An action highlighting digital advertising screens will take place in Broad Street, Reading, on Friday November 29 at 11:00 am, in a protest against the annual consumerism festival Black Friday.

More global consumer spending means more products being manufactured and shipped worldwide, adding to carbon emissions and fuelling global heating.

Many of these products also end up in landfills, are incinerated or recycled poorly.

Every year an estimated two million tonnes of waste electrical and electronic equipment items are discarded by householders and companies in the UK.

When e-waste is burnt for valuable metals, toxic fumes are released mainly from their plastic parts

What began as a single day of special offers can now last for weeks in the lead-up to Black Friday and last until ‘Cyber Monday’.

The competitive nature of Black Friday can lead people to buy items they might not have planned to purchase.

Martin Lewis warns that ‘Black Friday can be addictive’ and ‘it’s not a saving if you weren’t going to buy it anyway’.

The idea that some deals aren’t always as good as they seem is backed up by research from Which?

Their investigation found that 98 percent of the Black Friday discounts advertised in 2023 were the same price or cheaper at other times of the year.

Black Friday encourages excessive consumption. A new Netflix documentary, called ‘Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy’, lays bare the way corporations continually release a new stream of products, deliberately encouraging consumers to keep buying more; for example, millions of phones are discarded every day.

So many products are produced with planned obsolescence, built to break and need replacing.

Every industry should plan for ‘end-of-life’ of their product instead of a business model which relies on replacements, adding to the ever-growing problem of plastic and toxic waste.

Advertising plays a critical role in driving demand for consumer goods. DOOH (Digital Out Of Home) media is found on billboards, LED screens, and digital signage placed in high-traffic public spaces people already frequent outside of their homes.

In the UK, outdoor advertising is a billion-pound business dominated by large corporations.

A double-sided  “six-sheet” digital screen as seen on many high streets today consumes as much electricity as three average UK homes, whilst larger digital billboards can consume as much as 11 times.

Outsmart, the trade body for the Out of Home (OOH) advertising industry, reports spending in 2024 has reached £1bn, an increase of 12% compared to the same period last year.

The actions in Reading come as part of an internationally coordinated series of creative responses to Black Friday known as the ZAP Games. ZAP (Zone Anti-Publicité, or “anti-advertising zone” in French) began in Brussels in 2020 and has since spread to become an annual event ahead of Black Friday.

Activists target outdoor advertising such as bus stops, billboards and digital screens, repurposing them for artistic purposes. ZAP Games is coordinated by Subvertisers International.