The Ad Industry’s Plan to Fix America’s Gun Crisis
If you want a crude sketch of the biggest corporate players in a given year of TV, look no further than the Emmy Award for best commercial. Twenty-five years of winners form an ensemble cast of petty bourgeois preoccupations: Nike, Chrysler, Bud Light. This year’s nominees included a commercial for Meta (the artist formerly known as Facebook), one for Chevy (repping the still-muscular auto spend), two for Apple (a perennial contender), and two for the prevention of school shootings—one of which won the Emmy.
This marks the second time in three years that an ad addressing gun violence has been awarded. That might strike you as dystopian, but it’s actually a positive sign. Commercials, the most expensive and lumbering ad units, tend to reflect ideas that have already matured in the marketplace. If most ads exist to stoke desire for a product or indulgence, public-service advertising is a kind of counterprogramming, going back to government wartime messages exhorting Americans to conserve resources. Public-health campaigns, in particular, face the uphill battle of directing people away from their usual patterns of consumption. Eat less meat, don’t drink and drive, resist the urge to light up: These have always been hard sells, even putting aside their inherent opposition to industry profits.
Gun-violence-prevention ads face a tougher challenge, as evidenced by their name—an and in certain ways moot. Nearly 400 million firearms already circulate through labyrinthine state and local systems. They trade hands with mixed transparency, flowing from established retailers such as Dick’s Sporting Goods to gun-show booths to secondary sales and a fathomless black market. Advocates and lawmakers can attack the problem of gun violence from dozens of angles, but PSAs, which find success by seeding simple, powerful messages, are often seen as too blunt an instrument to communicate policy proposals.
