"Advertising kills? If only!"
The Government wants to ban advertisements that show cars going fast because they encourage young people to speed recklessly and result in accidents which kill people. According to the Minister for Silly Remarks and Stupid Suggestions, advertising kills! If only. (Advertising kills only one thing: a bad product. Get it into the hands of enough people and word of mouth does the rest.)
The Government is only the latest in a long line of simpleminded institutions to conclude that advertisers can make people do anything they want simply by showing them something in a commercial. This belief is common among the leftover conspiracy theorists of the left wing. Big money controls the media and uses it to control the minds of the masses. Tra la la. It's quaint, like a Chairman Mao badge, and just as relevant.
The power of advertising is respected far more by people outside the industry than inside it where the daily reality is very different. We've been trying to control people's minds since advertising was invented, but people stubbornly refuse to be controlled. They respond to some ads and not to others. They buy some advertised products and not others. They send some companies broke and make others obscenely successful. And they make some products global successes without any advertising at all - eg. Walkman, Trivial Pursuit, Viagra, HotMail, Starbucks, Harry Potter, Blair Witch Project, Wal-Mart, the list goes on.
Dear Minister, have pity on the poor advertiser who takes the punt with his own money to buy 30 seconds on the box to tap-dance in front of the bored and the disappeared before the show starts again, hoping they'll remember his name. He's only trying to flog some clobber so he can pay the staff's wages and the government's taxes and keep body and soul together.
Actually Mr Minister and his fellow conspiracy theorists insult the intelligence of the masses by portraying them as soft headed and easily led. The Russians in 1917 turned to Lenin for food and an end to Russia's involvement in the insane Great War, not because they thought he made good speeches and the dictatorship of the proletariate made such good sense. He pitched to them what they wanted to hear: Bread and Peace. The Tsar, on the other hand, offered Continued War and Misery. He ended up down a mineshaft.
Mr Minister, automotive manufacturers would pitch slow cars and soft, goody-goody imagery if it would sell cars, ie. if the punters wanted it. But the buying public have taught manufacturers that they like powerful vehicles by the simple method of buying them when they are offered to them.
You see, Minister, it is not the poor consumer who is led by the nose, it is the advertiser. Companies spend huge amounts researching what their target audience wants to buy and what they want to see in ads, before fashioning their products and their advertisements. The majority of marketing firms slavishly follow the whims of their masters, the consumers, which is why there is so little real choice and so much me-tooism.
As a politician, Mr Minister should be full of sympathy for the poor advertiser and respect for the fickle nature of the consumer. Voters don't do what they are told, especially by election advertising - which is usually among the worst advertising produced in any category. Far from having blank minds waiting for a powerful advertisement to imprint an indelible and compelling directive, consumers actually think and analyse what they are shown and told. They do things with information. They draw conclusions that were often unintended.
For instance, McDonalds found years ago that consumers coming to their stores noticed two things that formed the underpinning of the McDonald's brand. These things were not originally intended to carry overt brand messages, but they communicated far more powerfully than the big yellow arches logo and the televisions ads showing singing, dancing, hamburger-loving kids and adults having a ball eating American cuisine. These things - known in the marketing trade as "brand drivers" - were almost imperceptible in the hullabaloo that is the MacDonald's eating environment. They were the French Fries (no one does them like Maccas) and the cleanliness of the toilets.
Now I was fired from the teaching faculty of an institution run by the graduate school of one of our major universities for giving my students this information. The strange man who ran it appeared to have deep personal feelings about food and toilets. The point is: so do McDonald's customers. And the company could not have predicted this or sought to use these factors to manipulate consumers.
As a politician, Mr Minister should understand what advertisers learn everyday: you can huff and puff all you like, but you cannot resist the will of the people.