When I invited Paul Kitcatt to join me on our ProBonoMundi adventure, we knew pretty well what some immediate pushbacks from the industry will be. After all, both of us had long and distinguished careers in the agency business.
We have addressed some of them in our blog’s Manifesto, in a TEDx talk in Sarajevo and in my epistolary ping-pong with my friend, ex-Google colleague and industry stalwart Patrick Collister.
It was the ‘pre-bunking’ sort of manoeuvre – discouraging and maybe even ‘defanging’ attacks before they happen. In his inimitable way, Paul articulated our responses to the most anticipated ones at the end of the PBM Manifesto.
After I recently published the initial draft of my ‘forensic ethics’ NCS framework, I have received some interesting responses and offers for help – which I have wholeheartedly accepted, of course – but also some pushbacks; again, mostly expected ones.
One of them, however, really struck a chord with me as it was sharply articulated and interesting. I want to share it here and unpack it. It’s intriguing in a way that it doesn’t deal with the ‘markprom’ industry itself and its alleged benefits for the society but is pressing more philosophical and personal buttons.
The first thesis from it is the (not new) accusation that any enemy of the promotional industries, especially advertising, is simply a dour killjoy. Or, in the words of the critic, I am a ‘Puritan’. Mary Whitehouse’s name wasn’t mentioned, but her spirit (maybe even a ghost) could be felt lingering in the background…
The second one was that I am a nihilist. As far as I understood it, it implied that either I want to destroy the marketing industries and replace them with…well, nothing, or that I do not believe there is a solution at all.
Here is the objection in full:
‘I guess my response to your ideas is that you are a new Puritan.
And, while the title has become pejorative, the Puritans were high-minded and sincere. One of the names they were given in the early 17th century was ’The Precisionists’ which resonated with your quest for measurement.
What they were reacting against was a Catholic church that was grotesque in its wealth and, now that people could read the Bible for themselves, at odds with the fundamentals of Christianity.
So how do you believe in a God who has been captured and is leading mankind to hell?
You replace one set of beliefs with another.
They believed strongly that God was to be found in the heart, but they could only demonstrate the power of this in declaring war on the advertising of the time, the paintings, statues and cathedrals.
And that’s what I think you are doing.
It is too horrible to believe that the world really is about to destroy itself. You can talk about it, think it, but to believe that we are doomed, as the Puritans did unless they took drastic action, that is nihilism. And for Laz the humanist, it is unacceptable.
So, in believing there must still be salvation for us all, that belief manifests itself through opposition to the advertising of our time.’
Beautifully articulated, but also beautifully wrong.
Like all worthy criticisms, precision is the key to address them. I will go through it line by line, with my comments.
A crank?
‘I guess my response to your ideas is that you are a new Puritan.
And, while the title has become pejorative, the Puritans were high-minded and sincere. One of the names they were given in the early 17th century was ’The Precisionists’ which resonated with your quest for measurement.’
Although an atheist, I do understand the metaphor. I am not a zealot of any kind, though. I was born and grew up in a communist country and I know first-hand how destructive ideological rigidity could be. And the so-called ‘neo-liberalism, for the want of a better name, is also an extreme, rigid ideology.
As I said in various other articles, what Ku Klux Klan is for Christianity or the Taliban is for Islam, neo-liberalism is for capitalism. It is not and should not be THE capitalism. Actually, the neo-liberals and the libertarians are the new Puritans, if by that we mean ideological zealots fighting against the ‘state’ as the biggest (in their view) evil for society. One enemy, one solution.
Check out this marvellous book by Prof. Abby Innes from LSE, called ‘Late Soviet Britain’, explaining why materialist utopias fail and why America and the UK now repeat exactly the same mistakes of the Soviet Union! The main reason: ideological rigidity or ‘closed-system reasoning’. Remember the neo-liberals’ main battle cry: TINA (There Is No Alternative). Pure bollocks, as there are many, many alternatives coming from extremely credible sources, if only one is ready to listen.
I am a moderate and (I like to think) a realist, sitting between the neo-liberal and old-left extremes (a social democrat, again, for the want of a better term) having seen with my own eyes how both of these ideological extremes failed and are failing us. What did work well in the past, though, as we also know quite well now, is a managed capitalism – yes, with restrictions for business, including advertising.
The only significant results in reducing smoking were achieved when ads for cigarettes were banned, as well as smoking itself in many places. So, not just communications, the availability and the consumption of the product as well! Was that ‘Puritan’? In the sense of the above libertarian complaint, I guess, it was.
I argue that we need more moderate markets, much more ethically and socially responsible, as well as more moderate promotional industries. They cannot be amoral and fundamentalist anymore, concerned only with growth and profit: morality and ethics must be part of its mindset. They are not now in any real sense, which is what any honest marketing person will tell you in confidence, usually when no one else is around and if they are not terminally invested in it.
I don’t want to kill advertising, nor it can be killed in the liberal market system. As long as we have liberal democracy, we will have ‘markprom’ industries as one of its prominent economic and cultural features. But we can, and we should, regulate it more, as it is now running amok, peddling all sorts of sophisticated propaganda that is one of the crucial factors in damaging our minds, our bodies, our societies and our environments. This is what my three ‘pollutions’ from the NCS framework are all about and the way to build the case for stronger responsibility and regulation is to measure those detrimental effects better and in more unified ways. In that sense, yes, I am a Precisionist.
But, wait a minute: why is this an awkward thing, given how obsessed modern marketing is with measuring its effects? From super-real-time AI-powered media buying optimisation, via the sea of metrics in CRM and e-commerce, all the way to the advertising effectiveness doctrinal debates sparked by Binet and Sharp, it could be argued that – based on this desire to be ‘minutely exact’ – modern marketing is run by hardcore Precisionists themselves!
‘What they were reacting against was a Catholic church that was grotesque in its wealth and, now that people could read the Bible for themselves, at odds with the fundamentals of Christianity.
So how do you believe in a God who has been captured and is leading mankind to hell?
You replace one set of beliefs with another.’
‘Grotesque in wealth’, yes, that rings a bell. Difficult to dispute that urge to be a bit of a contrarian when something like that sits on the opposite side, right?
However, we don’t need belief to challenge the status quo. We have ample evidence. From Nobel Prize-winning economists, from a galaxy of some of the best minds on the planet, even the millionaires themselves are asking to be taxed, seeing what social obscenities this fundamentalist market ideology is creating all around the world!
It is not about replacing beliefs with another set of beliefs, but with more rational decisions based on evidence. I know, I know… this is the real killjoy, the least sexy, the least cool thing in the world – if you happen to work in advertising.
‘They believed strongly that God was to be found in the heart, but they could only demonstrate the power of this in declaring war on the advertising of the time, the paintings, statues and cathedrals.’
Is it just me, or would someone else also find the comparison between advertising and Michelangelo a bit rich? Yes, he was a propagandist too, but for every Andy Warhol – inspired by the mass culture and advertising – I would name you roughly 20,000 worthless adverts that do not generate any cultural value whatsoever, that parasitically and derivatively exist on the diet of popular trends and, yes, what is left of what we may call ‘art’ today. Even worse, they promote various damaging social stereotypes and mindsets, they are functionally bad.
People used to admire the proportions and elegance of the statue of David, today we are amazed by the packaging design; we used to be overwhelmed with awe in the Sistine Chappel, today we feel it in NikeTown and Apple Store…
Advertising is not THE cause nor THE syndrome of a deluded society, but it is both, in different ways, in different areas of our lives. It is right to question it on any merit, especially artistic.
A killjoy?
I believe there is another side of the ‘Puritan’ complaint: that I want to suck the brightness of life that advertising so skilfully constructs, out of society, that I am a dour killjoy; that I am the guy who wants to kill not just Christmas, but also Easter, Valentines, Halloween, Black Tuesday, Black Friday and other bright or black consumerist frenzies that remind me of a piranha pond when a piece of raw steak is dipped into it.
I feel that any civilisation whose definition of joy and happiness is defined by the number of things they buy and amount of money they spend should have its head examined.
All this spending, all this ersatz joy, and we are still getting more miserable (America just dropped, for the first time, from top 20 countries in the World Happiness Index; Britain is not doing quite well, too). I am definitely not the first one to say it – there is a whole library of books and research, starting with the Frankfurt School – that consumerism can’t replace meaning in life.
Family, friendship, meaningful work, the sense of purpose, good health, emotional balance, nature… these things matter the most and are usually exactly the opposite from the values promulgated by the ‘markprom’ industry.
If we keep perpetuating the shamanic delusion that advertising equates with joie de vivre, we are going to keep feeling even more lonely, lost, confused, depressed and unhappy. We need a different, not commercially obsessed, more communal and sustainable intellectual and mythological framework for defining joy and happiness. Actually, we have it already, as above, but it’s drowned in the sea of sales pitches; it is useful only if it could be sold, not on its own merit.
‘It is too horrible to believe that the world really is about to destroy itself. You can talk about it, think it, but to believe that we are doomed, as the Puritans did unless they took drastic action, that is nihilism. And for Laz the humanist, it is unacceptable.
So, in believing there must still be salvation for us all, that belief manifests itself through opposition to the advertising of our time.’
This final criticism about being a nihilist is an interesting one.
Nihilists were probably the ultimate killjoys. Nothing is good in that world. Nothing makes sense. Everything should be torn down and replaced with… well, they will try something, not clear what, but it will surely be better than the status quo…
As I said, I don’t believe that the world is destroying itself, I can see it with my own eyes and we have trainloads of evidence by some of the most enlightened and credible organisations and individuals in our civilisation. Hard evidence. Numbers. Science.
Undisputable.
So, to be worried about our downward spiral – and not for myself frankly, but for my children and their children – is not an act of nihilism, on the contrary! The biggest nihilists are those that keep perpetuating the myth of permanent growth, of business being above everything else, of money as the only measure of worth, of mindless consumption and destructive mythologies – at all cost, for an immediate gain.
The real nihilists want to abolish the state, despite the crushing evidence about what folly that is. The real nihilists think now, in their world future doesn’t exist beyond analyst reporting cycles. They cannot even imagine the future, beyond the imminent smash and grab. The possibility, and now reality, of destruction, is beyond their ideological blinkers.
What is more nihilist than a collective suicide for the sake of profit?
And the ‘markprom’ industries, as I keep saying, are the willing accomplices in this. They are inspiring us to fill those shopping carts taking our civilisation literally to hell. They may not be the main culprits, I agree, but at the moment they are also far from redemption. Not even close to the line.
And one thing I believe may tip the scales is to start talking about it openly. This kind of conversation is the minimum we should expect from rational, enlightened beings that actually care. For that, I thank my sparring partner for the ‘Puritan’ challenge.
The more we engage with different points of view, the more likely we are to start doing something about it.
So, not quite the Puritan or nihilist position after all…