The Trouble with Advertising, Part 2

THE TROUBLE WITH ADVERTISING, Part 2

James R. Rosenfield

December, 2002

Last month I focused on the sinister power of advertising, plus trashed agencies and clients for their unholy combination of cluelessness and disingenuousness. I also took a whack or two at the culture of ad agencies, a blend of skullduggery, backstabbing, and sucking up that would not be out of place in Renaissance Florence.

Please note, as I pointed out in the previous article, that when I discuss the trouble with advertising, I am referring mostly to primetime television advertising, created by multinational agencies for multinational companies. There are other culprits, to be sure, but not on such a grand scale. It's the lockstep march of big agencies serving big clients that motivates people to make poor decisions, for both themselves and society.

Agencies are now even sharing in some of the turpitude roiling the American business scene. "Interpublic's $68 mil mistake" headlines the August 19, 2002 issue of Advertising Age. "Interpublic Group of Cos. last week restated earnings for the past five years to reflect $68.5 million in improperly expensed charges at McCann-Erickson Europe." If memory serves me, McCann's corporate motto is "Truth well told."

On the same page we learn that "Ogilvy instituted a wide-ranging ethics policy…In January, Ogilvy reached a settlement agreement with the Justice Department, which included a $1.8 million payment, after it was accused of overbilling the government on the original contract…the WPP Group agency had to take many other steps to avoid being barred from future government business. These included a new ethics code…"

Whoops! Trying to dupe the feds re the White House drug contract doesn't sound super smart. Poor David Ogilvy has to be rocketing in his grave!

This month I should rightly offer some recommendations and solutions. And I will. But none of these can apply to the global brands and mega-agencies which are the main perpetrators of advertising in its most virulent form. They will persist in their usual activities. And they will remain successful, consciously or not, in their real, albeit, sub rosa mission: Not to build brands, not to promote sales, but to build categories and sustain, strengthen, and increase the stranglehold of consumerism over the 1st World, and, increasingly, in the 3rd World.

So if you're a WPP, IPG, GM , IBM or some other global alphabet soup of an enterprise, you will continue in your actions even if you agree with some of what I say (which is unlikely). And probably you should continue doing what you're doing, since it's in your definite interest to build categories and maintain the consumer society. It behooves car manufacturers to build the SUV category, and then benefit mutually from the subsequent consumer desire. Similarly, McDonald's and Burger King would be perfectly happy to share the junk food market worldwide. Post-industrial capitalism stifles competition. One of the jobs of advertising, in fact, is to create the illusion of competition.

Big corporations in the early 21st Century form interlocking ogilopolies, reflected in their giant agencies. Huge agency networks enable a single company to do work for any number of competitors. The networks will explain, of course, that there's a "Chinese wall" between their individual agencies. A few years of business experience tells you to head for the hills when you hear the phrase "Chinese wall." And that's the trouble with advertising.

THREE QUESTIONS

The following three questions make no sense for enormous multinationals, who cannot live without television, cannot respect the consumer, and must be, at best, ethically neutral, if not downright unethical.

But if you're anyone else, here are some things to contemplate, things that could even give you some competitive edges against the giants out there…

1) CAN YOU LIVE WITHOUT TELEVISION?

If you are not a large company, don't even try to use television the way the big guys do.

TV is fantasy land. ("Reality TV," one of America's most decadent current products, is a kind of pornography of the soul, the sheerest and creepiest of fantasy.) Television engages the non-linear, pattern-recognizing right-hemisphere of the brain better than any other medium. For TV advertising to build its dream world of gratified desires, all intellectual and decisional faculties have to be switched off. That's how television's awesome power works: People suspend disbelief, and for the duration get hypnotized into agreeing that beer makes you sexy, not flatulent. As soon as you add anything that requires an iota of thought the spell gets broken.

The effectiveness of this kind of advertising can be seen in the ad campaigns typically run by large banks. Even though the poor consumer knows that she has had 1,000 bad experiences in the branch, she will stride optimistically into her local Citibank or Westpac office, only to be disappointed yet again. Effective advertising can indeed be the perpetual triumph of hope over experience.

You can use television for sales promotion, as long as you don't advertise during prime time. Fringe times - early morning, late at night - tend to get people less entranced, which means they might attend to a directive, decisional message. That's why direct response TV has historically thrived during those periods. But other media, particularly print and radio, can often deliver a sales promotion message in a more targeted and far less costly fashion. (One problem is that agencies hate print and radio: No glamour.)

The ascendancy of television coincides with the post World War II growth of the consumer culture. TV technology had actually been around for some years before the war, but like all technologies had to be perfected, and the price had to come down. Above and beyond the economics of technological development, though, there's the fact that culture and media create each other. Every culture produces the media most fitting for it. For the ancient Egyptians, it was monumental architecture. For the Venetians, it was painting. For us, it's the tube.

The alert reader will ask if the Internet is now creating a new culture, and how might this affect television?

Certainly a new culture is forming, and its impact on society will be considerable, although predicting what form it will take is futile. Predictions about new technologies just don't come true, with very, very few exceptions. But there's no reason to suspect that the Internet will affect mainstream TV advertising in the slightest, at least in the short term.

The Internet is as archetypally left-hemisphere as TV is right-hemisphere. The Internet is all about searching, information, decisions. Ad agencies (them again!) tried desperately a few years back to turn the Internet into television, a medium they understand perfectly even if they don't quite understand why it's so powerful. That's where the archaic term "Surfing the Net" comes from, analogized from channel surfing in TV viewing. But none of this has worked out at all, because you're dealing with different parts of the brain.

That's why I remain skeptical about "convergence," the idea of all communications and entertainment media contained in one box. That's another idea that gets ad agencies slavering. But agencies remain shockingly ignorant of media theory, even if they have a media theoretician on staff.

2) CAN YOU RESPECT THE CONSUMER?

David Ogilvy (forgive his chauvinist language, everyone was a doofus back then) once said, "The consumer is not an idiot, she's your wife."

Advertisers want to manipulate, coerce, shame, badger, and tempt people into participating in the consumer society. To quote McLuhan once more, they want to make you sick, then sell you the cure. You're not attractive to the opposite sex; you're too fat, too thin, too short, too tall; you don't have the kind of fun other people have; you're a loner, because everyone else is at a party all the time; etc., etc., ad nauseam.

Those who despise the consumer society always tell people just to turn it off: The TV, the stream of information. But that's impossible. Advertising messages are embedded in too many daily stimuli ever to be turned off. Besides, it's axiomatic that at a certain point of intensity things lose their turn-off switches. As Thomas Edison once commented, it's much easier to get into something than to get out of it.

So advertisers can rest comfortably with the knowledge that there's no turn-off available. But what if an advertiser began communicating authentically? What if prices, distribution points, and product information were supplied, not just in sales promotion messages, but in all advertising messages? What if people were addressed as human beings, rather than automatons whose minds are blank slates, to be inscribed by the most manipulative advertiser?

The annals of advertising and brand building, in reality, are filled with success stories of this sort, from Bill Bernbach's fabled Volkswagen campaigns to Avis' "We're Number 2. We try harder." Are we now past the point of even being able to advertise in this way?

Probably. But it would be nice to take a shot at it.

3) CAN YOU ABANDON ETHICAL NEUTRALITY?

Fat chance!

But perhaps in a time of greater social responsibility (if that time ever comes), companies and their agencies will only promote products that, at the very least, do no harm.

That said, I will admit this is a slippery slope. What's harmful to you might be harmless to me. Toxicity depends on dosage and vulnerability. But clearly products like cigarettes, fast food, and Sports Utility Vehicles are bad for society in general. Any fair assessment of economic gain versus economic loss in those categories ends up in the net loss column: The health costs of smoking and obesity, the environmental costs of gas guzzlers. Society would be better off if cigarettes, fast food, and SUV's disappeared. The scores of billions of dollars tied up in manufacturing and promoting those categories don't even begin to compensate for the cost - both human and monetary - of the pain and suffering inflicted.

How should the individual ad agency or client behave? Well, if you're an Art Director working on a fast food account, and you have three kids to feed, you might not want to make a move. And who's to blame you?

This points out something about the consumer society that bears repetition: It creates the illusion of choice while eliminating choice. There's no choice on American highways but to eat fast food. There's no choice in the big-time, multi-national advertising industry but to get involved in pushing products that create damage.

That's the trouble with advertising.