| Chapter 2: | Marketplace Advocacy in Action |
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American Plastics Council:
“Plastics Make it PossibleSM”
For more than 2 decades, the American Plastics Council’s “Plastics Make it Possible?sm” campaign has highlighted the varied and extensive use of plastics and promoted “the many ways plastics inspire innovations that improve our lives, solve big problems and help us design a safer, more promising future” (American Chemistry Council, 2010b). The campaign epitomizes marketplace advocacy in that it advocates the benefits of the product (plastics) to society—its use in everything from socks to home insulation, car airbags, and bicycle helmets—in response to growing concerns associated with the product.
The rise in environmental activism in the early 1990s led to considerable apprehension about plastics. Harris Interactive polling in 1992 found that 78% of the U.S. public felt that plastic was harmful to the environment, and 37% of consumers avoided buying products packaged in plastics (Harris Interactive, 2006). Consumers were boycotting plastic products; meanwhile, corporate customers were avoiding plastic packaging due to adverse public sentiment. In response to falling market share and calls for legislation to ban plastics, the American Plastics Council launched the well-known advertising campaign “Plastics Make it Possible?,” which used emotional appeals to highlight the benefits of plastics—particularly in regard to health, safety, and medicine—in print, radio, and television ads.
In one 30-second television ad, for example, a distracted mother stands just outside the front door signing for a package as her young toddler sneaks back inside the house. As the toddler moves through the house, the camera focuses on a socket cover for an electrical outlet, a baby gate that prevented the young child’s entry into another room, safety packaging on a medicine bottle, and a plastic soda bottle that dropped on the floor but did not break. The voiceover explains: “In so many ways, in so many places, it keeps a million disasters a day from happening. It’s like having a life insurance policy you never knew you had. It’s plastics. Plastics make it possible.” Other prominent television ads in the