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Animals are like people, only nicer. Or so it would seem in the annals of British advertising, where animals have featured in some of the industry's longest-running and most famous campaigns. What did you sleep on last night? Did the unlikely combination of a hippo and a duck haunt your dreams at any point?

Think about what you had for breakfast this morning. Did cereal-toting tigers, honey monsters or tea-swilling chimps have anything to do with it? How about what you have in your bathroom. Does an adorable Labrador puppy spring to mind?

Brand spokescreatures such as these make an instant emotional connection with us. A bit like pets, they offer warm, uncomplicated relationships in a world too full of confusion and hostility. And it's not just the British who have a predilection for things four-legged. Animal ads seem to tap into an international empathy with the cuddly kingdom.

In Canada, for example, mobile phone advertising is dominated by dogs, lizards and beavers. Frank and Gordon (the animatronic beavers in that list) front Bell Canada's cell phone campaign, representing brand attributes of cuteness and mobility. Wander into one of their high-street shops and you can even have your photo taken with a stuffed version of the toothy twosome, perhaps on your new camera phone.

More cynically, one can see the economic advantages of animals for advertisers themselves. They don't answer back, they are non-unionised, and they arguably have a more universal appeal to today's global marketplace than humans from a particular ethnic or demographic mould. They are a great way of surrounding a brand with associations other than how much it's costing us.

Best of all are animated animals, whether as cartoons or increasingly life-like animatronic creations. These get round the proverbial difficulties of working with "animals and children", as well as neatly removing any question of exploitation.

With changing attitudes to animal rights and a keener sense of the importance of animal welfare, avoiding the charge of exploitation is becoming increasingly important for advertisers. A number of companies in the UK have stopped using great apes in advertising (including Halfords, Grolsch, and perhaps most famously PG Tips).

In the Republic of Ireland only last year the mobile phone operator Meteor prompted protests from animal protection groups over the use of an orang-utan called Harry in its advertising. Earlier in 2005 the AA ruled out future use of captive wild animals in its advertising following similar protests about its use of an elephant.

Such protests are connected with more than just a simple concern for animal welfare, however. They may be early warnings of a shift in popular opinion which might see the use of animals in advertising as undignified, in spite of its popularity until now.

There is a growing sense in which humans are beginning to consider themselves as no different from any other animals. Many contemporary philosophers define personhood on the grounds of an organism's consciousness of being alive rather than its being human.

Influential ethicists such as Peter Singer have revived the idea of utilitarianism on a global scale, arguing that we need to weigh our rights as humans with the claims of other living beings when we make moral decisions. It takes a while for this kind of thinking to filter through to the level of marketing, and it's open to all sorts of objections. However, a similar kind of philosophical revolution has had a profound impact on attitudes to green issues, which we now take for granted in marketing and elsewhere.

One of the first ways in which the use of animals in advertising may change in response to this trend is that advertisers will stop patronising animals by giving them cute human characteristics, and instead recognise the animal-like features of humans.

This may explain the current advertising campaign by (yet another) mobile phone operator in the UK, where customers are split into different kinds of animals depending on what they're looking for (and put on different tariffs accordingly). Dolphins are sociable creatures who use their phones to facilitate and organise their interactions with others, canaries like nothing better than chirping away on their mobiles, racoons are highly instrumental, and panthers are sleek, sophisticated hunters prowling the microwaves for information and entertainment.

The animals are represented in the ads not by real creatures, nor by even vaguely life-like animatronics, but by symbolic representations such as balloons in the mobile phone operator's house colour. Not only does that banish any suggestion of exploiting real animals, it also cloaks the human assumption of animal identities with a sense of innocent celebration and fun. Like people, only nicer.

Further reading

• Marketing in a Complex World
• Philosophy and the Human Situation
• How are we to live? Ethics in an age of self-interest by Peter Singer

About the author

Terry O'Sullivan is lecturer in marketing at the Open University Business School. He researches and teaches in the fields of fundraising, marketing communications and non-profit marketing.

Blogging about

Money Programme

Get the facts behind the big business and finance stories from around the world - and down your street.

All too often, looking at the short-term, it seems too expensive to be green. Cleaner hybrid or electric cars, organic foods, energy efficient domestic appliances, and many other green products, all cost more than their conventional equivalents, so the majority don’t buy them. However, if we look at the long-term, it’s possible that it may cost even more for us NOT to be green. There are four main ways that our actions today can damage the world left for future generations.

1. We are consuming non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels at a rate that will make them either very expensive, or not available at all, in a small number of generations


2. The emissions of greenhouse gases associated with our fossil fuel use are likely to cause major disruption of the climate, making some areas uninhabitable and increasing the risks of major weather-related disasters


3. We are adding other pollutants to our environment, whose long-term effects on our health, and that of other species, may be severe


4. In modifying the environment to support our lifestyle, we are changing or even destroying the habitats of other species, with unknowable, but potentially serious, consequences

The costs that these will impose on future generations are unknown, but certain to be large. Should we be prepared to spend a little more now, to ensure that our children and their children don’t have to spend very much more in the future?

Is green really more expensive?

The examples above certainly appear to be more expensive. However, at the other extreme, 'greener' actions such as switching off unnecessary lights, turning down heating thermostats or planning car journeys to minimise unnecessary travel, all cost nothing, other than a bit of thought, and provide instant monetary savings.

In between these extremes, there is a whole mixture of costs and benefits: short-term versus long-term and individual versus communal. I would argue that when we take the longer term and wider view, the green version isn’t really that expensive.

Better household insulation, low energy bulbs and other aspects of domestic design may cost more in the short-term, but provide significant long-term savings of both money and pollution. Expensive hybrid or electric cars are at the moment largely irrelevant, but why drive a large, heavy, fuel-guzzling vehicle when a smaller, more fuel-efficient, one could do the same job at a lower cost?

"Driving a smaller, greener, vehicle is only expensive in terms of the image of the driver."

For short journeys, a bicycle is even cheaper! Spurious claims about the safety of SUVs and similar vehicles do little to hide the fact that most of these monsters are an expression of vanity on the part of the owner. Driving a smaller, greener, vehicle and driving it less, is only expensive in terms of the image of the driver.

The same is true of driving smoothly and at the most fuel efficient speed. But the speeding, stop-go driver is sure that his or her time is so valuable that to travel more slowly would be expensive. And there lies the nub of the problem.

It’s a matter of choice

How do we, as individuals, mentally cost our time, our ambitions, our lifestyle desires and compare these with the needs of others, born and unborn? Do we, or should we, consider these other costs when we decide to take a long haul foreign trip, buy a bigger car, or spend on other items?

Many of the goods and services we buy are designed to save us time, so that we have more time to enjoy the additional goods and services we believe we need. Buying the ingredients of a meal and cooking them is seen to 'cost' too much of our valuable time, so we spend money on ready prepared dishes that only need to be reheated.

Other purchases are designed to satisfy other desires, such as for status, novel holiday experiences and so on, but all these things cost money. To obtain this money we may even end up working longer hours, to earn enough to buy the goods and services to enjoy in our vanishing leisure time!

It may seem crazy, but this cycle of earning and spending is essential for economic growth, the requirement of liberal market democracies. It’s therefore in the interests of governments, business and the media to keep this cycle in place.

Myths of market economics

Francis Fukuyama claimed in The End of History that liberal market democracies are the final end point of human development, and therefore in some way inevitable. But, as George Lakoff has pointed out, markets are actually designed and created by humans, and are based on particular sets of rules.

At present, those rules do not allow for the costs of environmental damage, and deem that benefits in the future are worth much less than benefits now, but there is no fundamental reason why this should be so. It is just that we have chosen to set up markets in this particular way. The green product or service voluntarily incurs the current cost of environmental protection, while the non-green one does not.

Until a recognition of these additional environmental costs is built into the rules governing markets, being green will always appear to be expensive. There is an enormous educational and political task here.

In the end, money is only a means of exchange, necessary to obtain something that we as individuals happen to want. In a market economy, there will always be providers ready to respond to these wants, or even, dare we suggest, to create new wants, because that is what provides economic growth. But does it have to be thus?

Are we really such inadequates that our lives are only fulfilled if we drive the latest, largest SUV, take the longest long-haul flights to currently unspoilt destinations, and in the process destroy much of what we, or others, may want? Is that really the cheaper option? We are all part of the whole Earth system, so should we not make decisions that reflect this?

It may not be expensive, but it is difficult! Being green is only really expensive if we think solely in terms of our current lifestyles and ignore the future and the less fortunate. But even in the longer term, it’s not necessarily going to be cheap, and it’s certainly not simple.

All too often, we can reduce one aspect of our environmental damage, and even save ourselves some money, but in the process, make another aspect worse. The hybrid car illustrates this neatly. Current versions actually emit more carbon dioxide per kilometre travelled than does a modern diesel car of similar size, according to research by Which? magazine. But the diesel puts out more of some other pollutants. So while either is better than the gas-guzzler, which of them is actually the cheaper, greener alternative?

"Buying ready prepared meals could be a greener choice than home cooking"

Paradoxically, buying ready prepared meals could be a greener choice than home cooking. Meals cooked in efficient industrial ovens use much less energy per item than the myriad of domestic ovens needed to produce the same dishes individually. Storing these dishes in industrial scale chillers is also better than domestic fridges and freezers.

The trouble is, we need the domestic fridges anyway, and we probably end up making extra fuel-expensive journeys to buy the ready prepared dishes. There is a strong incentive for the food manufacturer always to source the cheapest ingredients, and the distortions of the marketplace mean that this may involve the materials travelling massive distances. So the theoretical environmental benefits of industrial food production are mostly illusory.

If we are prepared to look beyond the short-term in our decisions, we need to be aware of their environmental effects, and of the sorts of complications suggested here. There is a whole range of Open University courses that tackle these difficulties, from the introductory to the postgraduate. If you are seriously concerned about the costs of being green, these provide the information you need to help you.

Futher reading

• The End of History and the Last Man by F Fukuyama, published by Penguin
• Framing the issues: UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff tells how conservatives use language to dominate politics by Bonnie Azab Powell, UC Berkeley NewsCenter
• 'Green Machines' in Which? (May 2006, p16-19)
• Working with our Environment: Technology for a Sustainable Future (T172)
• Environment (U216)
• The Environmental Web (U316)
• Environmental Decision Making: A Systems Approach (TXX863)
• Climate change – a few degrees can make all the difference: inundation, disaster, extinction
• Your trip at what cost? – take a virtual holiday and see how much pollution you generate

About the author

Dick Morris has been visiting senior research fellow in the Open University Technology Faculty since 2004. Prior to that, he was senior lecturer in systems, responsible for a range of Open University courses including the technology foundation course, food production systems and systems modelling, and for cross-faculty activities around the environment.