The Labour pains of advertising

The advertising industry is fighting for freedom of commercial speech against a rising tide of interventionist pressure. However, attempts to defend itself against charges of being manipulative are counter-productive.

A quick glance at the Advertising Association’s (AA) latest annual review creates an uneasy feeling. Despite the advertising industry’s regained vitality and obvious influence, it’s difficult not to come to the conclusion that it feels under siege. No, it’s not those familiar issues of media fragmentation, inflation, the rise of direct marketing and interactive multimedia, but the ever-looming spectre of yet more regulation that they fear.

AA director general Andrew Brown talks of a “substantial programme of defensive activity”. Chairman Winston Fletcher boasts that: “1994 will be remembered as the year in which food advertisers began to bite back at their critics – critics who in the main offer little logic and even fewer facts.” President Sir Michael Perry says that when it comes to interventionist pressures “there are few activities where the difference between prejudice and reality are as starkly visible”.

Misunderstood, and surrounded by hostile, prejudiced, ignorant forces, the ad industry is valiantly fighting back, bravely continuing its heroic fight for freedom of commercial speech.

That’s the picture the report paints. Which is very sad, because as long as the industry continues to don its war paint and make ugly, threatening faces at those who want more regulation, it will continue to be horrified by what it sees. It is looking in a mirror.

The touchstone of virtually every pressure group’s campaign to restrict or regulate advertising is the belief that “those clever people in advertising are out to manipulate us”.

It is a belief reinforced by the industry itself, day in, day out. Agencies, for example, boast endlessly about their feats in persuading consumers to buy more, pay more and generally respond to their blandishments. More fundamentally, the goal of manipulating consumers’ behaviour is never far from the surface. Indeed, often it is quite explicit.

Ever since the Fifties, when men like Ernest Dichter, Louis Cheskin and Emanuel Demby started promising that psychological techniques could unlock the keys to consumers’ thoughts and actions, advertising has been associated with attempts to manipulate consumers.

Not much has changed. Notwithstanding critiques like Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, today virtually every marketing conversation is still peppered with the language of manipulation – pulling this emotional trigger and pressing that aspirational button. As Dan Wieden of Wieden & Kennedy said at the D&AD last year: “Don’t we try to predict and control their (consumers’) behaviour in much the same fashion as the poor pigeon in Skinner’s box?”

So far, the ad industry’s attempt to assuage consumer lobbyists’ fears have been ineffective – sometimes even counter-productive. The reply usually takes one of three forms. First, there’s the semantic wriggle. Communication is persuasion, is manipulation. Therefore if you communicate you manipulate (so any attempt to manipulate is justifiable). Second, there’s the “consumers aren’t that thick” cop out. They know we are trying to manipulate them, so therefore it’s harmless (which is why we find ourselves embroiled in long, tedious and quite bizarre debates about whether three-year-olds can or cannot tell the difference between ads and programmes). Third, there’s the “honest” avow-al – “aw shucks, guv, we may

try but it hardly ever works”.

What answers like these fail to do is address the suspicion that surrounds the industry’s motives. Take a parallel from a different world. The Labour Party has for years been grappling with the legacy of its origins as an alliance between pragmatic reformers and red-hot socialists.

No matter that the socialists were always in a minority, nor that they never really influenced Labour in power. It was their motives that really instilled fear in the establishment. It was what they might do, and what they wanted to do, that mattered, not what they ever achieved.

The point about such fears is that no factual argument can allay them. Which is why the AA’s attempts to “argue the facts” about advertising’s influence fall on such stony ground. It’s not the facts the pressure groups are worried about, it’s the motives.

Labour had to take radical action to tackle its running sore. In its attempt to reassure the electorate, it has gone as far as repudiating an important strand of its own heritage. The trouble with the ad industry, as ISBA council member Peter Waterman points out, is it that the idea of manipulating consumers to pay more and buy more helps ad agencies sell their wares.

After all “the more successfully they can manipulate consumers, the more desirable they are for clients”. For this reason, “ad agencies are one of the worst enemies of the case for advertising,” says Waterman.

Advertising, he argues, is “a piece of information attached to the brand. It allows you to make decisions. It is information, which is what makes the market economy tick. It is the essential fuel of purchasing decisions. It speeds them up. It allows more accurate economic decision-making”.

Without advertising, companies with new products would not be able to recoup the costs of innovation because no one would know that the new, improved product existed. Without advertising, matching supply and demand gets even trickier than it already is.

That’s not as sexy a selling line as promising the earth. But then, as Labour found out, while promising the earth may be an excellent short-term motivator for your immediate supporters, it has a habit of alienating wider circles.

Labour has started dealing with its historical baggage. As long as the ad industry fails to renounce the misconceived beliefs parts of it embraced in its naive youth, it will continue to create a prejudiced, and powerful, opposition for itself.