It’s Time to Talk Tough With Litter Louts
16/11/2010

‘Keep Britain Tidy’ is one of those public service slogans you once saw everywhere, and is long overdue for revival. Not that it’s enough to appeal to people’s sense of civic responsibility anymore.

CCTV and the threat of a hefty fine might prove effective, or you could, like
the town council in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, try shaming would-be offenders by posting signs admonishing them: “Don’t be a Tosser”. You can see how this might address the mentality of those who think nothing of emptying car ashtrays in public car parks, even if the language is more suited to a public lavatory than a public notice.

Residents of Trowbridge were in the news this week for opposing the affixing of the said sign alongside a Remembrance Cross, about which they were understandably upset. But it still begs the question of how to mount an effective anti-litter campaign.

It seems to me a bit shameful that it has been left to an American – Bill Bryson, author of Notes From a Small Island – to head CPRE’s Stop the Drop movement in Britain, as if the rest of us couldn’t be bothered about shuffling along pavements clogged with crushed Coke cans and last night’s fish and chip wrappers.

One tough talking yet verbally inoffensive anti-litter campaign that Bill might draw inspiration from is one launched in Texas, USA, some years ago to clean up its highways, on which drivers’ habitually flung litter from their cars. The authorities tried all the usual appeals to good citizenship, at considerable cost, but without noticeable effect.

Eventually they recruited the Dallas Cowboys football team for a TV ad in which they showed players picking up used beer cans, crushing them in their bare hands and muttering menacingly “Don’t mess with Texas!” They backed this up with a press and poster campaign, stickers and promotional mugs.

The slogan obviously struck a chord with Texan’s native pugnacity, because the campaign was a runaway success, and in the first year it reduced litter in the state by a phenomenal 29 percent, and over six years resulted in a 72% reduction in visible roadside litter. (See Nudge by Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein, Yale University Press for a fuller account of the campaign).

The moral is that effective advertising is not directly related to your media spend, nor does it depend on near the knuckle innuendo to be memorable. If you want further proof of that, you could do worse than employ Simpson Creative to handle your publicity. I’ll even offer a free taster to Trowbridge town council. How about “Don’t trash Trowbridge!”