Why has advertising become a game of Trivial Pursuit?

2011-09-19 09:00

Chris Moerdyk

Round about this time every year, the South African advertising industry gathers to party up a storm and pat itself on the back.

I don't have a problem with that – it's an intense industry that is deserving of a bit of R&R.

The problem with advertising, though, is that it is the most trivialised business discipline on earth.

Unlike the subject of money, which is discussed with sober reverence in banking halls and boardrooms, advertising usually tends to crop up at dinner parties after a lot of wine and somewhere between intellectually devoid discussions on Big Brother and drunken debates on Jerry Springer's role in advancing modern civilisation.

Adding to this public perception of advertising being nothing more than some sort of commercialised trivial pursuit, is the fact that the ordinary Joe is obsessed by it. Ask any radio talk show host to mention the word advertising and switchboards light up like Christmas trees with callers of every age, colour, race and creed wanting to expound on their best and worst ads. Not only that, but they also manage to come up with strategies that even the experts who developed the ads never knew were there.

IQ has never been a consideration in the national sport of judging ads.

To make matters worse, there is a lot of bad advertising around. Mainly because, unlike other decision-making, a lot of people in business have the rather alarming habit of taking advertising advice from their spouses, in-laws, personal trainers, domestics and dentists. And, I'm not kidding, one CEO I know takes all his new ads home, shows them to his Rottweiler and if the mutt wags its tail the campaign goes ahead. Growling, heavy panting or a dog doodie on the lawn means the whole bangshoot goes back to the drawing board. I am kidding actually, but this scenario wouldn't surprise me in the least.

To exacerbate this perception of advertising, the industry rigorously regulates itself out of some sort of paranoid fear that if it doesn't slap itself about with demonstrable gusto, government will do it for them. With the result that it takes only one complaint for an entire phalanx of highly paid industry execs to sit down for hours and decide on whether it should be banned.

The ad industry openly encourages the public to vent its spleen on any ad that might offend, with the result that anyone who wakes up in the morning in a foul mood about being powerless to do anything about government's Aids policy, road carnage or getting massacred by the Australians at just about every sport up to and including jukskei, all they need to do is crank out a fax to the advertising regulators. A response is guaranteed along with at least a 50/50 chance of instant gratification.

A crazy business? You betcha.  When a TV commercial was banned recently an ad agency creative director was heard to say: "How can we let the public, a tiny minority, this lunatic fringe, dictate to us? Damn it all, we're supposed to be the lunatic fringe..."

Which just about says it all.

And we wonder why government feels so confident about no real repercussions when it decides to ban the advertising of tobacco, alcohol and fast foods.

In spite of advertising being important to the economy, nobody seems to take advertising seriously, not least of all the advertising industry itself.

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