The problem with advertising

Is that the people who do it are liars. That's OK, though, isn't it? I mean, actors are liars as well. Aren't they? But no, that doesn't work, because an actor lets his assumed persona fall away at the end of the play so that people can leave the theatre reassured that what they saw was an illusion, an exercise in make-believe. The advertiser never does this, he’s always performing. A very quick example might be Saatchi & Saatchi. In the eighties, they represented the Tories. Now they run election campaigns for Labour. Therefore, even In an arena purportedly concerned with telling the truth, and with the manifest intention of affecting people’s fundamental beliefs, the advertisers are, and must be, changelings, saying whatever the highest bidder asks them to say, being blue one day and red the next.

This process closely resembles creativity, in that it entails an imaginative projection into the mind of another person or corporate body in order to understand and articulate the concerns of that person or entity. And for a while you can kid yourself that you are actually being creative and, moreover, getting paid for it: the best of all possible worlds. But that feeling soon falters as you realise that you’re only ever getting to play with the tiniest gnat’s fart of creativity due to the fact that advertising insists on limiting the scope and tools with which you can express yourself. Your ads must confine themselves to  the unique health giving property or the personal growth or the amount of sex you'll get from consuming this or that product in a world without death, blemishes or clouds. Which is to say, you’re working from a small box of preformed and increasingly threadbare sentiments, stock phrases and metaphors.

So it's not and can never be genuine creativity, because genuine creativity uses the full palette of the imagination. It has the freedom to say the horrific and the hilarious, not just the asinine and the good. It is unpredictable and subversive. A language without this freedom, a language without recourse to extremes, with no-go areas and taboos, is a crippled and diminished language. In the old days, people knew this. Classical rhetoricians taught the value of establishing the ‘confutatio’ (counter-argument) after the main argument so they could establish and demolish those arguments in the ‘refutatio’. Which is to say, they knew that you cannot effectively persuade someone without revealing the whole picture, including the bits that don’t agree with what you’re saying. Advertising does not trust its bovine public with this level of intellectual autonomy and discernment. That’s why you so often have to scratch your head and try a bit of deductive reasoning to work out from an advert what the particular product is meant NOT to be via the infinitely diluted platitudes of what it is.

It would be wonderful if this situation could be changed, if you could have an ad agency with scruples. But to do that you’d either need to change the discourse itself, which would be an uphill struggle because consumers have become accustomed to being spoon-fed nothing that will disagree with them; or you’d need to have an agency which could be unfailingly positive because it only represented clients which embody the ethical and humanitarian concerns of the more enlightened portions of society. I can’t see the latter ever happening because, as wondrous as it would be, I don’t think there are enough of those businesses around, and turning enough profit, to keep an agency afloat. And even if there were, the bank manager would very likely reject your investment proposal as an unsound risk, because it’s not based on a recognised business model.

The reality is that the ad agency reflects the society it is in, and multiplies those reflections through endless repetition until the average consumer doesn’t know what the hell is real anymore. And we live in a capitalist society full of businesses that habitually cheat and double-deal, so this farrago of deception is what advertising reflects back to us; it’s what we eat with our cornflakes and put on with our deodorant: a distorted and untrue simulachrum of what life is like, and what our priorities should be as members of a society.

To put it another way, it is universally the case that the nastiest, most unethical companies spend the most on advertising because they need the most image management. Their success derives directly from their lack of scruples, but they don’t want us to know that. It is not a coincidence that the most lucrative clients at my last agency came from the defence sector, petrochemicals, banks, major pharmaceuticals and controversial FMCGs. Most of whom aren’t the kind of people you’d like to meet down a darkened alleyway. They’re more the sort of people you’d like to meet in one of the lower circles of hell having their private parts gnawed on by Satan whilst being shat on by demons.

To conclude, then, let’s have a couple of quotes from Plato and The Princess Bride, because they knew what was going on.

'The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.'

‘Life is pain, highness. Any one who tells you different is selling something.’

Comments

[Marley]

You shouldn't chastise yourself though Matt; your craft is arguably the more difficult skill (I know, no points for saying that).

Creativity allows for freedom and free reign of ideas, whereas within advertising, you have constraints placed all around you and must discipline yourself to deliver within those restrictions, often with the thinnest of instruction and within the narrowest of windows.

You have to surprise, cajole, seduce and yes, sell, to an increasingly ciritical, savvy and misanthropic audience, whilst ensuring your 'tone of voice' matches the 'brand values'. Despite this advertisers, sometimes at least, deliver real craft, if not exactly high art.

The upshot? Continue to produce beautiful languorous copy when you can and short and snappy when directed, but only in order to promote the brands you feel comfortable with and in the meantime, well, 'keep working on that novel you been workin on...'

[Matt Phipps]

Hey Neil. Thanks for the comment - sorry it's taken me so long to respond; I didn't see it for ages as this site doesn't send email notifications of new comments and I'm still a little unfamiliar with it.

As for your points, I don't disagree with you at all. I accept the pragmatic arguments for continuing to make a living in this industry and I am reconciled to the compromises this entails, as well as the satisfaction that comes with doing a job well (and if only that happened more often). However, my criticisms of the language advertising employs, that sunny and delightful, deathless language, were primarily the means of accessing a broader debate about the ethics, or lack thereof, in the industry as a whole.

I am not opposed to selling or profit. I am not that naive (at least, not anymore - I'm sure I was once). What I am opposed to is people profiting from the act of misleading people into making a decision through the distortion or elision of the facts, which is something advertising does with frightening regularity. Now, I know ethics are an easily mocked concept in the business world, but I don't see why this should be the case any more than I agree with our politicians insisting that we should have a constantly expanding economy when this is clearly at odds with a sustainable future. Why can't we all make enough money to live and prosper and have personal happiness without undermining the happiness, prosperity or freedom of others?