A Hard Truth About Lying in Advertising
15 de mar. de 2022
This is a text about lies that needs to start with the truth: I base my text on a text by Francisco Alencar from 2013, which I have been inspired by more times than I should have and for which I have never paid royalties. To start, I will give credit.
According to Ipsos, advertising executives are among the least trustworthy professionals in the country. Behind only politicians and government ministers.*
According to the Daily News, police officers and judges are not the best examples of trust, but they are still more trustworthy than advertisers.
Advertising executives may have made the list because of some corruption scandal in state bids, but I remember that advertising has always been a mythomaniac, a characteristic of those who have a compulsion to lie.
Some lies are quite funny, like when the dating app Match.com features Satan on a date with his partner in 2020. We know that the characters don't exist, but it's funny to see Satan respecting social distancing during the pandemic or 2020 trying to pull him to church.*
Most of them are not very funny. When a brand says that its product is "worth a steak" and tries to associate it with a child's healthy development, there is an attempt to deceive parents (and many believe it).
Or, to give a current example, when a brand replaces plastic straws with paper but fails to mention that plastic straws represent 1% of all plastic in the oceans and 90% of plastic comes from 10 rivers*.
Changing the raw material can ease the conscience, but individualizing the issue of a systemic problem is misleading and can make the situation even worse, especially when the brand is one of the biggest polluters on the planet.*
The fact that advertising lies all the time makes the truth have enormous power. It is increasingly rare, but no one is indifferent when it happens. When Beats, Dr. By Dre asks, "You love black culture, but do you love me?"* there is a powerful truth about the influence of black culture and racism in the United States.
However, advertising and advertisers lie so much that, at a certain point, they begin to believe their lies and spread them beyond the creative product (a lie):
Contracts between companies and agencies that are not respected.
Agency profits are made through the capitalization of resources necessary for the well-being of employees.
Employees are hired 100% of the time but divided between two or three brands.
A woman who became a director but earns the same as a male manager.
Diversity work is making historical reparations but does not have black, disabled, and trans people discussing the rules created to benefit white men.
Consumer research was conducted with people from the agency itself.
Social listening with two tweets that show the entire internet talking about a certain subject (left in bold to show that the tweet was researched exactly using those terms).
The list is long, but it is essential to emphasize that lies are lies. They are harmful to any relationship between people, companies, and brands. Regulating lies in relationships is to condone a system that makes people mentally and physically ill, and that uses lies as one of the instruments for its maintenance.
Advertising executives seem to care little about being on the list of untrustworthy people in the country. Still, if we want a healthier market, we must review and question the lies in daily processes to have more transparent and truthful relationships—not only in creative products.
