The Trouble with Advertising, Part 1

James R. Rosenfield

October/November 2002

LOTS AND LOTS OF FAT PEOPLE!

Not only fat people, but fat kids! Little miniature whale boys of seven, tiny girls lurching like walrus babies into the water.

That's not how things used to be. It's certainly not the way things looked when I first moved to Southern California in the mid-1970s. But since then, we've gotten heavier and heavier. Currently, 60% of Americans over the age 20 are overweight, and 25% are obese, according to the U.S. National Institute of Diabetes & Digestive & Kidney Disease.

And childhood obesity, with dire lifelong health ramifications, is now considered an epidemic.

The U.S. Surgeon General reports that in 1999, 13% of children aged 6 to 11 were overweight, and 14% of adolescents. "This prevalence has nearly tripled for adolescents in the past 2 decades." The Detroit Free Press (April 8, 2002) reports that in the state of Michigan, smack in the middle of the pork and polyester belt, "a quarter of the children…almost twice the national average…are over their ideal body weight…11 percent…are obese, defined as 20 percent or more than their ideal body weight.

"…According to the Fitness Council, 39 percent of Michigan's children have elevated cholesterol, compared to a national average of 25 percent. About 7.5 percent of Michigan's kids have high blood pressure.

"Type 2 diabetes, previously considered an adult-onset disease, has increased drastically among youth nationwide…"

The implications of this are staggering. Overweight kids become overweight adults. Overweight adults get sick, to the tune of $99.2 billion in healthcare costs in 1995. And it's gotten worse since then.

No one chooses to be overweight, kids especially, who suffer particularly cruel social discrimination. Why, then, is this happening?

"The average American child sees 10,000 food ads on television each year," says Kelly D. Brownell, director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders (New York Times, August 13, 2002).

No one can resist this level of propaganda, let alone a child. And that's the trouble with advertising.

By inducing compulsive consumption, advertising indeed fuels the consumer society. But when the U.S. consumer society pays $99.2 billion per year in obesity-related healthcare costs, you wonder where the fueling ends and the fooling begins.

Businesses spend an estimated $13 billion a year marketing junk food, according to Marion Nestle, chair of the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University. This is a return-on-investment straight from the 9th circle of Hell. And that's the trouble with advertising.

TRUE BELIEVERS

I belabor these morbidity figures because people who help create such a situation are in gross violation of any semblance of ethical behavior. Yet this is not anything that most ad agencies would even think they had to defend. (The knaves and charlatans involved in marketing cigarettes are of course at this late date beyond the pale completely.)

Any good agency guy or gal would say, blandly and sincerely, we're just giving people what they want. And we're informing them about their choices.

Well, this is the most utter nonsense of all, and truly destructive because it 1) seems to make sense and 2) is usually stated with complete sincerity.

I drove from Oklahoma City to Norman OK last month, and in that stretch there was nothing available except fast food. The choices are between McDonald's and Burger King, not McDonald's and something non-toxic. That's not a choice at all, and that's typical of the pseudo choices that abound in our post-industrial society: You can drive a huge SUV or a humongous SUV, but both of them will pollute the air.

Advertising creates the illusion of choice. That's part of its power.

Certainly the power of advertising doesn't lie in its ability to build brands, which is questionable, or to increase sales, which is even more questionable. The power lies in its ability to create needs based on a constant, unremitting stream of well-crafted propaganda. By making you sick and then selling you the cure (to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan), advertising persuades people to do things that are personally and socially harmful, like eating junk food, smoking, drinking to excess, or driving environmentally wasteful vehicles.

The power behind the power lies in the culture of advertising itself. Advertising people, particularly agency folks, feel, not incorrectly, that they are essential to the consumer society. But they are also interchangeable. One reason why clients change agencies so often is that it doesn't really matter what agency you use, as long as they're able to throw the stream of propaganda out there. McDonalds and Burger King profit from each other's advertising, as the category continuously gets bigger. Everyone benefits, except the poor consumer, who trips along merrily scarfing garbageburgers until his arteries freeze up.

Exceptions to the non-brand building, interchangeable nature of advertising and agencies are so rare that when it happens, it's big news. The most talked about American campaign in years is from an insurance company called AFLAC. The TV spots feature a duck squawking "AFLAC, AFLAC!" Brand recognition has gone up from 18% to over 70%, and you know why? THE ADS ARE STRONGLY BRANDED!

But these ads were done by a small, unknown agency that was willing to talk about the client, via a brand message, rather than themselves, via "creativity."

AGENCIES, IN THE MOST PATHETIC WAY, DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY'RE DOING

I should mention that, in addressing advertising, I'm talking primarily about TV commercials done for large companies by large agencies. Every other medium, from print to matchbook covers, is more effective in generating sales, and usually more effective in creating brand awareness. But again, TV ads by the big boys are what create and sustain the culture of consumption.

The pathetic thing about agencies (and advertisers) is not that they're cynical - that would be infuriating, rather than pathetic. It's that they actually believe that they're building brands and producing sales.

Supporting these suppositions is a body of pseudo-scientific research, based on a series of assumptions that have never been validated: that likeability has an impact on market share, that awareness leads to sales, and that attitudes create behavior.

The "research" that's constantly done to validate these assumptions is almost always either anecdotal, which means nothing, or statistically flawed, which means less than nothing. In addition, the "research" is either conducted by interested parties (the advertising department, the ad agency, the competition) or by academics who wouldn't recognize real-life if it hit them in their tenures.

These assumptions, though, have the signal virtue of being believable. Common sense sort of suggests that likeability, awareness, and attitudes are important. But common sense and human behavior are two very different things, as any sentient being over the age of 21 has long since discovered.

WHY DO AGENCIES EXIST?

Good question! Why don't companies just do it themselves? Think of all the money and grief that would save. But again, as I just said in a different context, common sense and behavior are two different things.

Agencies exist because:

1) They're excellent at perpetuating their own existence, especially important now that the world of advertising agencies has boiled down to several global monoliths. Agency culture is exquisitely adept at both sucking up and back- stabbing, both of which go very far towards self-preservation in the business world.

2) They intimidate clients through the cult of creativity. David Ogilvy said long ago that it's not creative unless it sells. The non-branded, amorphous advertising that populates the airwaves in the early 21st Century doesn't sell anything except consumerism - which is, admittedly, by far the most important thing to sell.

The fact is, "creativity," whatever that is, has almost nothing to do with effective advertising (by which I mean ads that actually build brands and move products). If most "creative" ads were replaced by a talking head flagging the audience ("SUV buyers") and expressing the benefits, sales would skyrocket. But no agency would be willing to do this, and no client has the guts to suggest that the emperor has no clothes.

3) They give slightly non-conforming people a place to hang out each day. The consumer economy can't accommodate too many artists, so better to turn them into Art Directors who can delude themselves into thinking they're doing something "creative." Guys can wear ponytails and earrings, everyone can wear blue jeans (except, of course, the dreaded "suits"), and folks can think that they're lending artistry to deodorant commercials.

ARE THERE ANY GOOD LARGE AGENCIES?

Well, no. The late Jay Chiat used to wonder how large his agency could get before it got bad. He found out. But a large agency can't be good because its objectives have nothing to do with advertising that builds brands and sells products. (See above.)

"Surely you can nuance this a bit," perhaps you are thinking. Well, a bit. Elephantine enterprises like Omnicom, WPP, et al., consist of networks of large agencies (Ogilvy, Y&R, etc.), which in turn consist of numerous local and regional agencies that have been acquired through the years. This makes for quite a mixed bag in terms of quality. The Chicago office might be terrible, but the Sydney office might be superb, depending on the agency that was originally acquired, and the extent to which the parent company has succeeded or failed at ruining it.

There are always surprises. I was working with the Chicago office of one of the biggies a few years back, and the level of professionalism was somewhere between preteen and prehistoric. On the other hand, I dealt with the Caracas office of another biggie and found to my surprise a well-disciplined operation, run by a very buttoned-down fellow who knew precisely what he was doing.

For the most part, though, the Chicago experience is the norm. This reality runs counter to the argument given by the big guys that a level of consistent quality can be guaranteed throughout the network. This is absolute hogwash, as I've found repeatedly in my travels through the years. But hogwash, after all, is the business agencies are in.

And that's the trouble with advertising..

(To be continued next month)

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© 2008, James R. Rosenfield. All rights reserved. Use by permission only.