Trust the IPA to defend TV advertising

Well done everyone for shouting down that nasty Philip Kotler on the boat the other day. What a cheek – coming over here telling us we don’t know how to make television advertising work (MW September 25). Who does that nobody think he is? And to the person who said

his detractors gave the impression of a lorryload of squealing piglets on their way to the abattoir – shame on you!

Lucky we had that nice Hamish Pringle on hand to defend our boys. He can set the record straight. But not by sending Kotler a copy of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising’s effectiveness award winners, obviously – that would have been like my brother-in-law saying he’s a great golfer because he once got a hole-in-one.

No. What’s needed is a simple calculation of the average effect on profitability of, let’s say, a hundred randomly selected campaigns. Then he can prove once and for all that Kotler (not to mention Andrew Ehrenberg and Gordon Brown and John Philip Jones, et al) are all wrong – and that £3bn of TV advertising done the British way does make better sense than putting the shareholders’ money in a piggy bank. With all that financial resource and all those clever people at the IPA, it shouldn’t be too difficult, should it?

John Bunyard

Managing director

Fast Marketing

London SE1