In several ways, religious and commercial images are competing for the same space
By B.C.
TWO recent bits of news will be of interest to people who worry about the offence which advertising and other marketing tools can cause to religious believers. As it happens, both items concern Christians in Britain, but one could find many similar stories from other countries and faiths. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), a self-regulatory body, rejected a complaint from 30 people who said they were upset by a Christmas commercial for KFC, a fast-food chain. The ad poked lightish fun at some secular aspects of the winter-holiday celebration (like shoppers squabbling over an item they both wanted) and showed carol singers trying to soften the heart of a Scrooge-like figure with what they self-mockingly called "stupid songs". It was the latter two words which offended some; but as the ASA noted, the singers were just making a point about their grumpy listener's state of mind.
Meanwhile a sandwich-shop chain, Pret A Manger, said last month that it had withdrawn a brand of tomato-flavoured crisps called "Virgin Mary" after receiving protests from Catholics. In a message to the complainers, the company said "we are extremely sorry that the crisp name we had selected has offended you...[the CEO] has taken your advice and decided to remove all of the crisps from our shops...we will be donating all the unsold crisps to homeless charities that we support across the country,"
Advertising regulators across Europe face many such complaints and they use broadly similar guidelines to deal with them, recommending that marketers avoid material that will either cause widespread offence or intense offence to a small group. Admittedly, religion-based protests are only a small percentage of the total number. The European Advertising Standards Alliance, which groups 37 self-regulators in Europe and beyond, recorded about 60,000 complaints in 2012, of which 16,000 related to "taste and decency"—as opposed to, say, misleading content or unfair competition. About half the "taste" protests concerned issues of gender (usually, ads deemed degrading to women) while about 3,400 were about "offensiveness", including the religious sort. But one of the most complained-about ads was one that could have given offence on either feminist or religious grounds; it promoted a Polish energy drink by showing a woman on a bed clad in white lingerie, under the slogan "be sinful..."
If the proportion of religious protests sounds low, that is probably because most marketers would see no advantage in a sales strategy that might prompt a significant share of consumers to boycott their product. So many religious complaints are either anticipated successfully or nipped in the bud. But Harley-Davidson, a motorcycle-maker, has tested the limits with a billboard in French-speaking Quebec, where a vigorous debate about secularism is in progress. It is a composite picture of two female faces wearing both a hijab and a helmet, under the slogan: "Á Chacun Sa Religion"—roughly "to each her religion" (see picture).
Perhaps it's surprising that the worlds of faith and advertising don't clash even more frequently. At a deep level, both activities are competing for the same space in people's conscious and sub-conscious minds. Pope Francis (as part of a general critique of capitalism which a colleague explains in this week's print edition) has taken issue with many aspects of capitalist culture, where "priority is given to the outward, the immediate, the visible, the quick, the superficial and the provisional" in the name of "unbridled consumerism". But paradoxically enough, the papacy, especially in the early years of John Paul II and perhaps now again under the current pontiff, is itself a global brand which relies on modern technology to transmit arresting and abiding images around the world.
For believers in any religion, perhaps the most challenging thing about modern advertisements is the way they proclaim a global community—based on common enthusiasm for a consumer product—of the kind that in centuries past was mostly constituted by faith. The contested KFC ad shows people forgetting their differences as they tuck into chicken legs: why squabble about anything, it seems to imply, when we all love a nice chewy nugget. An ad for an American steak-house chain mixed the religious music of Bach with the slogan "if steaks were a religion, this would be its cathedral", and the message resonated, because we unconsciously acknowledge that for many people, steaks and their preparation (especially outdoors) are indeed a sort of sacred rite, an ultimate reference point.
Borrowing a bit of pop-psychology from Carl Jung, you might even say that in much of the rich, northern hemisphere, commercial products and images are now the defining "archetypes"—displacing the old reference points of religion. But there are still huge swathes of the world, and large sub-cultures, where religious archetypes populate the collective unconscious; when people close their eyes, they see Christian icons, Koranic calligraphy or statues of Buddha, rather than juicy steaks or gleaming motorbikes. That's probably one of the big reasons why modern and traditional societies find it so difficult to understand each other.
