacy of the BBC and Africa and how people all over Africa, particularly countries that were occupied by the British, have this tendency to support English teams because they were available on radios originally and then when BBC television came out.
29:07
So, yeah, I mean you can make some arguments of why what the Saudis are doing. Of course, the source of the money is awful, but in terms of, as we talked about earlier, creating a social license through sport, it's not that dissimilar. And I think, as perhaps the German League are also gonna find out, that they've made this great moral line saying we're not gonna take money from Qatar, et cetera. But they've already been priced out to some degree. If you're a good German player, you move quite quickly. And what's also interesting is the difference between sports.
29:35
I think this podcast always ends up talking about football, because it's the one where the big moves are happening, but it's not just football. We've talked about tennis, and obviously there's interest from the Saudis of basically starting about their own tennis league, or turning their turning the main ATP event into one of the grand slams. Essentially, we could talk about live golf. Which perfect example. The PJ were like no, no, no, we're not gonna do this on moral grounds, until the number went up enough. Pivoting all the way back to advertising, though, what do you make of the actual adverts that they're being created? So I think maybe the Qatar World Cup would be a good example. They created the one with David Beckham, they created the one with Gary Neville. These were adverts direct to consumers, saying this is a legitimate operation, world Cup. What do you make of those kind of outreaches?
Freddie 30:19
Well, I think I mean it's interesting. I think it was interesting to see who they lined up. I thought it was quite telling. I mean they obviously spent a huge amount of money with, in terms of their ambassadors, some of them former football stars the very strong political connections as well, so that you can see the thought process there.
30:37
The adverts that were marketed to English speaking consumers around the carbon neutrality claims at the World Cup, I thought were obviously deeply misleading and you know, we, we advertising and a few other organizations from around Europe did submit complaints to advertising regulators to say that they were deeply misleading to consumers and got passed around various jurisdictions. We ended up in Switzerland, where FIFA is obviously based, and they ruled in our favor. So FIFA were, you know it was, it was, it was acknowledged and the the sort of consumer protection court there ruled that FIFA had greenwashed, they had misled consumers over the carbon, carbon neutrality claims. But yeah, I think, I think these forms of advertising and the sometimes the content that they contain is worrying and it also points to a lack of protections for consumers over this sort of stuff.
31:28
Advertising regulation in the UK is quite light touch and it's also quite light touch in other European countries too. And, most importantly it's it's reactive rather than proactive. So you know, when those FIFA and Qatar adverts went out saying that it's going to be the first ever carbon neutral World Cup, you don't have to worry about your flights over here, football fans, we've got that covered, we'll. You know, we're offset for you, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The damage has already been done. Now you know people. I'm sure some people bought those tickets and bought those flights without even thinking about the environmental consequence, but some may have been, may have made their decision based on that. You know, maybe it did play a part in the decision to go over to Qatar. And I think that's where you see how misleading those adverts can be and also how we need better state legislation to prevent that sort of damage being done Next time round.
Ben 32:23
Yes, and obviously that achievement you guys got in Switzerland going through that legal system was obviously fantastic because it added some and I acknowledge the irony of this word, it added some legitimacy to that claim because for a long time any pundit in the space was like that's obviously not true, you can't do that with offsetting. But there was no sort of proof in the pudding and finally, when that came through, we were such a relief to be like, okay, I'm not going insane. Someone actually knows that that's not how, yeah, emissions and offsetting can work. What do you think about advertising through vehicles beyond just like consumer facing? What do you think about things like what Etihad, for example, are doing with man City, where it's not necessarily that every man City shirt just telling you to get on an airline, but the two become quite synonymous? You know it's called the Etihad Stadium. You know the Etihad is not the state, but it's very related to Abu Dhabi et cetera. What do you make of that level of? Is it advertising? Is it culture creation? I don't know what it is.
Freddie 33:19
I mean, yeah, I think we could argue maybe above what the definition of it is. I mean, I think Etihad's a really good example because you're right that that is an airline that is state backed. It is basically a brand for Abu Dhabi to the international community and to consumers all around the world, like pretty old school mentality of having an airline associated with your country. You know, it's classic sort of consumer diplomacy really. I think city, obviously, you know there's been a shirt sponsor for so many years now that they've become inseparable. I think it's concerning and I think it's a good example of where ownership and sponsorship kind of blur. Right, because I think airlines in particular, they're not particularly endowed with loads of cash. Right, they're, margins are slim, they're obviously a very polluting industry and they get a lot of government support through VAT exemptions on flight tickets. There's no taxation on jet fuel, kerosene, so they get all this help and you know there's no way that British Airways or something like that will be on the front of a Premier League club because they couldn't afford to do that. So those are interesting questions about you know why is Etihad at the front of the shirt? It's because they can afford to and I mean I don't know how much that deals worth. I'm sure it's probably not even public record because of the relationship between owners and state and club. But yeah, it's a really good example of the lines being blurred between sponsorship and ownership.
34:53
And you know Etihad, I've tried a few initiatives around sustainability. I mean I know that you say that they're not like saying jump on a flight, but there was some hoardings around a city game last season that someone brought to my attention that said blind at zero. So there are. Obviously they are making environmental claims which are baseless, potentially misleading to consumers but also damaging to just general. You know idea that aviation in its current form can be sustainable. And they also did this bizarre sustainability push within city where if you recycled a plastic bottle you'd get like air miles. I mean, come on, like, how do these decisions get signed off really at the top level?
Ben 35:34
That was the, I think, from a bad advertising perspective and for context, bad advertising and correct me if I'm wrong here, verdi, but like it's bad advertising is what the name is, and you're not gonna find a better example of bad advertising than encouraging people to recycle their plastic bottle on the grounds of sustainability and getting flyers in the war. That blew my mind. Yeah, I know.
Freddie 35:57
And it was also, you know, not even that long ago. I mean, I remember when I did a project with Professor Peter Newell at the University of Sussex a few years ago on sustainable behavior change. And you know, when you're talking about that sort of stuff, you're talking about like some scholars talk about things like nudging and, you know, like little consumer tricks you can do to get people to make the right, more sustainable decisions. And someone brought attention to something that Tesco did like 15 years ago, which was the exact same thing, and it was like you bring your halogen light bulbs in you know this is before LED, so it gives you a sense of how long ago this was Halogen light bulbs in and they'll give you AMRs as well. So it's like and they got hammered for doing that at the time. You know people were like that doesn't make any sense. And then you know you have Manchester City and Etihad doing it. You know the last sort of three, four years. It's wild.
Ben 36:43
That's frustrating. But now we look to the future. How would you best and I mean, obviously you're doing this work now, so please give us more about the work you're doing and how you want it to grow how do you go about fixing this? Because I see two scenarios. I see regulation on one side, stopping this kind of just overinvestment in marketing and creating the social license, but then, as I say, that raises issue of game theory. Or I could see almost some kind of like counter marketing, but then you get into a we can't afford to outmarket them because they just have bigger marketing budgets. How do we go about this?
Freddie 37:18
Well, I mean, that's the ultimate question. Really, I think there's different ways of going about it in different sports. I think Premier League is an exceptional example. I think I don't have the answer to that, because you have to look at government regulation, you have to look at independent regulation, you have to look at the Premier League itself how it regulates the clubs, how it screens potential owners, and also you have to go down to the club level too, and how they screen potential commercial partners. I think you're probably right in the directions you see it going. I think there's a room for all of those, though I think there's a need for more regulation, and I think we are going to see, in the years to come, government stepping in and regulating advertising that is environmentally damaging, especially in those areas of high emissions behaviors so airlines, suvs, fossil fuels and, if government moves on that, and all governments that have legislated for net zero will acknowledge that behavior change and demand side reduction the academic term is essential for getting to those targets. So then you're in a situation where government's moving and sport will be either forced to move or we're not going to be seen to be doing nothing on this issue.
38:32
I think another avenue is obviously fan protest and that upward pressure. We've seen them mobilize around other issues, of course, around climate issues. We're yet to see a huge uptake of this amongst fan groups, but I'm confident that fans will begin to eternalize this as a concern as the impacts and the pressures of climate change unfold. This might not necessarily be a short term thing in the global north and in the UK, but I think in places like Africa and stuff like that, where the game is football and other sports are developed India, cricket I think you will start to see some pressures coming from fan groups and from spectators for the more ambitious action. And I think through those demands, high carbon companies and big polluting industries will be kind of low hanging fruit. They'll be the ones that go first, really, and then there'll be a sense of operationalizing more sort of sustainability measures and e-carbonization, all of that sort of stuff. But the first thing that will go because it's so public facing, I can imagine are the relationships with the big polluters.
39:35
Yeah, and then I think you're probably right in your assumption about the counter-advertising. I think that we're seeing some moves away from certain products. Of course we're seeing gambling and other leagues and Scottish League. There was very hard fought campaign against alcohol advertising. We saw it historically with tobacco as well. So I think there will be concerted efforts to move away from certain industries and products when the harms of those products become unignorable.
40:04
And of course, climate change is here and now for many billions of people in the world. But for the insulated and wealthiest global few that are in the north and in Europe and in the UK, where we are, those impacts aren't being as hard felt now, but they will be and they will affect many aspects of our lives. So I think when those impacts and those concerns and those fears trickle through into everyday life, I think we will see sports clubs having to shift and, of course, elephant in the room as well. There are obviously huge amounts of sports that are being already affected by climate change. I mean the obvious one is obviously winter sports.
40:44
That was that report a few years ago. That was said that something like I can't even remember it was a marginal amount of previous Winter Olympic host nations would be able to host the Winter Olympic Games again in just 30 years, in less than 30 years. That seismic, those are big, big shifts in how sport is hosted, where it's hosted and who gets to compete, and in Beijing, and everyone will remember those images of those sort of like snowless beasts and all those artificial machines churning out snow. But the Beijing Olympics are still sponsored by some of the biggest polluters available in the world, so there's a long way to go, ben.
Ben 41:24
Yes, what a perfect example of a retraction of social license that people don't smoke inside anymore. People used to smoke on planes. I mean it's weird to even think about, but now you wouldn't dream of it. So it shows it works. The other, I mean the other point and I don't like to phrase this podcast as education, because that implies that everything that I've ever said has been verified. It is not. It is let's call it, counter marketing that we're coming here. We've got an opinion, I think, based on some reasonable arguments, and we're putting forward those arguments.
41:53
The problem, of course, is becomes we can even talk about the marketing of this podcast. You know, I've looked at marketing this podcast. It's very expensive. I haven't done it. Cool, you hope that people listen to it anyway.
42:03
But then the other day I get a. I get a beaming in my ear listening to a different podcast. By the way, if you like this podcast, why don't you listen to the podcast by BP? And I'm like what? And I go listen and BP have a podcast that's about all the things that BP are doing, which is ridiculous to me because it's one of the biggest countries in the world and they have their own podcast.
42:22
But again, how much money have they given to Spotify or to Apple or to whichever podcast I was listening to? That it comes through that you're way more people are going to hear that marketing than this side of marketing, at least at the start, so that it does seem like quite an uphill battle to flip that, so sorry. Last point before we end what do you make of maybe trying to incorporate some of these lessons into not necessarily the marketing side but the education side, like surely we could start incorporating this kind of lesson that the average consumer would know before they even were legally allowed to buy something, that recycling a water bottle and getting frequent fire miles as a result of that is just not tenable. What do you make of that side to it?
Freddie 43:04
Yeah, I mean there's definitely an education piece and I think that like comes around to the broader arguments for carbon literacy and the I think you know honestly from government, political parties and whatnot around that, the changes that have to be made if we're going to meet our binding climate targets. I do think consumers are wiser to it than they get credit for. There's a wonderful polling done, I think, by YouGov around Greenwash and who consumers trusted making environmental statements and like at the top was David Attenborough you know that these were suspects Chris Packham, but right down at the bottom was big business energy companies. So consumers realise that they are. They are selling falsities. You know, through these advertisements and through these promises and these pledges, consumers know that it's not legit and they don't I don't think they consciously take it on board when they're making these decisions. But there's obviously the subconscious side right and there's the symbolic side where these companies are continued to be pasted all around us. And they are. You know they're on the front. They're on the front of our football teams, you know our favourite players are wearing them as part of their uniforms, almost, and that obviously has power, right, because I think subconsciously all of us think that, oh, those products can't be that bad, right, because they're continuing. We see them every day. You know we can't leave the house without seeing an advert for an energy company or an SUV or an airline or a fossil fuel funding bank, and there's symbolic power in that and I think that's something that you know it needs to be addressed.
44:40
I also think that the educational piece isn't just for consumers. I think it's also for for organisations and the bodies that carry advertisers and that generate other rely on commercial revenues. I think high carbon advertising and could even be extended to more problematic sponsors as well alcohol gambling that needs to be internalised into their frameworks and how they think about sustainability and how they think about, you know, esg or or social purpose. These aren't. They need to understand and acknowledge that these, these industries, do cause harm and that harm can be traced back to them by going into these partnerships and these sponsorship deals. So I think it's an educational piece that is for all of us, really for people that will work in the space, for, you know, concerned individuals that are working in the sports industry, and also for consumers as well, and I think it's like you said, it's an uphill battle, but you just got to look at the, the wins that have been made, you know, in the past with tobacco, even some of the wins that have been made in sport around climate and against fossil fuel firms, and I think that should be fuel to fire this, this push, because I think there's also a question of using this as a vehicle to sponsorship and commercial partnerships, using that as a as a wedge issue almost, to talk about questions of ownership, to talk about questions of funding, to talk about, like I said at the beginning, the real value of sport, who is sport for and what is sport for?
46:03
And I think these are fundamental questions that we neglect on a daily basis because there's this hundred billion dollar business that's being built up around it, and those questions become unimportant when you're, when you're looking at your bottom line and when you're looking at commercial revenues and when you're looking at ensuring you've got enough money.
46:20
Can you continue to compete so you can stay in the top flight? These questions get way late and I think the campaigns around sponsorship and the campaigns around commercial partnerships it's a really good opportunity for all of us to, you know, ask ourselves those questions, those very fundamental questions, and from that you know there are broader campaigns and demands and asks to be made, but there's a huge opportunity here to build a, a sporting world that serves local communities, that serves people and makes us all happier, healthier, and it makes the planet happier and healthier, and I think that's something that we need to focus on and that's something that we need to have almost blinkers right, because there's a lot of noise out there. There's a lot of false solutions being peddled. There's a lot of people you know within the industry which are they've got path dependencies. They say this is the solution, this is the way we should go and it's wrong. So I think it's about being open, collaborative and fiercely stubborn in our pursuit of what we're going for really, what a pragmatic response.
Ben 47:21
That was my goodness. Yeah, so much to unpack there. On an ending note, I agree with you that we're not all perfect certainly not. I mean, look at me, I was watching the, the Barclays English Premier League, for most of my life. Now here I am ranting every other week about the Barclays fossil fuel bank. So progress is possible. And yeah, I really like that point you made that when you're in a path dependent society, it seems very path dependent, but there's always room for change.
Freddie 47:46
So definitely, and I think it comes down I'd just like to say that and I think it comes down to control right, and this is, you know, a very vital thing for not only sustainable choices and sustainable consumption choices, but also our you know, our sense of self and our own well-being. There are things that you and I do not have control over. We do not have control over the sport we love being sponsored by a fossil fuel company or a fossil fuel funding bank. Just in the same way, we don't really have control about where our energy comes from, where our electricity is generated or, you know, when we go to the supermarket, we don't have control whether the vegetables and fruit are covered in plastic. These are things we don't have control over.
48:22
But what we do have control over is the work that we do, the questions that we ask, the relationships we do build and the way in which we push these campaigns forward to build a foundation for tangible change. And I always like have to remind myself about that as well, because you can get bogged down and you can get depressed by how much that needs to change and how far we need to go to get where we supposedly need to be, which also might be a massive underestimation of what the climate is going to do and what the science is telling us. So it's about focusing on what you can do where you can do it, and doing it to the best of your ability, and I think that you know your work continues to inspire me in that regard as well, so I'm grateful for you having me on.
Ben 49:05
No, you're so welcome and I really resonate with that point. The other day I asked one of my mother's friends what the carbon impact of her redoing her kitchen was, and I promise you I'm not going to be invited back anytime soon, so I wouldn't recommend that. But yeah, Freddie, thank you so much for your work, thank you for Badvertising's work and, yeah, thank you for coming on the show and sharing all that with us.
That was our conversation with Freddie Daley, someone who's doing such important work, and I encourage you to reach out to Badvertising or the partner organization, the Rapid Transition Alliance, if you're interested in these themes. Links is always in the episode bio. That does it for this episode. Next time we are speaking to a journalist who is reporting on sport and sustainability in Uganda, not to be missed. Thank you so much for listening and bye for now.