Truth: Like A blanket that always leaves your feet cold
Advertising has an interesting relationship with the truth.
People will tell you that the classic way to construct a TV ad is to take the product benefit and dramatise it.
By ‘dramatise’, we mean ‘exaggerate’ and by ‘exaggerate’, we mean ‘lie about’.
Look at Lynx: you don’t just pull women, you pull gorgeous women and lots of them (not true).
Or VW: their car is so small but tough that policemen would hide behind it in a shootout (they wouldn’t).
Or Cadbury’s: eating their chocolate brings you as much joy as a gorilla playing the drums (not in my experience).
Or Macdonalds: their restaurants are full of pleasant, salt-of-the-earth types and smiley, well-behaved families (they are packed with eye-bleeding shitwhistles).
Of course, people will say that we’re all aware of the rules and we should expect to be lied to when we take in ads. We will then tune out the lies and accept only the true bits that we can easily decipher and understand.
But isn’t that just bullshit? We’re saying that these massive, expensive exaggerations won’t confuse anyone, that people can separate truth from horse feathers perfectly well in the blink of an eye, that they are supposed to accept one piece of film as both mendacity and veracity simultaneously.
I find it odd that we’re supposed to stuff ads with pointless legals that no one will ever read just in case they get the wrong impression about something that barely matters, but the humongous flim-flammery goes unchecked. If I tried to say, legally, that Lynx will definitely make you pull more women I think I’d run into a large brick wall from the BACC. However, if I just imply it, somewhere in the world of bullshit, then I’m fine.
‘But,’ I hear you cry (I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that Gout-Legs will take particular issue with this), ‘aren’t you just saying the public are morons? Can’t you credit them with enough intelligence to separate fact from fiction?’ Well, I guess I just don’t understand why a massive illustration of a load of bollocks is fine, and why it’s so hard simply to tell the truth. Whether the public can understand or not, why is sophisticated smoke and mirrors so acceptable?
Perhaps if it weren’t, we wouldn’t end up with so many dogshit propositions about life being better when we get together (unique to every alcoholic beverage, telecom company, airline, and postal service in the world).
UK advertising has become very un-UK feeling for a long time now.
nobody sees through bullshit like your average Brit. your ads used to reflect this. but no more.
now you pump out prozac-flaovoured stuff like that soft eurostar stuff. NOTHING happened in that ad. film is about things happening. hello!
I remember George Lois saying that reality tv would be the dirge for advertising. Doesn’t advertising just reflect society at any given moment?
Richard Thornhill said ‘it isn’t lying, just expedient exaggeration’. I’ll go along with that or what about ‘if the truth hurts lets just find ourselves another truth’.
Lynx ads rule!! Love these ones:
http://www.youtube.com/user/thelynxeffect#p/u/1/61AGuq1AnKI
The truth, it’s ugly but it gets you there.
you were right. mainly because most of what you said is wrong.
the truth is, if you smell like shit, you’re less likely to pull a bird than if you smell fragrant. the rest is executional entertainment.
we’re used to it.
from day dot, we’re read stories before we go to bed that have a human truth behind them for us to decipher and be enriched by. and so it has been since the dawn of modern thinking.
the best advertising is based on a human truth. what’s so bad about that?
In truth the ads that tell the truth you and I call boring. The ones we all remember from ‘the good old days’ are rubbish compared to the good ones now. Or at least we fool ourselves into believing so.
Ben, you and probably most of us slag ads all day if it wasn’t Glazers Flake or the Honda ad that says driving a honda is like a blur of blue, red or green fuzz. Actually I do think the Honda ad is crap.
Let’s face it, we all want to do something great and by great we mean original and by original we mean meaningless. Gorilla for fucks sake. Great piece of film but really? Selling chocolate to chicks? Never in a million years.
And what girl wants to be portrayed as covered in chocolate cum? Nice one, you all deserve a big pay rise.
bentos.
lynx are badly written very old gags.
poor poor poor.
‘executional entertainment’ is that another euphemism for bullshit?
Kinda?
All creativity is essentially lies.
Without lies there would be no fiction, no stories, no imagination.
Imagine if no-one ever told a lie. and then one day a fat guy told a lie, what would happen. Hey, i bet that would make a really crap film
is cantdrawcantwrite pissed?
executional entertainment. that’s your job ben. in books or ads. you play off insight and human truths. and you make it interesting enough for people to give a shit about. don’t you?
But books are fiction (well fiction books are), so we understand that level of artice that disguises truths.
Ads, in my opinion, are another matter. They are there (in theory) to impart information. In truth, they impart bollocks in order to sell more stuff.
Maybe there’s something wrong with that.
Also, if your product is good enough, there’s no need for this ‘smell better and shag loads of birds’ stuff. There was once an ad for a saucepan that was so strong, you could melt its main competitor in it. No lies. Brilliant ad.
I think this industry of accepted untruth is just a way for people to try to differentiate identical products with lies. Is that OK? Hmmmm…
http://www.brandrepublic.com/news/1017376/burger-king-ad-banned-overstating-burger-size/
Heaven forbid!
It’s all a version of the truth. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”
We all know what the onus is for advertising when it comes to the brand/product. It’s up to the public to put it all in context. For instance lets say I’m advertising blueberries. How about, ‘Power packed with goodness.’ or ‘Pound for pound more power packed than any other fruit.’ or ‘A good big ‘un doesn’t always beat a good little un’. Not untruths but whether they warrant the huge mark-up in price compared to say a strawberry is another matter, in fact that’s not my job, I’m advertising blueberries. The public have got to take some responsibility for themselves, surely?
Current tv ad for paddy power shows some blind footballers kicking a cat. Except we know that its all just adland bullshit, and in real life, no cat was brutally crippled.
Come on advertisers, this ‘sophisticated smoke and mirrors’ is unacceptable. Next time, let the blind bloke hoof the fuck out of a real cat.
yes
They did that in the film Crazy People about the hilarious antics of us “adverts” people. They decided to tell the truth in advertising and were locked up in a home for mentalisers! Imagine! Whereupon, they opened an advertising agency that only told the truth. Their line for Volvos was, if memory serves, “They’re boxy. But good.”
Needless to say, it was such a ground breaking thing to do , the adverts were incredibly successful, they won all the pitches and well…you know the rest…crack, whores and you start believing your own hype and that you are, in fact, a genius.
Which agency is it that has the company line: ‘The truth – well told’. You must be pretty cross with them Ben?
McCann’s. So that line is absolute bullshit.
They tell truth about as well as Captain Hook gives handjobs.
I take exception to that.
Surely anyone dumb enough to take an advert literally wouldn’t be clever enough to make enough money to buy whatever it was that confused them in the first place?
What are you suggesting Ben, we should only make infomercials from now on? (ok, so that might be fun for a while). My/our job as a creative (as i understand it) is to find a sufficiently compelling metaphor for whatever shit, cynical, hair-brained plop plops my client is trying to hawk, and make it as pleasant an experience for the consumer as possible. No-one’s forcing them buy anything though. The whole process requires their participation, and their consent.
That is how capitalism works.
If you’ve a problem with liars, maybe start with politicians. Or mediums. They’re WELL full of shit.
Come on Ben, let’s get Derek Acorah!
In one of Alex Bogusky’s posts he makes a pretty good case for not advertising to children. This is because they take everything literally and don’t have the filter adults have to filter out all the shit (all backed up by medics and psychologists).
So it seems everyone is filtering out all the shit anyway so we can pretty much say what we want.
does the economist actually cure itchy scalps?
You can’t handle the truth.
G-L: No! Exactly! I can see I’ve won you over.