My ‘ping’ to Patrick Collister’s ‘pong’ on my previous article on ad industry’s ethical challenges.
Disclaimer: Patrick is a dear friend, my former partner in crime at the Google ZOO and the person probably most responsible for my landing a job over there. I thank him for taking the time and trouble to engage in a conversation about industry that both he and I spent so much time in.
As I said in the article, it was a thought experiment. I seems it did strike a chord. So, this is what my ex-Mythocrat character would reply to Patrick. We can do justice to PC’s pushbacks only if we go through them with a headlice comb. Fine, fine grain.
In this conversation, despite its paradigmatical magnitude, both the God and the Devil are in the detail. Everything else is just bullshit (says the ex-Mythocrat).
Patrick pushed back on several fronts.
‘Despising advertising is nothing new. When I came into the business, my family sneered at me.’
It’s an interesting line of defence. One would have thought, even with a modicum of rationality, that if a lot of well-meaning, decent and often well-educated people – very fond of capitalism, too – have real beef with the industry for so long, shouldn’t we finally start paying attention? Shouldn’t we – at least sometimes, collectively, genuinely, en masse – ask ourselves whether there may be some truth in that? And, if yes, what should we do?
Can we seriously feel morally superior and dismissive just because well-meaning people have been criticising us for ages?!
There are usually two responses we give to that long-standing criticism. One is based on infantile psychology, the other on largely flawed economics.
Psychologically, we are deluded. We think of ourselves as rebels, right? Misfits, the crazy ones, the challengers. We are creative, as if creativity doesn’t exist anywhere else. We are officially, professionally (but largely by self-appointment) creative , the rest is just dullville. We live Tom Manahan’s famous quote that ‘advertising is the rock’n’roll of the business world’. We are, in our minds, Herman Hesses’s ‘Steppenwolf’ Harry Haller, being told by someone (ourselves, in this case) that maybe he is right and the world is wrong. Oh, what a feeling!
We are but a teenage gang, marking the territory by pissing at the outside. Rebels without a cause. We are not dull suits, all right (although we employ them as a shield from clients, to be a grown up in the room, to pick up the toys once the creatives finish, and to ensure we make money at all). No, we are not the dull clients. We are just their slaves.
As for the myth about our exclusive ownership of creativity, I would just look at the world of literature and film and compare. They don’t call themselves ‘creatives’, they just are. Not to mention the whole of the Silicon Valley, who have managed to pull the rug under our feet without us noticing (and still struggling to respond to it) by being fiendishly creative – just not the way we describe it!
The evidence against us has never been stronger. There should be a playlist on Spotify called ‘Songs and litanies for ad people in denial’.
If your family sneered at you, I wonder whether the best response is to alt-sneer at them. The world is holding us to account for all the obvious damage we just cannot be absolved of. It’s immature to just diss it. Even worse, ethically blind. Or, even, evil: if we decide to be oblivious about the social cost of our industry, so that we keep making a buck, well, there’s no other way to describe us but the one used by the cherished Dave Trott in the title of his book – ‘Predatory Thinking’.
Our other response to the family challenge sounds like a more credible one, but only on the surface.
‘Today, 20% of the workforce in the UK and 25% in France are employed by the state. Advertising is a cog in the machinery that makes the money that pays for all those services.’ (Patrick)
British advertising industry has created £18.6 billion of Gross Value Added (GVA) effect in 2018 (thecreativeindustries.co.uk)
It is worth exploring this one, as it is one of the biggest guns we can pull out. Or, it looks big, if looked only through the microscope of our own interests.
Yes, ad (and marketing) industry employs a lot of people, who pay taxes and buy stuff and contribute to the society. They also help other businesses create and sell new products, creating – as Patrick says above – money to pay for the public services.
If only all that money really stays in our society, it would be nice; if it were not offshored and hoovered away, with minimum tax impact. But, that is a chat for another time.
We never asked ourselves what is the societal cost of our industry, as opposed to its contributions? After all, even marketing itself is not working with Price of the product as the only parameter anymore, without taking into account various external/social cost implications.
Yes, marketing industry contributes to the economy. So did the coal industry, not long ago. Hugely contributed to it. And, what happened? Its social cost became unbearable and the industry is largely no more.
But, their societal cost was visible in the air; it was easy to fight against it. Ours is in our heads and our hearts. Not so easy to measure. Not even, if you ask Kahneman, easy to understand it, and even more difficult to accept it.
What is the societal cost of an unbridled want, of an unleashed impulse, of the unrestricted desire? Interesting question, eh? Many psychologists and sociologists do know the answer, are trying to measure it, are warning us about it, but we ask them for opinion only when they help us stimulate those wants and desires more. Otherwise…
Or, how much does the arms industry contribute to the economy and whether we can and should defend it purely on those grounds? How much money does the illegal drug industry make and how many people it employs? How much does it contribute to the economy via various laundering operations? After all, it was the Mexican drug cartel’s money that saved one of our biggest banks during the credit crunch. What’s the GVA on that?
There is a reason that market for human organs is not legal, despite an expected brisk trade. American blood plasma trade is largely looked upon as a barbaric abomination by the rest of the world.
We have learned that some industries have a huge societal cost, smoking and oil being the last official pariahs. But, what about palm oil, sugar, plastics and data? Sugar is in credible medical circles now considered a substance of addiction; if it were invented today it would have probably been classified as a restricted drug. So, how about that for the next chocolate bar campaign that makes us chuckle?
We can’t talk about contributions if we don’t talk about damage as well; I give you a trickle on a little tap here and take with a fire hose there. In other words, what is our net effect? There is one metric clients adore, NPS (Net Promoter Score). The propensity of customers to recommend a brand or a company. It has been shown recently that it’s yet another consultancy bollocks , but that’s another story…
Why don’t our agency groups (and clients, first), introduce a similar-sounding, but radically different measure that I call the NCS: Net Civilisational Score? List, honestly, all the benefits we bring to the society on one side and all the damage, all the cost we are complicit in, on another. How many of us, do you think would be in the positive zone? In that sense – to resolve those long-standing silly debates about who’s more important – the whole industry is working below the line.
‘He’s thinking about how Dove moisturiser is razing forests in its hunger for palm oil. And Nestlé exploit the farmers of South America to make more money from their coffee. If you choose to look at it this way, there is hardly a company out there that isn’t in some way either fuc*ed up or is fuc*ing things up.’ (Patrick)
And that’s, again, our defence?! The world is crap, we may as well monetise it well? If we don’t do it, someone else will. Jeez. There is always someone else in the neoliberal world, isn’t it, because it’s a dog against dog in that chilling vision of the world. This is ethical lobotomy in practice.
Do you remember when we spent a week in Google’s Garage in Mountain View running a Creative Academy for a big house of brands? You’d been moderating it, while I was working on a CSR scheme by their chewing gum brand, collecting a penny from each pack sold – remember this! – to help protect kids’ teeth from caries, while at the same time two other teams were working on how to increase impulse buying for two of their high-sugar products! It was one of the biggest cases of ethical schizophrenia I’ve ever witnessed! And the industry is steeped into it.
Speaking of that, a question for you: would you work for a brand that lied about the emissions of their cars and by so doing increased the levels of proven harmful particulates in the atmosphere, damaging the health of millions, and contributing to the Covid mortality rate? Or would you ask them some searching questions first? Or put your skills to work for a brand promoting cycling in our cities, rather than cars?
‘Laz, we live in a world of paradox. The invention of the motor car both liberated and then curtailed travel. A 200mph Ferrari is a slower way to get to work in London than a bicycle. The mobile phone opens up communication. Yet it is isolating huge numbers of young people. And so on.’
This is very true. But we contributed to that paradoxisation big time. The suburbs, and motorways to them, were invented by the car industry, so that they can grow the market. We advertised it and glamourised it. On mobiles, well, just watch the Social Dilemma.
The problem is that our industry loves paradoxes, they are the source of drama and anxiety – the favourite ingredients of planners and creatives, right? ‘Find the drama in your product’; ‘what anxieties is this product the solution to?’; ‘what social proof pressures we can apply here?’ These paradoxes are the air we breathe and the professional bread we eat. As someone once said, ‘the worst thing for a marketer is a satisfied customer’, as they would stop buying ‘new and improved’. The originator of this phrase in marketing was Samuel Colt, pistol maker. The guy surely knew his weapons.
‘Advertising promotes new goods and services. It encourages competition, which forces companies to make better products and price them attractively’
As above, at what societal cost? Is this the case of advertising ‘stimulating people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, to impress people who don’t care’? What about a new, better product that we don’t actually need?
‘The problem is that right now there is more bad advertising than ever before. Ads that talk down to people; are aggressive; shouty; are unhelpful. For instance, some booze companies were urging people to drink more in lockdown, to keep the blues away. In the digital universe, bad advertising is unregulated. No wonder over ¾ of a billion devices have adblockers installed.’
Ahh, the great old days of Bill Bernbach! Well, that’s what you get when you help create a crass world in which satisfying any whim becomes the key mission in life. That’s what happens when the buck becomes the only measure of everything. It kills beauty and intelligence and the sense of balance. I wonder what’s our role in it? And, on adblockers, you are right about the key reasons. Very few people mention bad art direction. I’m just not so sure the offline ads are much better. We just don’t have TV and street ad blockers. Imagine if we did, how many would survive?!
‘Technology continues to turn advertising inside out. And I suspect that this is what offends Laz.’
Genuinely not. I have a problem with advertising as an industrial system for weaponising the humanities to keep us in a permanent state of wanting more stuff. All the evidence around us, which only ethically opiated can disregard, shows that we are complicit in the destruction of the human and animal habitats, our social structures, our focus on key challenges we face – and face precisely because of the advertising amplification of the worst capitalist excesses that are the bedrock of a fundamentalist economic dogma. What Ku Klux Klan is for Christianity and the ISIS is for Islam, neoliberalism is for capitalism.
So, no, I am not a capitalism hater. I am with Churchill on the upsides and downsides of democracy. I am a big fan of the socio-democratic capitalism, or whatever is the 2.0 form of it (and the suggestions are not lacking). But I am not for the Chinese state capitalism, klepto-capitalism of Russia or Serbia, or neo-liberalism. They cannot claim the mantle of THE capitalism.
‘While it is easy to see it in black and white, that leads to generalisations such as advertising is cancerous. Life is a lot more nuanced. Right now, advertising is recruiting retired nurses back into the NHS to help combat Covid. It is advising cancer victims that they can still, must still receive treatment. It is urging Americans to vote.’
Christ on a hoverboard! We have terminally lost perspective on our world!
Advertising would not be needed to recruit nurses back into the NHS, as they would’ve already been there!
Cancer patients should not rely on advertising to tell them they can still receive treatment, it would’ve been available all along!
And Americans… oh, boy! If you think that what is happening in America right now (the vote counting night, as I write this) has nothing to do with hyper-commercialisation, ad-trained thinking and predatory commercial media fed by advertising, then any further debate is pointless. This is what happens to a society, and we are going in that direction, too, where sleeping in front of a store to be the first to get a new model of a smartphone or a heavily discounted toaster is more important than sleeping in front of a polling booth to be the first to vote. We have become much better consumers than citizens, and advertising industry is a contributor to that tragedy.
‘In my book I try to offer solutions to the problem Laz has described. It all winds up with this thing called ‘creativity’. I believe the evolution of our species has been driven by the innate human need to make things better. For ourselves, yes, but for other people too. Every day, there are people developing new ideas for new businesses, new products and even new ad campaigns in the hope that doing one thing better makes everything better.’
The society makes everything better for everyone, not advertising. Therein lies the catch: if our predatory neo-liberal masters with big purses tell us that there is no such thing as a society, where do we stand there? How can we indulge in that ethical schizophrenia any more?
‘Rather than throwing bricks, I want to make a few. Because if you get your wish Laz, and the building comes down, we’re going to need something to put up in its place.’
Finally! I’d also like to make some new bricks Patrick! Even more, as you say, a new edifice. But I don’t want to decorate a dungeon. And that new edifice will follow the new societal contract that must be forthcoming, otherwise we will all suffer immeasurably more than the current trials and tribulations.
Or, here’s another way: let’s start calling the emperor naked. Let’s start cleaning our own house first. Let’s boycott clients and products with the negative NCS. Don’t work on bottled water, sugar, betting and similar, don’t encourage people to behave on impulse. Give our expertise to the guys who are fighting against it. Break the silence, ask inconvenient questions, the way we are doing it here.
Btw, I would like to read your draft chapter, too…
P.S. On the title photo in your piece: it’s Mythocracy at its most typical. A Nazi soldier squad executing a Monopoly capitalist mascot. I find it a bit crass, frankly, as there are real dead people there, over whom the mascot is crudely superimposed. If you don’t have ethical problems with that, read my points above again. If you think I’m being a killjoy, the same, at the very top.
And, yes, it’s a cunning method: just by associating critics with the Nazis the brain goes into the associative overdrive, the framing effect is triggered, the semiotic point is scored… That’s what Mythocracy does; that’s why I just wanted to have picture of a sea turtle. Let the nature speak for itself against our human folly.