Rory Tregaskis – 27th May 2011
If advertising is corporate propaganda let’s at least try and keep it proper.
Today a fellow student said that people don’t give a shit about ethics or whether something is green when they buy.
I don’t think this is true, nor do I imagine Nike, Nestle, Coca-Cola or McDonald’s, who in 2005 were the world’s most boycotted brands. In fact 36% of consumers in the UK said they boycott one or more brand. And I wonder if Philip Green who has been kept in the news by UKUncut (www.ukuncut.org.uk) for accusations of book cooking tax shirkery, or Anita Roddick and daughter Sam whose brands The Body Shop and Coco de Mer are built on a foundation of making the world better would concur?
Recently Tesco’s allegedly (my lawyer mother advised me to put that word in) unethical business practices were a main ingredient of the tinderbox that sparked riots in Bristol.
Clearly people care about the way businesses behave.
Advertising is no different. A survey in the USA ranked advertising as 43rd lowest out of 45 professions in a list based on honesty and integrity.
I believe advertising that is not firmly rooted in truth has three problems:
1. It doesn’t work. A dishonest advert doesn’t empathise with its audience so they won’t relate to it and won’t buy it.
2. It tarnishes the brand. If a brand acquires a dishonest reputation it will be nearly impossible to shake it. Nestle is still the target of an active boycott campaign http://www.babymilkaction.org/pages/boycott.html despite its most infamous bit of naughty behaviour occurring in the 1980s.
3. Most importantly it can hurt people.
Agency Grey’s advert for Ribena claimed it was “your daily does of Vitamin C”. Even if it was true that Ribena contained Vitamin C, if you regularly drank enough to get a healthy amount your teeth would cease to exist and you’d swiftly develop diabetes, but it’s not true. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/mar/27/schoolsworldwide.foodanddrink.
How many parents gave their children Ribena thinking it would do them good? Probably not many, I don’t think the advert could have been successful. People aren’t stupid, so I doubt they bought the claim – but Ribena’s fibbing had the potential to do harm.
Aside from lying in adverts another common practice is to make people feel dissatisfied with what they have, and offer their product as the solution. Insurance adverts often have a slightly different angle; scare people into buying. The pernicious outcomes of unethical advertising are widespread. How many kids are being bullied at school now because their mum couldn’t afford the latest trendy footwear out of some ad? How many teenage girls will vomit their dinner tonight because fashion ads have made them hate their body? How many millions of years will plastic bottles clutter our oceans because advertising told people the water from their tap isn’t good enough? The aim of these adverts is to make people unhappy and that is wrong.
Much of the time the problem is the people who make the adverts just don’t think properly about the impact of their work. Lazy advertising reinforces harmful stereotypes. Advertising is guilty of dramatically under representing non-white people http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/apr/21/tv-ads-ethnic-minorities , stereotyping women and telling people they are ugly. This old ad for Egg by HHCL sums it up nicely http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiSxDX5Y4gA.
The usual excuse given by the advertising industry for being ethically neutral (in other words amoral) is that it is not their place to decide what is right and wrong. In a free market their job is to sell their client’s product as well as possible regardless of the impact. Almost all advertising has at its root an ethical problem; its purpose is to encourage people to consume more and more, is this acceptable? Whether or not that is ok to do advertisers have a duty to do it in a responsible way.
Maybe advertising agencies need to start thinking beyond just the financial implications of their work.
This blog post might read like a career suicide note to you but I hope it doesn’t. Agencies like HHCL who always thought about the impact of their work and Creative Orchestra, the first not for profit ad agency who put creativity before financial targets, TEA (The Ethical Agency) and the odd campaign like Dove’s Campaign For Real Beauty reassure me that advertising can have integrity.
