The Honest Adman

There is not much to say about Benetton. Nice, mid-range, fashionable but not too edgy clothing. But in the 1990s, Benetton had quite a lot to say about itself—and others had quite a lot to say about Benetton. Or, at least, about its advertising.

The campaign in question was a series of “shock ads”: billboards about social justice, under the theme “United Colours of Benetton.” The early ads were innocuous enough: a group of young people of different racial groups, for example, made a powerful statement on behalf of racial harmony while showcasing the clothing. But the ads became progressively more provocative, and when one billboard portrayed a nun and a priest kissing, that was too much for some religious groups, who protested loudly. Other ads showed a black horse and a white horse copulating, three identical human hearts labelled “black,” “white” and “yellow,” human genitals in various colours and close-ups of various parts of the human body tattooed with the words “HIV Positive” in the type-style of Nazi concentration camps.

Benetton fiercely defended the campaign. In its view, the campaign captured consumers’ attention by speaking about issues that mattered. The company made no apologies for raising its own brand awareness while promoting social change.

Of course, whether you agreed depended on where you stood on the issues they were portraying. Benetton’s ads offended many consumers, but others applauded them for their courage, and the company withstood a deluge of criticism from a wide range of outraged groups for several years. The final straw—the death knell, if you will—for the campaign was Benetton’s “On Death Row” campaign featuring photographs of inmates condemned to death in U.S. prisons. Victims’ families protested loudly, and later sued; Sears threatened to remove all Benetton’s products from its stores. After settling the lawsuit and unsuccessfully attempting to negotiate with Sears, Benetton withdrew the campaign and its creative director resigned.

The controversy over the Benetton campaign raised some important questions about our relationship with advertising. Because the causes Benetton promoted were on the liberal/left end of the political spectrum, many of advertising’s traditional critics were silent. But does a company like Benetton have any business talking about anything other than sweaters? Is this an unwelcome invasion of public space, or a greatly needed airing of important issues?

Like everything about advertising, it depends on whom you ask. And that is the point: advertising is controversial because people are diverse. Personally, I was not at all offended by the Benetton campaign; neither were the many juries who presented it with advertising awards all over the world. I see a priest and a nun kissing as a message of universal love, not an offence to Catholic celibacy. But others see it differently, as is their right.

And depending on whom you ask, you will hear that advertising is a scourge that makes us more materialistic, deceives us into buying products we do not need, stereotypes women and minorities, manipulates the most vulnerable in society, such as children and older people, and interferes with press freedom.

If you ask Terry O’Reilly and Mike Tennant, the authors of The Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate Our Culture, you may not get the definitive answer, but you will be entertained. Based on their popular CBC Radio show of the same name, O’Reilly and Tennant lead us on a ramble through the forest of modern advertising and marketing. And a jolly ramble it is: while they do not avoid serious social issues, their preference is for the anecdote, the quirky story that reveals the human blunders, coups, personalities and pressures behind the campaigns.

Ever heard of John E. Kennedy (no, that’s E., not F.) and his three little words? He was the inspiration behind creative advertising; the three words were his definition of advertising as “salesmanship on paper,” while up until then advertising was mostly informational. Wonder how the word “doozy” came into common use? The Model J Duesenberg, an automobile launched in 1928, had such an impact that it became the term for anything exceptional. Or how Reese’s Pieces came to have a starring role in the movie E.T.? The makers of M&M’s turned it down, presumably to their subsequent regret.

Packed with stories like these, the book is a data mine for advertising geeks (not that I know any, but there must be some out there), a conversation piece for those glamorous parties ad folks are always attending, and, for most readers, an insider’s look at how ads are made. It is informative, interesting and educational.

O’Reilly and Tennant do have a perspective on the role of advertising in society. It’s this: advertisers are, for the most part, well-intentioned folks who are just trying to sell us stuff. There is no conspiracy, no secret science, no deliberate manipulation, no intent to offend (well, Benetton must be an exception, then). But advertisers are human and some do stupid things that may be in their own interest, yet hurt the industry as a whole.

Take, for example, spam, that scourge of the electronic world. Because the costs of spamming are so low, it pays to send an email out to millions of people in the hope that a few will read it and one or two will respond (yes, there are people out there who are still waiting for their cheque from that Nigerian princess). Advertisers such as these are breaking O’Reilly and Tennant’s Great Unwritten Contract, the principle that advertisers should give something in return when they demand our attention: some useful information or entertainment, or both.

Now, a cynic would say that the Great Unwritten Contract is worth about as much as the paper it is written on. And certainly, most advertising executives would look at you quizzically if you mentioned it. O’Reilly and Tennant decry advertisers whose intrusive, attention-grabbing tactics annoy consumers without giving them anything back: not just spammers, but those who surround us with advertising on billboards, in cinemas, washrooms, elevators, golf holes and the like. This creates “clutter” (a.k.a. too much advertising, everywhere) and gives honest admen a bad name.

Yes, that was the word “honest” and “admen” in one sentence. For O’Reilly and Tennant, ad folks are just trying to get by in the face of tectonic shifts in technology and culture and rampant suspicion among consumers. The true villains in the piece are media companies—TV networks, billboard owners and so on—who profit from and try to foster clutter.

The result of all this is alienation and cynicism: because advertising is ubiquitous and often annoying, most people do everything they can to avoid it and, when they are forced to pay attention to it, ignore or disbelieve what it says. So it becomes harder to convince people that your product really, really does wash whiter.

I’ll buy the “honest adman” idea (I have met many of them), but I think O’Reilly and Tennant miss the point. It is probably true that people are fed up with seeing advertising everywhere they go, but the main reason for this is that the ads they are fed up with are mostly directed at other people. Car enthusiasts actually do pay attention to car ads, and eagerly scan the ads to find the cool features of new models; but the same ads may be a nuisance to the rest of us. We are just not that interested in cars, and one more car ad, however entertaining, is just one more intrusion.

That is why supermarket flyers, the paper equivalent of spam, are such an annoyance. There actually are a few people out there who eagerly read them, but because supermarkets are unable to pinpoint them (and believe me, they try), they send them to everyone—knowing that most of them go straight into the blue box. Clutter is in the eye of the beholder, and most ads are annoying only because people are different.

The other reason for cynicism is that only very rarely are products better—really better. Yes, shampoo A does smell better than shampoo B, but so what? You barely notice the difference in the 30 seconds it takes to wash your hair in the morning. Car A handles better on corners than car B, but only in tightly controlled conditions on a closed course with a stunt driver—conditions you will never actually encounter. Yet marketers obsess about such differences.

They are not doing it to deceive us (not deliberately, anyway). It is just that marketers live, eat and breathe their products. Issues that are trivial for most of us have a central role in their lives. To establish a technical advantage over the competition on washing performance, dish detergent manufacturers will invest untold money, time and energy in lab tests and, as a result, really begin to feel that this difference is actually important and the world should know about it.

When the Royal Bank of Canada (now RBC) changed its logo some years ago, it reversed the direction the lion was facing, from leftward to right-ward. Why? Because the bank felt that a rightward-facing lion would tell consumers that the bank was facing the future, while the existing leftward-facing lion looked toward the past. Makes sense if you are a 20-something Royal Bank brand manager who doesn’t get out much; but lost, surely, on retired pensioners in rural New Brunswick.

So people get annoyed about advertising because it is meant for other people and because it does not usually tell them very much, but makes a big deal about it. Thus the great line “no other brand performs better”: it just means your brand is the same as everyone else’s. The marketers and writers may actually believe it is better, but can’t actually say so (those pesky regulators!), so they say the next best thing.

The Great Unwritten Contract idea only makes sense if entertaining consumers actually persuades them to buy more. But this is not proven. It makes sense that it should, and yes, I would prefer to live in a world of entertaining advertising rather than be bored into buying, but there are lots of cases where advertising entertains but fails to sell. There are also lots of ways to sell products without entertaining consumers.

You can scare them, for example. Governments regularly use this strategy to persuade people not to smoke. Or, equivalently, you can tell them they are stupid if they do (www.stupid.ca). It is a strategy that is tried and tested by deodorant manufacturers, drug manufacturers, toothpaste manufacturers and many others.

Or you can shame them. Wisk laundry detergent’s infamous “Ring around the Collar” commercial in the 1970s portrayed women fretting over the state of their husbands’ shirt collars and was heavily criticized by feminists for its stereotyping of women. But it took many years before Lever Bros. capitulated and withdrew it—not because the company was the slightest bit concerned about what the feminist movement thought, but because awareness of the campaign was by then so high that there was no point in beating that particular drum any more. You’ll still find “Ring around the Collar” proudly streamed on the Wisk website.

Even boring consumers can work, though it is expensive. If you repeat something often enough, some of it sticks. You can’t be tuned out forever. Or you can shock them, as Benetton did. At the cost of offending a few, you will get the media talking—free publicity and the added benefit of letting people know you care about the state of the world and are not afraid to say so.

The Great Unwritten Contract is just a Great Unwritten Wish. Because there are so many incentives for marketers to break it, it can never be anything more.

Nevertheless, O’Reilly and Tennant have written an informative, entertaining book and they do have a point: people don’t trust advertisers because advertisers have abused their trust too often in the past. I wish I could do more than wring my hands about this. I can’t make it go away, but perhaps I can give a few pointers on how to survive in this cluttered world.

Relax. Just as we are a society of too many useless products, we are a society that obsesses over trivial things. There are 1.4 billion people in the world living on less than $1.25 per day. That is a problem. Annoying advertising is not. Love your brands. Brands are doing their best to please you, thrill you, make you feel sexy, confident and powerful. Some of them actually do perform better, whatever that means, while others just feel nicer or bring you compliments. They can be your trusted, reliable friends.

Stay out of other people’s business. The ad that annoys or offends you probably is not meant for you. Hate those smug “Get a Mac” ads for Apple that make you feel like a boring PC nerd? Too bad. A whole lot of people love them, so they’re not going away any time soon. Suck it up.

Get informed. Understand why advertisers do what they do and say what they say. Learn how to read the ingredients and understand why that Happy Meal has so much fat. Know how to compare products in categories you really care about, and ignore the rest. Know what “we will not be under-sold” really means. And read The Age of Persuasion. It’s a good start.