“I was watching these ads,” the Toronto-born photographer said in a recent interview, “one after another, all with animals in them. For so many people, this constitutes their entire interaction with the natural world today: chimps selling them products.”
Animals feature regularly in advertising, especially on television, as actors or props. They are prized for their universal appeal; the simplicity of nature gives an unstated credibility to faceless corporations. And they verge on being ubiquitous.
Consider Canadian telecommunications company Telus’s long-running campaign, which uses pigs and parrots to push phones. Their rival, Fido, never runs an ad without a dog it in.
Carmakers anthropomorphize their products — the Chevrolet Impala is just the latest example.
More commonly, animal likenesses dot the multinational logo landscape. Esso has long employed a tiger as its brand figurehead.
Colbert, an avowed animal lover, has spent much of his career photographing wildlife. He is best known for Ashes and Snow, a travelling exhibit of humans and animals in exotic locales.
Our estrangement from nature, Colbert says, distances people from ecological degradation and the grave plight of endangered species.
So at February’s Technology Entertainment Design (TED) Conference — an annual gathering in Monterey, Ca. — Colbert announced the launch of the Animal Copyright Foundation.
Colbert feels the market that commodifies animals should also reward them. His proposal: What if one per cent of every media-buy dollar was given to a conservation organization?
He calls it “renegotiating our contract with nature.” Colbert believes that, if enough advertisers embraced the concept, it would have the potential to create the world’s largest environmental fund — one without the overhead that traditionally bedevils large organizations like the World Wildlife Fund.
Colbert claims to have drawn interest and support among influentials such as former U.S. vice-president Al Gore, DreamWorks Pictures partner Jeffrey Katzenberg and Google partner Larry Page, as well as executives from ad heavyweights like J. Walter Thompson and Saatchi & Saatchi.
The Economist magazine recently reported that the ad industry spends over $450 billion (U.S.) annually; based on anecdotal estimates, animals appear in 10 to 30 per cent of all advertising. At present, only animal handlers get paid.
The Economist, known for its business-friendly leanings, weighed in with a surprisingly warm analysis of Colbert’s idea. If the Animal Copyright Foundation logo “looks cute enough,” the Economist writer felt, the idea just might fly.
Others weren’t so complimentary.
“It’s a harebrained idea,” says Chris Staples, a partner at ReThink, a boutique ad agency in Vancouver with clients such as Bell Mobility and A&W Restaurants.
“It sounds wonderful and lofty, but rather than coming up with complicated global schemes, why not act locally? Big ideas can be great ideas, but this one has a lot of immediately apparent problems.”
Staples thinks clients would shy away from the added cost, even at one per cent of their existing budget.
He also says animals are already well compensated. ReThink recently paid the wrangler of two cows $7,000 for one television spot, while a human actor received just $1,500. (Given supply and demand, this animal-human disparity is common in the industry.)
Rob MacLean, a vice-president at DDB, a large national firm, faults the idea on several fronts, including its lack of detail.
“I think the [Animal Copyright Foundation] logo could be a vehicle to communicate the integrity of advertisers. It’s a smart idea that could take off, if properly managed and packaged, but as it is, it’s fraught with problems.”
MacLean says a similar Canadian model, the Environmental Choice Program, has managed to allocate funds to environmental causes.
But Colbert refuses to think small. He says he is not a fan of the drive-by activism favoured by celebrities at seal hunts and the like.
He also argues that acting locally or symbolically poses hidden risks. “It is very sexy to save a whale or an elephant, but it obscures our need to deal with the bigger picture.”
And the time to act, he insists, is fast approaching.
“By September, we’re going to see the first companies signing up for the animal copyright logo. You’ll see them signing up — or running for cover.”
Jeff MacIntyre (jeffmacintyre.com) is a Canadian freelance journalist living in New York.
