Eco-linguistics and Promotional Discourse

VOLKSWAGEN ‚Nature Routes‘, 2024, BBDO Ecuador, Quito – Lürzer’s Archive 03/24.151

There’s nothing new under the sun. That’s what we thought when we were approached by the editors of The Routledge Handbook of Ecolinguistics to rework our 2018 chapter on Eco-Advertising for a second edition. Initially, my Sydney colleague Sonja MOLNAR and I thought this would be a task quickly and efficiently done, updating some of the sources and examples and retouching here and there.

However, when the time came to actually deliver, we couldn’t help but feel that the burgeoning development of the field – both in terms of eco-linguistic approaches and green advertising (in its widest sense) – calls for a complete re-write. So we stuck with our genre approach, keeping three closely related ad-genres in place, i.e., green commercial, green-washed commercial, and non-profit/social and environmental advertising. All the rest of the chapter is as good as new.

VOLVO ‚Silent Cities‘, 2024, Havas Group Peru, Lima – Lürzer’s Archives 03/24.155

For example, we wanted a short history of eco-advertising with a special focus on how green advertising and green-washed advertising came into being in the 1960s/70s and how it was treated in marketing and ad research. Also, it seemed possible now to provide a sketch of eco-linguistic analytical approaches that harnesses recent work in the field. Finally, of course, the exemplification of critical eco-linguistic concepts and selected pieces of method had to be redone. This was necessary if we wanted to showcase topical and recent examples and if we wanted to illustrate the approaches outlined.

While the amount of work coming our way was a bit of a shock initially, we quickly found the job challenging in a good way and ultimately a lot of fun. We hope especially to have picked and sketched a number of really typical examples that will be fit to represent the field for a little while (We found some really great ones but could only include a few.). Some of the most insightful ads come from campaigns that were called out for greenwashing and countered by what TSERONIS and FORCEVILLE (2017) have called subvertisements.