New summary: What the public think about advertising high-carbon products and services: Citizens’ jury and public polling evidence from the UK.
- Jan 15
- 2 min read
Updated: Aug 3
This new research summary outlines the key policies a citizen jury created to match their concern about the advertising of high-carbon products and services. These policy options were then presented to 2000 adults in the UK via a poll to assess their level of support for these different options.
What did we find?
1)There is a clear desire for information on climate change and net zero targets. Many proposals referenced the need for greater education and awareness of climate change and emissions targets. Advertising was seen as being able to contribute to this. This suggests there is the potential for political leaders to explore policy in this area.
2)There is strong public support for the principle of additional regulation on advertising as part of a wider climate strategy. Indeed, concern about climate change is high, and people are looking to government to lead. Political trust in leaders and institutions is important if the public is to accept significant policy changes, but building this from its currently low level will take time. Other evidence suggests that participatory policy approaches, such as DMPs, when used effectively by policy makers can be part of rebuilding that trust.
3) An outright advertising ban on high-carbon products and services, whilst being the least popular policy option, was still more popular than doing nothing and keeping things as they are. Other research suggests that a ban may be the most effective in achieving change, however our research found that public support for measures varies as such that even demonstrating greater efficacy may not necessarily translate into greater support. Similarly, political leaders cannot achieve climate targets simply by calibrating their policies to be politically popular, they must do the difficult political work of building a mandate for policies people may not intuitively support.
4) There were clear patterns in people’s responses that allowed us to identify five key ‘stances’ that people are likely to take. Members of each stance also tended to exhibit similar social characteristics (see figures in sliding gallery above). The Object group tends to give blanket dismissal to any proposal. The Neutral group runs straight down the middle, neither opposing or supporting proposals. The Moderate group shows support, but not incredibly strong support. The Support group tends to lend strong support to everything, but there is a sub-set that do not strongly support the ban. The Support except ban group supports a ban even less than the Moderate group.
