The Loose Manhole Cover in the Capitalist Death Star is About to Close
I began to formally question the role and influence of advertising over 30 years ago. I was working as a copywriter at Saatchi & Saatchi when I was called to the Chairman’s office to be congratulated on being given a seat on the Board. The Chairman asked me in a perfunctory manner if everything was all right on the creative floor. I nodded and mumbled yes sir, shook his hand and left.
Afterwards I felt stupid for not having said how I really felt about the direction in which the agency was heading. Unable to get to sleep I got up and wrote a ‘Jerry Maguire’-style tract, setting out what I believed was going wrong. Early next morning, I marched up to the Chairman’s office to hand it to him to be told by his PA that he was off on international business and wouldn’t be back in the office until next week. She looked at the envelope in my hand and said if it was important, she could get it couriered to him. I thought about it for a moment and said yes, it was important, and handed it over.
My little polemic contained the seeds of the ideas I’ve been setting out in these posts. Essentially, that by focusing exclusively on feelings in our advertising, at the expense of facts, we were abdicating our responsibility to help consumers make better-informed decisions. I even said something about the importance of the role of advertising, in its old-fashioned form, in the functioning of the free market. I don’t know what I expected to happen. I thought I might get fired. Or promoted. The one thing I didn’t anticipate was absolutely no response at all…
Over the next few years, I talked to many leading figures in the industry and each time the same thing happened. There was a great deal of interest and openness; a fair amount of agreement in principle; a general bemoaning of the infiltration of US-style ‘feel-good’ campaigns at the expense of saying anything substantive etc. Then I’d write to them in a bit more detail for their comments and… nothing. No push-back, no questions, no comment, no reply at all.
This ghosting was so reliable that it became a running joke that if I never wanted to hear from someone again, all I had to do was send them the brown envelope and I would fall off the edge of their world.
But there was a serious side to this.
As I wrote in my previous post, every marketing department tracks the impact of their advertisements on sales. Every advertising agency has a new business presentation showing the correlation of marketing spend and increased turnover. But when the conversation turns to the consequences of overconsumption, any such influence must be publicly denied lest it leads to a call for regulation. This contradiction is so glaring and untenable to any marketing professional that the subject can never be addressed. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair (again) you can’t make someone understand something when their salary depends upon them not understanding it.
To help facilitate this studied ignorance, a culture of anti-intellectualism has arisen in advertising agencies. Curiosity on this topic is discouraged and anyone asking questions about the ethics of certain practices, for example, is viewed with suspicion and shut down, as my own experience demonstrated.
I was reminded of all this recently while reading about ‘the most successful political party in the world.’[1] Because within Conservative ranks exactly the same suspicion of ideas and intellectuals was described. Common sense and pragmatism are prized; theory and doctrine despised.
Reading this it struck me that the Tories are wrestling with a contradiction every bit as knotty as the advertising industry’s: how to make a party of privilege electable in the democratic age. How to sell policies designed to advantage the wealthy, on the basis that they benefit the more numerous less well-off.
From this perspective, the appointment of Saatchi’s by Mrs Thatcher was convenient on two levels: both organisations were effectively in the same business. They were politically, but also culturally, aligned.
‘Labour Isn’t Working’ was created in precisely this spirit. It certainly implied that Labour was responsible for the relatively high level of unemployment. It certainly seemed to suggest that this was of concern to the Conservative Party and something they intended to address. But within a year of taking office, unemployment had risen by 50%. Had Mrs Thatcher criticised Labour less equivocally, let alone suggested a remedy, this would have given her opponents a stick with which to beat her. But like the customer who couldn’t return her tampons because they hadn’t, in fact, set her free, the electorate struggled to hold the Tories to account because the thrust of their accusations were contained in the poster’s sub-text.
This is one of the great attractions of negative advertising as I’ve explained (and why the special licence given to political parties to simply knock their opponents is so corrosive) – it is a free hit below the belt. In this cowardly new world, you can shout about your soda or shout down the opposition, without saying anything about your product or policies.
Once again: the flight from objectivity in mass communication enables high-calorie processed food manufacturers, amongst others, to advertise their brands under the noses of the regulator, even while obesity and diabetes spiral out of control. The unique ability of political parties to denigrate their opponents in their advertising incentivises corruption, coarsens the debate and reduces political participation. The good news is that these widely-lamented trends, that seem to be such intractable features of modern-day liberal capitalism are, in this analysis, the product of a failure of regulation. There is a loose manhole cover in the capitalist Death Star, it can be found at 71 High Holborn, the headquarters of the Advertising Standards Authority.
Subjecting political advertising to the same rules that govern commercial communication and taking emotional sub-text into account for the purposes of regulation would, at a stroke, incentivise advertisers to communicate with their audiences honestly and constructively; in a fashion genuinely consistent with their interests and in keeping with a coherent conception of market freedom. What is more, the agencies responsible would easily adjust to this rewriting of the rules. As I’ve made clear in this post, they are not invested in the intellectually bogus status quo, they ignore it at considerable cost to their sanity and self-respect. This is the fragility of the status quo I described in my previous post.
The bad news is that the opportunity to close these loopholes is limited for two reasons.
Firstly, negative emotional miscommunication has proved so powerful a tool that it has broken out of the confines of paid-for advertising. At the recent Conservative Party Conference, for example, speakers (including government ministers) were systematically briefed to make false, inflammatory accusations against the Opposition based on crackpot conspiracy theories that had gained traction online.
Secondly, far from being held to account by the news media, right-wing outlets amplified and disseminated these falsehoods among their audiences giving them further credibility and resonance. After all, would a government minister lie about sinister plans to tax meat or to dictate how often you go to the shops? Would a respected newspaper report this without challenge?
What is happening here is a speeded-up version of the process that took place in the advertising industry. Marketing professionals, who honed their skills making hyperbolic claims for commercial brands in the knowledge that they would not be held to account by the regulator, are taking the calculated risk that making unfounded attacks on their political opponents will provoke engagement that outweighs the opprobrium these slurs receive. Part of this calculation is based on the fact that, just like the advertising regulator', the Press Standards Organisation will not intervene when these falsehoods are given oxygen by the press. Because, in common with the ASA, IPSOS - also voluntary, also industry-funded - limits itself to the consideration of facts and ignores implication, tone, emotional incitement and every other form of sub-text. They are deaf and blind, in other words, to all the most engaging and motivating forms of communication.
The strange thing about watching this 40-year-long car-crash play out is its predictability, particularly as these practices were first incubated and then imported from the United States. I remember very clearly how the expanding waistlines of the average American were first reported in tones of incredulity over here. I remember the mock-horror with which US political attack ads were viewed and the sense of superiority and amusement that ‘feel-good’ adverts provoked in UK creative departments.
We’re not laughing now.
[1] ‘Tory Nation’ Earle, Simon & Schuster 2023.