Selling VirtuePandering ad campaigns from Chevron, Starbucks, Liberty Mutual, and Barack Obama.
Posted Friday, Jan. 23, 2009, at 7:07 PM ET
When I go shopping for moral instruction, I don't drive the family van to corporate America's front door. Their job is to make good stuff for me to buy at a good price, not lecture me on the virtuous life. Yet that's the tack a slew of companies have been taking with ad campaigns that march up to my front door like an army of Mormon missionaries and bang loudly.
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StumbleUponTraditionally, big companies did good things like planted trees or reduced waste or rescued orphans and bragged about it in hopes that you'd buy their product. Nowadays, they want you to right the world's perceived wrongs so they can take the credit for it.
The most cretinous of the current "stolen virtue" campaigns comes from Chevron. Its "I Will" promotion, launched last fall, is "designed to raise awareness of the importance of energy efficiency and conservation," according to the company. The campaign's placards—viewable at the company's www.willyoujoinus.com Web site—are unavoidable on Washington buses and subways. The TV spots have aired during the Sunday political talk shows.
"I will leave the car at home more," reads the tag line on one of the print ads. "I will finally get a programmable thermostat," reads the second. "I will use less energy," says the third. Seeing as Chevron makes money every time you use their energy products, why is it trying to guilt us into using less? It's as if General Motors suddenly started running ads pleading with customers to drive their cars for another 10 years before buying a new one.
Although Chevron frames its campaign as being about energy conservation, that's a bunch of hooey. All other things being constant, if every gullible soul riding Washington's buses and trains performed the simple conservation miracles Chevron proposes, energy consumption would fall, and so would prices. As prices fell, the nongullible would take advantage of the depressed prices to consume more and thus drive the price back up.
But the Chevron campaign isn't about logic, otherwise it wouldn't be hectoring subway- and bus-riders who already left the car at home to leave the car at home. Chevron's unofficial subtext is climate change, which its ads never mention. The company wants to forestall any regulation or taxation of its carboniferous products and hopes that by encouraging the public to engage in saintly acts of self-denial ("Join us in one of the most important efforts of our time—using less," the ads implore), it will duck congressional intervention. (The League of Conservation Voters, whose views I don't endorse, offers this clever parody of the Chevron shill.)
Ranking second on my corporate ick list is Starbucks. Its "I'm In" project, riffing off of President Barack Obama's call to national service, hopes to "raise one million hours of service across America." Here's the deal: Visit a Starbucks by Jan. 25, fill out a card pledging to do five hours of volunteer work, and the shop will give you a free cup of coffee.
Starbucks says its motives are noble: To simplify volunteerism and "empower" customers to "give back to their communities." I find this explanation as palatable as a week-old pot of room-temperature robusta. If Starbucks were serious about national service, it would give its employees five hours a month of paid time to do publicly minded work—or it would ask customers to give up their extra-hot, no-foam venti skim lattes for a week and donate the money to charity.
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