Advertising people gathered at the recent LEAD conference to discuss the role, responsibilities and rights of the industry. Everyone agrees that advertising has the power to make a positive impact on the world and in doing so must (more importantly) consider its clients.
We all have the best intentions. We all want to make positive change, but this requires a level of intellectual honesty and cognisance of economic realities.
There’s also a flip-side: if we are here for good, then the direct implication is that we can also be here for bad. We can’t ignore that anymore.
“The right thing to do” has played on the collective consciousness of this industry for more than 40 years. There’s pro-bono charity work cancelling out naughty cigarette and weapons campaigns; calculated systems balancing the moral credits and debits of clients; and agencies setting up “for good” departments, usually with a suffix of “earth”, “ethos” or “change” to lean into the issues.
However, all this sidesteps having to look at the rump of what we do and acknowledging the deeper problems within marketing and advertising in a post-consumer world. The result is that we amass a collection of extremely bright ideas and observations about what “good” means, but ultimately the net status of the industry remains morally neutral.
So what should we be discussing? Here are four questions I’d like to see hitting the agenda if we’re really going to take this seriously:
How can we make it okay for people to refuse to work on a particular client?
It’s one thing to talk about ethics in the pub. It’s entirely different for an individual to decline to work on a piece of business. Anecdotal evidence strongly indicates an unspoken law: moral disapproval equals gross misconduct.
With such risk upon an individual speaking out, how can meaningful debate be encouraged? Creativity is all about differences of opinion and outlook. While we welcome ideas around what is “for good”, we avoid people expressing choices about what they feel is “for bad”. The economic structure of revenue and margins underpinning the industry don’t allow for it, to say nothing of cultures that would rather hear no evil see no evil when it comes to their clients.
How can agencies reclaim some kind of moral agency in client interactions?
A report published by the Comms Lab shows that clients’ mission statements demonstrate significantly more evidence of commitment to social purpose than those of their agency counterparts.
If agencies are to set out their values more explicitly they need to introduce a practical process of selection, not a philosophical one. Livity states that it uses a complex algorithm to decide which pitches to take, involving the staff standing in different corners of the room to express their biases. The company always goes with the majority vote.
How can we start talking about where advertising should not be in our lives?
Of course, we can look at the relationship advertising has with vulnerable audiences, such as children. We can publicly tackle issues such as obesity. We can sign up to industry-wide quality controls. We can even invest in programmes to help make people more media-literate.
But what about removing some of the problem in the first place? Less advertising and more discussion about which spaces are appropriate for advertising. The future growth of the industry is based entirely in the other direction. The dominant digital trend continues to drive quantity and frequency, volume not value. Creatives and clients agree that it’s more effective to speak to somebody once and well, rather than many times and poorly.
How can advertising promote constructive cultural values?
Advertising promotes extrinsic behaviour. I buy, therefore I am. But studies such as Harvard’s longest-standing examination into happiness show that building nourishing social connections with one another help us live longer, survive ills and achieve fulfilment.
Advertising encourages the perception of self as consumer, separating us from our natural selves. But we are not separate from nature; we are nature. So drawing moral relativities between clients is futile if we’re not prepared to talk about the much harder questions of consumerism in a world where economic growth has – of late – proved a tricky human master.
Jonathan Trimble is chief executive at 18 Feet & Rising
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