Honesty

I’ve been loving the new series of Mad Men, the television drama set in the Sixties at a New York advertising agency where men are men, and women are either pregnant or have typewriters sewn to their fingertips.

Every week I fall for the style and sophistication, the clothes and the power, but it goes hand in hand with smoking and drinking, rampant sexism and lack of morals. It’s like watching a Premier League football team.

In Mad Men they make no bones about how advertising manipulates the great unwashed in to buying stuff they really don’t need, at prices they can’t afford, with slogans they can’t understand. They remind us constantly that success is all a matter of ripping off other people’s ideas and not letting your clients know that you’re making it up as you go along.

There’s a random catchphrase site on the web just now called The Advertising Slogan Generator, and it really shows up how stupid the whole industry is. Go to it and you type in the name of your product then wait while it makes up a slogan for your campaign. I typed in the word Flatulence and got “We Bring Good Flatulence In To Your Life”, and it then gave me alternatives like “You Can Be Sure Of Flatulence”, “Watch Out There’s Flatulence About”, “The Flatulence Of Champions” and, my favourite, “Do You Love Your Flatulence Enough To Share It?”.

This selling nonsense has made me wonder how much better it would be if advertisers just admitted the truth about their dark art and we all got back to telling the plain facts about products. I know that in an ad man’s dictionary the word Description lies next to Deception, Truth next to Twaddle, and Fact next to Fantasy but I can dream, can’t I, of how life changing it would be if they started to tell the whole story?

Wouldn’t you stop to look twice at a billboard with “Global Warming – We Might Just Have Made It Up”? Wouldn’t you be riveted by an ad that said something like “Selfish? Got Nothing To Offer? Make A Career In Banking.”

In these days of celebrities getting accused of textual harassment, there’s an advert running in magazines and papers for a mobile telephone company that asks “What would you do with unlimited texts?”. Why not add the truthful answer to it? Something like “I’d get splashed all over the papers, then chucked out of my home and have to give my wife fifty per cent of my earnings.”

Comedian and writer Ricky Gervais made a movie last year called The Invention Of Lying about a society that always tells the truth to each other. I’d be lying if I said the movie was any good, but it did make me smile at one point with an honest advertising slogan on the side of one bus that said “Pepsi. For When There’s No Coke”.

It’s too late for me to go in to the advertising game now, but if I did then I would ask to be given the difficult accounts and then I’d set about making them more honest. Forget selling Viagra with photos of weedy men turned in to supermen. Why not just a slogan like “Viagra. Something For The Weak End.”

Or I could help Toyota with something along the lines of “In A Hurry? Try Our Cars. We Stop For No One.”

Honesty! That’s what we all need.