Obesity’s Link to Roadside Billboards

Tiny Rhode Island, the state most deeply rooted in individual liberty, vigilantly guards the following policy, while North Carolina lawmakers are busy surrendering thousands of acres of roadside forest in a giveaway to out-of-state billboard companies:

"It is the policy of the State of Rhode Island that on land held in the public trust, no vegetation is to be removed for the purpose of increasing the visibility of any commercial property."

Tar Heels familiar with a constitutional amendment known as the Environmental Bill of Rights (p. 538) know that was meant to do same for North Carolina, and they are bewildered that lawmakers, if even aware it exists, seem in flippant disregard.

Many Republican lawmakers are oblivious, at best, to the opposition of 8-in-10 North Carolinians to cutting more trees for billboards including a ratio of 19-to-1 against among members of their party, revealing a glaring weakness in representative democracy.

Obviously, taking out thousands of acres of roadside trees has an effect on public health because it is scientifically proven that trees help to clean the air, purify water, cool surface temperatures, screen wind and particulates and sequester climate warming gases.

Now comes a new study revealing that the outdoor billboards for which they are being harvested are linked to obesity, where prevalent.  This is a costly condition self-reported by 36% percent of Americans including 30% of North Carolinians.

Is it possible that Rhode Island’s refusal to surrender roadside forests to billboards is part of the reason that state’s rate of obesity is lower than states such as North Carolina where lawmakers are gratuitously deforesting to make their views more effective?

An analysis performed a few years ago by RTI International, based in Durham, North Carolina where I live, calculated that obesity is burdening the economy with hidden costs of more than $150 billion annually while jacking up health insurance premiums across the board.

To put this “obesity” tax on the non-obese in perspective, it is nearly four times greater than the amount a House bill is intended to cut from the federal budget in hopes of pushing working American families off food stamps.

They apparently think this will force these families to find work that pays a livable wage even though the proportion of low wage jobs has ballooned to 4-in-10, more than double what was in 2009.

McDonalds touts environmental responsibility as one of its focus areas including “conserving and protecting natural resources.”  Yet, for a decade, the world’s largest global foodservice retailer has also been the number one user of outdoor billboards.

This makes that company a major enabler of deforestation by outdoor billboard companies along publically-owned roadsides, not to mention a company empowering visual blight in communities, where on average, restaurants depend on tourist appeal for a third of their revenue.

Corporations like McDonalds have excellent intentions when it comes to sustainability, but all too often they are undermined when their marketing divisions fail to connect the dots or feel exempt.

To be credible, marketing must be about “storydoing,” not just storytelling.  One thing marketing departments in companies such as McDonalds can do immediately to redeem themselves is to stop enabling desecration by using outdoor billboard companies.

Food and beverage businesses overall make up 1-in-4 of the top 100 businesses in terms of generating outdoor billboard revenue.

In the past decade fast food restaurants alone have doubled their use of outdoor billboards while casual dining restaurants have pulled back.  Just look at Cracker Barrel, which has touted using 1,500 billboards alone in the past but has now fallen from 5th to 14th place in use.

Slowly, foodservice businesses such as Cracker Barrel are moving to far less destructive mediums such as highway exit logo wayfinding signs.

Among fast food giants, only Wendy’s seems to have had second thoughts about billboard use.  During this same decade, not counting those used by its bottlers, Coca-Cola, rose from 40th to 9th in billboard use contributing to a tripling of childhood obesity in a generation.

Founded by a third generation restaurateur, Orlando-based Aaron Allen & Associates, a restaurant industry analyst and consultancy for both independent restaurants and chains, steers restaurants away from billboards and toward far more productive marketing vehicles.

From 1971 when tobacco advertising on television was banned, until the early 1990s, tobacco companies were by far the largest users of outdoor billboards.  Then, there too, tobacco encountered an uprising of public health considerations.

It was in 1992 that McDonalds ran its first outdoor billboard campaign as tobacco advertising on roadsides fell dramatically by 33% by 1994 and then was banned from outdoor advertising in a legal settlement with 46 states in 1999 including North Carolina and Rhode Island.

Leveraging fire-sale rates as the death knell for billboards grew louder, by 2002 McDonalds became the #1 user of outdoor billboards, keeping this obsolete advertising technology on life support, a standing the foodservice giant has retained into the current decade.

This, even though studies show less than 1% of consumers now use billboards to make decisions and the desecration they create turns off 7 consumers for every 1 who still find them useful.

Billboards are the bottom feeders of the advertising industry, which overall has fallen to where it now returns just 1/10th of its input in terms of what it costs to place.

It is clear many lawmakers in North Carolina are not connecting the dots between billboards and public health.  Or maybe special interest lobbying by billboard companies has made them tone deaf.

Personally, I prefer to believe that most lawmakers are well-intended but just don’t get it or they are outmaneuvered by a sneaky few who know exactly what they are doing and don’t care.

One thing is for certain, billboard companies operating in North Carolina are hollowing out the code of ethics of their own industry which calls for protection of children and respect for the environment.

As for North Carolinians, we seem stunned if not numbed to the crass overreaching of billboard companies in the General Assembly.  Or maybe we like most Americans have tuned out advertising to the extent we no longer notice the visual blight billboards create.

Even more invisible and more deadly are the health hazards to which billboards contribute by enabling air and water pollution, increased erosion and surface temperatures and release of climate warming gases.

My guess is that soon, public opinion will give a death sentence to outdoor billboards the same way it did to using them to advertise tobacco.

In a Forbes article entitled No Billboards, No Outdoor Advertising?  What Next?, Scott Goodson, the author of a blog and a book entitled Uprising, told of one such uprising that has happened already.

In 2007, the world’s fourth-largest metropolis, São Paulo, Brazil put into effect a “Clean City Law” including an immediate ban on outdoor advertising as a form of “visual pollution,” even taking on media giant Clear Channel.

In a matter of months São Paulo took down 15,000 billboards.  Today, the measure retains an incredible 70% approval rating, coincidentially the same percentage of North Carolinians who see billboards as desecration.

Businesses and residents alike in São Paulo have been suddenly and joyously exposed to the community’s rich sense of place.

Firms there rapidly realized they had never questioned whether billboards actually worked.  As Goodson notes, “they realized that bombarding people with a visual traffic jam was never going to make an impact.  They learnt [sic] that one-way advertising doesn’t work anymore.”

The ban also “catalyzed” Brazilian brands and the ad industry there to “make a giant leap to digital.”

One day soon, North Carolina’s lawmakers too will rediscover the genius of the 1971 amendment to put roadside forests ahead of out-of-state billboard interests. 

It too will be be accompanied by a rediscovery of the state’s unique sense of place and a gestalt on the part of business.

Movement Inertia

Many recounting our successful defense and restoration of the Durham, North Carolina brand mistakenly assume as a community marketer that I would have had shoulder-to-shoulder support from other marketers here.

The fact is many were not my biggest fans and/or chose to only lend support behind the scenes. Some could never make the connection that the organization I led from 1989 through 2009 had the same responsibility for the community at large that they had for their individual organizations or corporations.

A few either actively worked against me or sold me out for personal gain when approached with win/lose proposals they could not resist. If having their regard (all were pleasant to my face) had been paramount, it is unlikely we would have ever succeeded.

What we did have was a social movement before there was social media. Thousands of individual Durham citizens, hundreds who we later anointed Durham Image Watchers, not only stood with us but proactively and publicly made our case.

All organizations that spearhead change are not so fortunate.

It isn't uncommon for an objective to be rendered inert by internal factions or splinter groups as we faced, often from those who should be shoulder-to-shoulder.

Just as often, groups and movements stall because supporters fall in love with the problem they are established to resolve so much that they can almost appear to seek to perpetuate it.

Here is another example.

The roots of the the women’s and antislavery movements are intertwined in the two or three decades prior to the Civil War. This was a time when U.S. Senator Willie P. Mangum from Durham was working on a series of failed compromises to save the Union.

Susan B. Anthony, who fought for both the women’s movement and to abolish slavery, and social reformer and escaped former slave Fredrick Douglass formed a friendship as early as the 1840s that is celebrated today with a statue in Rochester, New York.  There is also a bridge there affectionately known as the Freddie-Sue by many.

During the war the movements remained arm in arm and pushed for a Constitutional Amendment granting the right to vote regardless of race and gender.

But as emancipation became certain, it was Southern white women who drew the line at giving black women the right to vote.  Consequently,the two movements struggled behind the scenes with Anthony ultimately opposing ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment because it did not include women.

This strained the friendship between Anthony and Douglass but the controversy surrounding the schism traumatized the women’s movement for nearly 50 years. Its leaders - Anthony the exception - became more conservative as well as risk and conflict adverse.

In the wake of the political gridlock that resurfaced not long after the Civil War, the women's movement was left to soldier on.  It grew in popularity but was stymied internally over the decades by a fear of conflict.

Lacking an aggressive national strategy, the movement feared upsetting elected officials or even putting them on the spot. It settled for limited progress on a state by state level.  Many leaders often fell into activity traps such as speaking engagements and book tours.

That is until Alice Paul came along.

I remember when Paul died in 1977. Described by the small band who followed her lead as quiet and peaceful and almost mouse-like, Paul preferred to work behind the scenes.

She was strategic in the sense that she had no patience for what in my experience is about a third of every group that jumps from one activity trap to another needed to at least feel like they are getting something done but never solving the problem.

I think maybe they even begin to love the problem and the activity more than a solution.

Another third sits mute, while a third like Paul seize on a strategy. She gained her sensibilities as a Quaker and from time working in the women’s movement abroad.

Often more opposed than aided by others within the movement, Paul and a handful of others spearheaded the new, aggressive, national strategy that within eight years resulted in the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

This quiet Quaker wasn’t afraid of conflict or confrontation and she really knew how to rock the boat.

She didn’t get the credit she deserved until many decades later because as often happens, that went to those who quickly penned the last chapter with themselves at the center. But Paul would have been heralded by Anthony who had died just before this last push.

She didn’t stop.  She authored the first version of an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and lived long enough to see it passed by Congress and sent to the states for ratification in 1972, the spring before I graduated from college.

Given just seven years for ratification, it was quickly ratified by 30 states including my native Idaho which later rescinded.  Alice Paul died before knowing the outcome, just as Susan B. Anthony had prior to the Nineteen Amendment.

In the end, the ERA fell three states short of ratification, not just due to opposition by some men but again by those who should have been shoulder to shoulder, conservative women, predominantly in the South.

All of this is to say that groups often create their own inertia. Those that break through won’t get active support from those expected based on knowledge.

Those who are strategic shouldn't expect a parade. Social movements rarely involve the active participation of those you think they should but often fail for that reason.

It takes decades for the real story to come out.

So Many in the Hands of so Few

At the time my daughter was born in 1973, half of all households in America owned firearms.  By 2010, the proportion owning guns had plummeted to less than 1 in 3.  Only 1 in 5 Americans now owns a gun, down 32% since 1985.

So it is all the more alarming that in America there are 90 guns now for every 100 citizens, all concentrated in less than a third of our households and that 20% of Americans buy half of the new guns produced worldwide each year.

Even subtracting those weapons in the possession of law enforcement agencies, that is an incredible concentration of firearms in just 37 million households, a population about the size of Poland.  We may have 90 guns for every 100 residents in the US but they are all in the hands of only 20 of those residents.

Only 1 in every 4 hunters belongs to the NRA, which poured nearly $19 million, that has been disclosed so far, into last month’s election alone, much of it from those who benefit from that trade, all to elect candidates who will work to thwart policies that would better manage guns.

By comparison, three times as many hunters consider themselves conservationists and 66% of fishers and hunters believe Americans have a moral responsibility to confront climate change.

Given that only 37% of sportsmen and sportswomen believe what they call “gun rights” are the most important issue they face, if all of this lobbying is about hunters and not the gun trade, it seems that all of this lobbying should be on behalf of efforts to curb climate change.

I am not sure how many of the nearly 1,300 heavily armed, private militias operating in the US belong to NRA or how many of the 350 million firearms in America are to be found in the possession of members of these groups or among easier-to-define criminals nor do I know if legitimate game hunters understand that the need to better manage guns has nothing to do with hunting.

I’ve read and re-read the Second Amendment to the US Constitution in the few days since 20 first graders and several adults were gunned down in Sandy Hook, even returning to re-read Professor David Vandercoy’s excellent historical overview of the roots of that amendment, which date to the middle of the first century A.D. England.

I just can’t see how huge stockpiles of lethal weapons stored in the hands of a small fraction of the population is anything close to what the framers had in mind.  In fact, it seems just the opposite.

Clearly liberty and the right to bear arms go hand-in-hand and any move to better manage firearms must be in a way that meets the spirit of the Constitution while better protecting the population and this will require a lot more research.

Obviously, NRA members need to step up and be part of the solution to how we management firearms in America but new results by a Republican pollster suggests that won’t be the strategy used by those who have thwarted better management in the past.

The poll, which many have noted has had accuracy issues in the past, suggests more Americans want to address mental health and media violence than better management of firearms.  This is the kind of “false choice” that has worked so well for opponents of firearm management in the past.

Of course, the answer is “both/and,” not “either/or.”

When my passions run too strong, I often turn to statistics and historical context for relief and perspective.  As we are reminded by a blog post by Justin Peters, what happened in Newtown last Friday is not the worst school massacre in US history.

Nearly eighty-six years ago in Bath Township, Michigan, a school board official, angry over taxes, blew up an elementary school, killing 38 children and four other adults and injuring 58.  We do a much better job of managing dynamite now than we do guns.

I have a feeling 12/14 is a date I’ll always remember.

States Rights’ Was Really About The Elephant In The Room!

I’m deep into an excellent biography of Alexander Hamilton, the only founder of this nation who was emphatically and unequivocally opposed to slavery.  Born and raised in the West Indies, he had witnessed the inhumanity first hand.

The war that began 150 years ago last week has intrigued me from my youth and often been reframed as being a struggle over states’ rights and manufacturing vs. agrarian economies.  A Westerner until moving to Durham, North Carolina more than two decades ago, I do understand the cultural differences ( I know, to Southerners, anyplace else is the North.)

But it is clear from reading biographies of the founders of this nation that slavery was the “elephant in the room” and the unfinished business that festered for another seventy-four years after the Constitution was ratified. States’ Rights and debates about agrarian vs. manufacturing economies, while important discussions, were in the end euphemisms.

But just as the Revolutionary War did not complete the task of nation-making, the Civil War did not complete the task of emancipation.

African-Americans were horrifically victimized by slavery but the issues that still hold so many back cannot be resolved by reinforcing a culture too often centered on enabling people to hide behind that history.  Nor will just the threadbare-safety nets suffice as so many on the right condescendingly leave dangling.

Slavery is still permitted and enabled today as much through unlivable wages as through prostitution and other forms.  The indignation about the size of government is misplaced by tea partiers.  Even liberals, both the nation’s founders and those today, are defiant about limited government.

Hamilton was not only the chief architect of the Constitution but he parlayed his close war-time friendship with George Washington to persuade him to stand for election as the nation’s first President.

As the biographer I’m reading notes, Hamilton though, didn’t create America’s market economy as he is often credited, so much as he almost single-handedly “fostered the cultural and legal setting in which it flourished.”

But Hamilton also viewed a strong government as a means to balance the dangerous potential of capitalism devolve into greed and to “promote self-fulfillment, self-improvement, and self-reliance,” something the programs of the left have forgotten and the “I did it my way” right fails to acknowledge.

I’m highly recommending the biography of Alexander Hamilton and I’m glad I read it after reading A. Lincoln and before moving on to the author’s now Pulitzer-prize winning biography of George Washington.

And for detailed information on the role of my adopted hometown in the Civil War, click here.