Truth in Advertising
I’m getting very curious about this advertising question. A couple of commenters on Inquiry have disagreed with my characterization of advertising as having the goal of selling a product as opposed to finding (or disseminating) the truth. I’m becoming increasingly interested in finding out what is controversial about this. Am I just wrong? Have I got my facts wrong? Am I confused? Here I’ve thought all this time, even from earliest childhood, innocently gazing at rice krispies elves and bald giants in T shirts, that the purpose of advertisements was to get people to pay money for the objects the ads were talking or singing or dancing or enacting little playlets about, whether it be spearmint gum or a cleaning product or a sexually exciting automobile. Did I somehow get the wrong end of the stick? Were all those mini-dramas and songs and limpid sylvan landscapes not intended to inspire us to spend money on the cereals and beers and cigarettes in question, but rather to inquire into or convey the truth about said products?
I gotta tell you, I don’t think so. I have to say, I’ve been reliably informed on more than one occasion that the purpose of such entertainments and didactic offerings was and is, indeed, to move the viewer to buy the object of attention. I think I can offer abundant evidence that that is indeed the purpose of advertising. But – but one can always be wrong; I could be wrong; perhaps all my informants were wrong; perhaps it’s all a misunderstanding. Perhaps advertising is in fact a branch of education, and I’ve simply never grasped that. You have your schools, and your universities, and libraries, and museums, and then you have advertising, and they’re all doing the same thing, for the same reasons, with the same motivations, using the same methods and adhering to the same norms. Or perhaps advertising is a branch of research and inquiry; perhaps it’s a giant long-term multi-generational social science experiment that was started in the middle of the 18th century and is nowhere near complete yet. I never realized that.
I don’t think so though. I don’t think advertising is there to educate us, or to do disinterested research. But commenters keep disputing me. For instance: “Actually, being horribly pedantic and all, there is no reason why advertising should not be about truth telling even if it is also about persuasion, it really all depends on the ethical standards of the advertiser, the two things are not mutually exclusive.”
I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think it’s true that “there is no reason why advertising should not be about truth telling.” That is not the same thing as saying that advertising can’t possibly ever tell the truth, although I would argue that advertising can’t really ever be “about” truth telling, because it is in fact “about” something quite different. But the “no reason” thing first. It’s just not true to say there’s no reason to claim that advertising and truth telling are mutually exclusive: there is a reason, a perfectly sensible and widely recognized reason: advertising has an agenda, an axe to grind, a bias, which is different from truth telling and could very well interfere with the motivation to tell the truth. That’s obvious enough isn’t it? Here’s a thought experiment in case it’s not. You’re an advertiser: your new account is this cookie: you taste it: it tastes like shit. Is that what you decide to say in the ad? “Buy new raisin Weezelbronks, they taste like shit!” Put it more objectively: you do marketing research: you give the cookie to lots of people to try: they all say it tastes like shit. Is that what you put in the ad? “Buy new raisin Weezelbronks, everybody says they taste like shit!” Granted, most cookie makers would try to improve the cookie before selling it. But what about cigarettes then? Do cigarette ads say nothing but: “Smoke these, they’re addictive, they’ll make you smell bad, they’re expensive, and they’re highly toxic!”
Now just apply the basic principle to any product and any ad for it and you’ll see what I’m driving at. Advertising is not in fact “about” truth telling, it is “about” selling a product, and the two are not invariably mutually exclusive, but they certainly are in tension. Advertisers have no inherent motivation to tell the complete truth about the product unless they have the rare perfect product with no harmful side effects.
But I’m told I have “a very jaundiced view of corporate ethics” because I make this claim. But I don’t buy it (so to speak). I don’t think that is a jaundiced view, and it’s also not a personal one; it’s simply an observation about the inherent function of advertising. Unless, as I say, I’m completely wrong and confused and misinformed about what that function is. New information sought and welcomed.
As Orwell said, advertising is rattling the stick in the swill bucket.
Dylan has been dead to me since he became a shill for a knicker company.
Also,
Thou shalt not be on friendly terms
With guys in advertising firms,
Nor speak with such
As read the Bible for its prose,
Thanks OB, you sent me back to Auden.
Well, I could only see the one commenter who disagreed with you, and that seemed to be because he works in advertising himself.
You’re clearly correct, OB; advertisers spend their money to maximise sales, not as some kind of public service. Although there seem to be laws against outright lies (unless there is a disclaimer like ‘This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease’), the standards become somewhat hazy when dealing with misleading information (‘no aspirin relieves pain better’ [since they’re all identical]), and of course are totally unable to prevent ommission of relevant facts (‘drink Cola Product A – it tastes nice, but contributes to obesity, is addictive and rots your teeth. Oh, and you may also consider Cola Product B, which many people think tastes even better’).
There were a couple, actually, Ian, someone named John M as well as Mike.
Well I think I’m correct. But there’s a prize of – um – a year’s free free access to B&W, for anyone who can tell me why I’m not.
There are laws against outright lies, and I’m not at all claiming that all advertising is lies; I’m claiming that the goal of advertising is fundamentally different. (Actually before it got “sophisticated” advertising used to be quite factual and informative and truthful: it tended to be a page of small type saying what the product was. But that was a loooong time ago. It took them awhile to realize that large unfalsifiable emotive claims were a much better bet than dull literal ones.) (And even longer to realize that the same could be applied to political campaigns – but they got there; hence the steep downhill slide we’re on…)
Yep. The art of propaganda has come a long way over the last hundred years or so, and is of course by no means limited to advertising consumer products.
We’ve even got to the point where advertisers throw some of their methods back in their audiences face, in effect saying ‘we are manipulating you, and we know that you know that we’re manipulating you, but we also know that even if we acknowledge that we know that you know that we’re manipulating you, you will still allow yourselves to be manipulated by us anyway, and in fact this very acknowledgement is an effective way for us to further manipulate you’.
You see?
Yes I do. I’ve read my Bafflers!
OB : “Advertisers have no inherent motivation to tell the complete truth about the product unless they have the rare perfect product with no harmful side effects.”
And even in such a case, the only reason for telling people about the product is not to increase the sum of human knowledge, but to persuade people to buy it instead of buying something else. Truth is irrelevant in the context.
“a very jaundiced view of corporate ethics”
How is this view jaundiced? As if to say, the boardrooms are packed with people with the purest of motives, and OB is questioning their integrity, shame on her! However ethically upright a corporation’s executives may be, their top priority must always be profit. And nor is that a ‘jaundiced’ view, nor some kind of anti-globalist whine, it’s merely a statement about the (legal) purpose of any corporation’s existence.
I can’t understand why this is even a topic for debate.
As my day job is marketing and in the past I have bought space in newspapers, billboards and television, I think I am as well qualified as any to agree with you whole heartedly, OB. But if we think our product/service is good we have to find a way of telling customers (actual/potential) about it. And if we think that customers will be better off buying our product/service we can feel pretty good about her job. Where marketing/advertising becomes problematic is when the product is flat bad for you (tobacco) or when in areas like gambling (I do occasionally do the Lottery but still feel twitchy about the advertising) or when the advertising is for products/services which exploit people.
Products/services do have to be sold and if marketeers do a bad job, the people whose goods/services are being marketed will be out of a job.
Best wishes
I suggest people read the detective story by Dorothy L. Sayers: “Murder Must Advertise” for the low-down on this subject, which does not appear to have cahnge in its essential since the book was written in about 1930!
Depending on what you are selling to who, marketing/advertising can be fairly straight forward ‘Hey we have product X you will find useful for doing Y’, or it can be about creating demand, typically by a ‘Buy product X and you are way cool/sexy/glamorous’.
My own company indulges in marketing, a significant chunk of which is informing the industry we sell into about our (quite complex) software and why it can help them actually improve the work they do. Part of it also to create a ‘buzz’ about our software to make it sexy to use, an attempt to create demand. But in our case, such a buzz needs to be backed up by the damn stuff actually working.
Shoes/jeans/ice-cream are pretty easy to make work, so the main method of differentiating them is purely puff. Thorstein Veblen had it right 107 years ago.
Oh, one more thing. The most obvious place to catch the advertisers out is when they target children. Kids don’t use advertising to rationally differentiate between a wide variety of useful products, the intention is to create demand so that they bug the hell out of their parents to buy the burger/soft drink/snack food/toy.
Advertising to children, as such, is quite invidious and deliberately cynically so. The argument presented in defense of such advertising is often ‘well parents should monitor what their kids are subject to’. The obvious answer is ‘whoop de doo, you’re still cynical sods and such advertising is still unethical’. A second answer to it is that advertisers quite often attempt to reach children in ways that parents don’t know about, so that monitoring children impossible. A prime example is found here…
http://tinyurl.com/pe2zg
Winning advertising awards for a campaign that deliberately did “not let mum in on the act”. Evil.
Bill Hicks had it right, something about advertisers felating Satan if I remember correctly.
(Spoken as a father of a 15 day old who is tempted lock her in the attic until she is 35 to keep her away from such crap).
Hi Dave, thanks for the kind thoughts.
I realise that I’ll need to indoctrinate the BN-lette in my ‘one true way of thought’ as she grows up. This will involve a healthy dose of cynicism when it comes to people selling things, and spotting when people are trying to sell her things.
I also realise that advertising is part and parcel of the way we live, however I object strongly to the damn stuff being everywhere and to some of the mendacity you can encounter among advertisers who won’t admit the nature of their profession.
A very right wing and generally libertarian acquaintance of mine once said that the best way to deal with it is to tax advertising through the nose and put the money into education.
Oh come on, what can possibly be wrong with putting cartoon characters on the fronts of boxes of sugary ‘cereal’ so that four year olds will refuse to eat anything but bowls of pink sugar for breakfast?
Yes, it so kind of them to draw some nice pictures to entertain children while they rot their teeth. Or have some chap dress up as a clown whilst they gorge themselves on abattoir sweepings.
OB: “Oh come on, what can possibly be wrong with putting cartoon characters on the fronts of boxes of sugary ‘cereal’ so that four year olds will refuse to eat anything but bowls of pink sugar for breakfast?”
I’m a parent and I can tell you categorically that my kids don’t care how many cartoon characters you put on a box: if they don’t like it, they won’t eat it.
I only wish cartoon characters really *were* so influential: I could stick them on the beans and broccoli…
BN: “Oh, one more thing. The most obvious place to catch the advertisers out is when they target children. Kids don’t use advertising to rationally differentiate between a wide variety of useful products, the intention is to create demand so that they bug the hell out of their parents to buy the burger/soft drink/snack food/toy.”
First, I think you underestimate the intelligence of children. (I might also add that I have seen “rational” adults surrender to the latest craze as often as kids.) They can be quite adept at working out the “hidden message”.
That doesn’t mean that they won’t respond: if they see a movie advertised that they want to see, they’ll want to see it. (The same reaction as an adult.)
And they can be amused by ads for products which are irrelevant to them (eg home loans).
No doubt advertising does work, to some extent, but it is certainly the least of my concerns as a parent.
Wow, what a load of cobblers we all produce!
Good news, parents: kids are built to discriminate every bit as well as adults, they just need to be shown how to read the manipulation. The bad news: Adults are as gullible as kids, and resist being shown anything at all.
Corporate ethics? I would agree with the person who raised that, except that they are clearly hypersensitive about SOMETHING.
No way am I buying advertising unless it is to sell products and services. Selling stuff is a good thing, but don’t try to gull us that being a partner in Saatchis makes you Mother Theresa. If it were, you wouldn’t need those PC pro bono jobs to fuel your image of worthiness.
Odd that a B&W reader would use Mother Teresa as a handy shorthand for paragon of virtue. Have you read Hitchens, ChrisPer?
Keith “if they don’t like it, they won’t eat it.”
So you’ve bought it at least once, they’ve made some money out of you. Also the problem with things like junk food, is that they are designed to be liked, all that sugar and fat is in there for a reason. The cartoon character gets their attention, the sugar gets them ‘hooked’ (only loosely speaking).
Yeah, what BN said.
“I only wish cartoon characters really *were* so influential: I could stick them on the beans and broccoli…”
No, that’s not what I’m saying. Advertisers put the cartoon characters on the stuff they know kids will glom onto once they try it; they don’t put it on the kale or the brown rice.
I saw an interesting thing on tv a week or so ago (I don’t remember on what show) about advertising to children, and how effective it is. Small children to choose the item with the cartoon on it in preference to the cartoon-free one every time, even when the cartoon one is visibly less appealing in other ways. (Some very young ones chose a rock for breakfast, in spite of the tester saying with incredulity “A rock? You chose a rock? For breakfast?”) That only works once for kale, but it works for years for sugary pink “cereal”.
OB: “Advertisers put the cartoon characters on the stuff they know kids will glom onto once they try it; they don’t put it on the kale or the brown rice.”
Doesn’t that support what I said? When they can make kids pick brown rice, I’ll start to get really worried.
OB: “Some very young ones chose a rock for breakfast, in spite of the tester saying with incredulity ‘A rock? You chose a rock? For breakfast?'”
The point being? Very young children don’t (or shouldn’t) be choosing what they have for breakfast. It’s hardly surprising that a very young child will pick something attractive over something dull. Very young children can’t make rational, informed choices like that, so putting them in such situations is purely artificial.
There’s some interesting points being made here. A bit off thread but related, but my personal bugbear in the lexicon of marketing is the word ‘demand’. Supermarket executives use the term without blushing when they say things like this (on BBC Radio 4 the other morning)
“There is a demand for strawberries in November”. Head of Operations, T@scos
It follows, unspectacularly that this ‘demand’ must be satisfied or else the competition will clobber said supermarket chain with their own sales of midwinter strawberries.
Hence somewhere warmer like Spain, fields are used for growing for international strawberry exports, rather than more useful local or regional produce, with deleterious effects to the local economy and health.
The strawberries produced are big and red but have much less flavour than indigenous ones.
And there’s no real “demand” in the UK. No queues of people with placards; no MPs mailboxes brimful with complaints about the lack of summer fruits in midwinter. What there are is people who walk past that bit of the aisle in places like Reading saying – ‘Oh look, strawberries. In November ! I will get some, because that makes me feel more sophisticated than I expected when I walked in here.’
We are double-suckered, 1) because the environmental footprint sucks, and 2) because that’s really all it takes to flatter someone into spending money they hadn’t planned to spend. Admit it, we’re all prone to this exploitation, children and adults alike.
The reach of advertising can be limited, and very expensive. Marketing gurus say things like ‘Establishing or pursuing market niches is allowing the person to fully realise their own individuality’.
When businesses people bandy around euphemisms and misappropriated meanings like “demand”, without being challenged, I get more p1ssed off than when do-gooders burble on about “comoonities”.
I feel there is an enormous post hovering somewhere nearby about the ethics of marketing…
Keith,
“Doesn’t that support what I said? When they can make kids pick brown rice, I’ll start to get really worried.”
Sure, it’s essentially the same thing as what you said, but it makes a somewhat different point. Your version would be scarier in mind-control terms, but the existing version is scarier in nutritional terms.
“Very young children can’t make rational, informed choices like that, so putting them in such situations is purely artificial.”
Well obviously it’s artificial, but it’s also a rather dramatic illustration of the fact that very young children pay attention to the packaging rather than the food, and that advertisers and store owners know that and use it. The cartoon cereal is on the bottom shelves, at toddler eye-level.
“‘I will get some, because that makes me feel more sophisticated than I expected when I walked in here.'”
Hoot. Yup.
“that’s really all it takes to flatter someone into spending money they hadn’t planned to spend. Admit it, we’re all prone to this exploitation, children and adults alike.”
Yup. I did admit it, as soon as I hooted with laughter. I don’t actually spend the money, because I don’t have it, but I would if I did, feeling a little glow of sophistication in the process, no doubt.
If that enormous post gets too unwieldy, consider offering it to me as an article. Include some strawberries and I’ll take it even if it’s crap.
Ha ! Mebbe … meantime have a look at this
Principles involving marketing policies: An empirical assessment
“Abstract We examined nine marketing textbooks, published since 1927, to see if they contained useful marketing principles. Four doctoral students found 566 normative statements about pricing, product, place, or promotion in these texts. None of these statements were supported by empirical evidence. Four raters agreed on only twenty of these 566 statements as providing meaningful principles. Twenty marketing professors rated whether the twenty meaningful principles were correct, supported by empirical evidence, useful, or surprising. None met all the criteria. Nine were judged to be nearly as correct when their wording was reversed.”
http://www.springerlink.com/content/p6610m7227633067/
Journal Marketing Letters
Publisher Springer Netherlands
ISSN 0923-0645 (Print) 1573-059X (Online)
J. Scott Armstrong1 and Randall L. Schultz2
(1) The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 19104 Philadelphia, PA
(2) College of Business Administration, University of Iowa, 52242 Iowa City, IA
Frank Key, thanks for noticing me, you maybe haven’t realised that I am kinda the village idiot among the really literate types here.
Yes I read Hitchens on Mother Theresa. Didn’t make a lot of difference to the public’s value of her as a paragon of self-sacrifice, IMHO.
Ha! Remember those women in false beards stoning people for saying ‘Jehovah’ in Life of Brian? ‘Mother Theresa…AAAAAgh!’
Have a great day!
Well, I’ve consistently used the shorthand “all advertising is lying…to some extent” with my son (who’s now 3+1/2), and it seems to have worked so far (hollow laugh when he considers the future…). Do I feel remotely guilty or wrong in any way, am I misrepresenting the industry? Har!
No advertiser is ever going to tell the whole truth, and when you’re working with a toddler, that equates to lying. Of course it isn’t as bad as “Smoke tabs, they’ll make yer dick massive”, but over-finesse with definitions doesn’t cut it with micro-apes.
Sometimes we’ll even sit down with a particularly bad ad (cars are usually good for this – “how come there’s no traffic on that road?”, etc,etc), and go through all the stuff it’s not telling us – see, learning critical thinking can be fun!
:-)
FAO jeffrey Mushens – my last post wasn’t a side-swipe by the way. I’m no expert and would be interested to hear your point of view…
I doubt that this will be broadcast in the US;
http://www.funny-videos.co.uk/videogoodthingscometothosewhowait.html