Advertisers:Poor Company to Keep

It is estimated that each American is exposed to well over 2,500 advertising messages
per day, and that children see over 50,000 TV commercials a year. In our
view, as many as one-quarter of all these ads are deliberately deceptive. Increasingly,the family of businesses that advertise is not one you should be proud to be associated with.
What a Marketing Expert Says About Advertising “Increasingly, people are skeptical of what they read or see in advertisements. I often tell clients that advertising has a built-in ‘discount factor.’ People are deluged with promotional information, and they are beginning to distrust it. People are more likely to make decisions based on what they hear directly from other people: friends, experts, or even salespeople. These days, more decisions are made at the sales counter than in the living-room armchair. Advertising, therefore, should be one of the last parts of a marketing strategy, not the first.” —Regis McKenna, The Regis Touch (Addison-Wesley, 1985) Do you doubt our claim that a significant portion of advertising is dishonest? Do a little test for yourself. Look through your local newspaper as we did one recent morning. We won’t belabor the point with the many other examples we could cite from just one newspaper. Obviously, whether you look in a newspaper, magazine or the electronic media, it is not difficult to find many less-than-honest ads. Even if you advertise in a scrupulously honest way, your ads keep bad company. The public, which has long since become cynical about the general level of honesty in advertising, will not take what you say at face value. For example, suppose you own a restaurant, and instead of extolling the wonders of your menu in exaggerated prose you simply state that you serve “excellent food at a reasonable price.” Many people, cynical after a lifetime of being duped by puffedup claims, are likely to conclude that your food couldn’t be too good if that’s all you can say about it. One type of dishonest advertising is especially irritating because it’s a bit more subtle and involves magazines and newspapers that you might have respected before you discovered their policy. It works like this: The publication touts the products and services of its advertisers in its news stories. For example, some computer magazines have been known to favorably review the products of their heavy advertisers, and small newspapers often fawn over the products and services of businesses that can be counted on to buy space. Once you discover this sort of policy, everything the publication reviews, even businesses that are truly excellent, is thrown into question. Devious advertising is rampant in our culture; from “enhanced underwriting” of public broadcast shows, featuring announcements that look identical to commercial television ads, to paid product placement (inserting brand-name goods into movies and TV). And we have come a long way from the dairy industry giving free milk to children at recess. School districts across the country sell exclusive ad space to the highest bidder on school buses, hallways, vending machines and athletic uniforms. Channel One, which gives participating schools video equipment in exchange for piping ads into the classroom, is the tip of the iceberg. Corporations have begun writing the very lesson plans themselves.