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Can advertising be both a force for commerce AND a force for good?
People love to say they hate advertising – and in many ways, I think we've earned our bad reputation (which might sound strange coming from the CEO of the largest media agency in the world). Personally, I believe that advertising has a responsibility to be more informative, more relevant, and more reliable in helping people navigate the landscape of choices in their lives. At the same time, we have to honor our commitment and responsibility to our client partners to grow their businesses and build their brands. In your view, what advertisers are doing the best job of serving this dual role in a genuine way? What are some examples you've seen, both past and present, that demonstrate being a force for good as well as a force for business? What more can be done in this space?
Luke Kachersky
Of course, not all - or perhaps even much - advertising is ideal. Yet it is clear that advertisers that approach this ideal do better for themselves and their customers' well-being at the same time. For example, in work we're doing at The Center For Positive Marketing at Fordham University, we've observed quite a strong correlation between brands' well-being (read: financial value) and the well-being of the people they serve. This result dovetails nicely with the Harvard Business Review piece Ms. Desmond cited in an earlier comment.
Advertisers need to more explicitly recognize these relationships and aim for this ideal. Advertising can and should uplift businesses, consumers, and society as a whole.
www.CenterForPositiveMarketing.org
Bruno Carre
The ad world doesn't deserve the bad reputation, the clients also bear that responsibility! Companies with a bad product or service do want to advertise that product.
Perhaps the responsibility of ad men is denying that advertising a product won't help.
Example:
In an ad agency, who would dare to turn down a client after realizing their product sucks...? "Sorry sir or M'am, but we believe you should first improve your product/service before deciding to spend a significant amount of money to advertise it". Your point of view is the same as David Ogilvy's: inform, help.
I love marketing and communication strategy (that's my job) but I'm allergic to ads. Here is why. The century-old traditional advertising model could be compared today to "shout and sell", whereas we do have the means to "talk" with consumers when they want and eventually help them, which benefits both the consumers and the brands.
Mass-advertising with "shout and sell" techniques still works, unfortunately. But content marketing, that is to speak about everything relevant to the product but the product itself is a great way to engage a meaningful conversation with consumers and help them make a (better) choice.
One of the first (commercial) example is www.beinggirl.com by P&G: Help teenage girls addressing (embarrassing) questions about becoming an adult. Of course it is meant to sell, but P&G did put their products in a very discrete way. It was a great success and I believe still is.
For above the line ads, the example of Nike is nice: translating what your company stands for into something meaningful (see Michael Porter's Thick Value theory for that matter)
In a nutshell: Today, the ad industry has the means to "talk & serve", which eventually sells more (!) instead of shout & (trying desperately to) sell, which becomes more and more difficult (and big kudos to the creative directors who still manage to do it!)
Fletcher Kauffman
I am of the view that advertising is inherently "not good"-- and I am referring to advertising in its more specific meaning (the one-way market-facing communication meaning) as opposed to all forms of marketing.
I have always felt (since I was quite young), that advertising-- were I to assign a personality to it-- is, well, kind of date-rapey. Yes, I just said that. Advertising is that guy who comes into a party, isn't really interested in you at all (he's not even listening to what you're talking about), he just wants interrupt you to talk about himself and, by the way, almost nothing he says about himself in any way squares up with your actual experience of the guy. This is the same guy who told TiVo that their "commercial skip" button shouldn't skip commercials anymore-- because people will use it to skip commercials and we don't want them to be able to skip commercials. Yes, we want to force people to have to see things they do not want to see.
I have been looking (off and on) for a decade for a way to, literally, end advertising-- while still providing a way for people with wants and needs a way to connect with businesses ready to meet those wants and needs, but on a more equal, open and honest footing.
I will definitely allow that some advertising is relatively better than others-- although when I see an ad that touches me emotionally, I'm pretty immediately met with the thought "They just connected with me emotionally... to get my money." I mean, commerce is what's behind it all anyway-- they're not reaching out to me just to make sure I'm doin' okay.
Laura Desmond 50+
heloise. obyrne
Comment deleted
Laura Desmond 50+
http://hbr.org/2011/11/how-great-companies-think-differently/ar/1
Elwira Stadnik
Mirko Pallera
the topic is so interesting and I would like to have the time to read all the comments.
I've been studying the relation between advertising and good and I discovered the power of archetypes, of jungian archetypal psychology and the methodology of archetypal branding by Pearson and Mark.
My new book with all my reflections is going to be published in Italy on February 21th. The title is "Create! How to design a contagious communication (and make the world a better place)".
I have also a keynote that I'm presenting in english. You can find here the slides: http://www.slideshare.net/mirkopallera/create-how-to-design-contagious-communication-cristal
My next presentation will be at Davos (Switzerland). http://forumdavos.com/ I hope to see someone of you there.
If you are interested in contacting me you can find me here or on Facebook: http://www.ninjamarketing.it/author/mirko-pallera/
by the way I'm looking for publishers in different languages so if you are interested I can send you more information . very best to you
Jordan Reeves 50+
http://www.ted.com/aws
Laura Desmond 50+
Colin Brown
Lets use a better example in beer commercials. Alcohol is a substances that is constantly abused and negatively affects the lives of hundreds of thousands of people every year but I laugh and/or smile at almost every beer commercial I see.
The major point I'm trying to make is that advertising/marketing is to increase sales. If the product, service, or cause your advertising happens to do "good" (however you define it) then you sleep easier at night.
Thomas Anderson
For advertising to be a force for good, you'd have to do it for good first, and hope people can repay you some how.
(as I say this though, I hope my daughter has a nice career like yours!)
Thank you for asking the question!
Cherilyn DeVries
Yes, advertising has the power to educate, but to say that is actually does is a stretch. Education expands our thinking and our world, while the companies paying for the ads really want to narrow our focus to their product.
For small companies, I believe advertising is essential to connect customers with real needs with service providers. Large companies generally just use it to make us feel insecure and urge us to conform. Given large corporations' intentional overreach in our lives and our government, I do what I can to stay away from their insistence that I need them.
tina fosse
anna baba
Relevance, and help with making wise choices are absolutely the areas which need addressing, imo. May I ask how much ethical discussion goes on before it is decided to proceed with an advertising project? Or is it, as many think, really all money driven?
We know so much more about health now, maybe a rethink of what kind of ads should take priority is needed. I believe that companies who played along with this could earn serious respect - and we have to try to get away from the 'all big corporations are bad' mindset, which is just divisive.
Personally I would like to see the genius behind Coca Cola ads used - by that firm, even - to promote a healthy drink AS WELL. Then people would have a real choice. Ditto with other big brands selling small luxury goods. That's what we want, but there is also what our bodies need..
Guy Shrubsole
As we review in the report, there's compelling evidence that advertising, far from simply building brands as you state, boosts overall levels of consumption. That's to say, it encourages people to spend or borrow rather than save, or even work longer hours to earn more - in order to attain the sorts of materialist lifestyles that are being advertised to us. In a world of resource limits and an increasingly unstable climate, ever-increasing levels of material consumption are unsustainable. Advertisers often say they bear no responsibility for such big problems - 'we're merely selling what a client asks them to'; 'we have to rely on govt / other businesses / the consumer to shift behaviour and drive greener investment first'. Of course, pretty much every industry and every state has raised similar objections: 'we're only 2% of global emissions', 'someone else should lead'.
But as you say in an earlier post, advertising "...can shape public wants, desires, priorities and expectations." To that list I'd also add cultural values - an area that has seen a huge amount of social psychology research in recent decades. We argue in our report that advertising promotes materialistic values, and undermines pro-social and pro-environmental values.
If advertising wants to be a force for good in society, it needs to start thinking very hard about its indirect impacts. It's one thing for Starcom to (commendably) pilot its own carbon footprinting tool to measure the direct CO2 from crafting an ad campaign; but what about the additional CO2 caused by that ad boosting consumption?
amelia smith
Heathrow cabs
Nick Fitzhugh
In my view, advertising is when a company puts out information into the public domain about its products or services, so that if someone out there has need of that product they know where to acquire it; i.e.. to whom they can give their custom. However, I believe that this quaint notion has been slowly but inexorably overturned to be replaced by the new wave of "marketing", whose aim is to put messages into the public domain that try to convince us that we have a NEED for a company's product. Sometimes such messages will even go as far as to imply that our self esteem or social status depends critically on having this product, and sometimes even that it must be THIS YEAR'S model of the product! The aim of these messages, of course, is merely to encourage consumption; the products no longer to exist to serve the customer, but the consumer exists to serve the product producer - by endless consumption.
Not only is this situation not good for the environment - from the depletion of raw materials to produce products that are either entirely unnecessary or designed to be shortly thrown away and replaced - but it's not good for us either because, if we are susceptible to these marketing messages, we are pressured into a constant state of feeling incomplete.
I believe marketing consultants have a responsibility to redress this situation, and to use their own skills of persuasion back on their own clients - i.e. the product producers - to create a market reality where there is a healthier, more genuine, and more sustainable balance between what is being produced and what we really need in daily life. Let's start by remembering that our role in life is NOT just to consume!
jaimoe jeremiah
jaimoe jeremiah
We’ve created a platform (a passive social credit awards service...In other words, SMRC passively observes, generates and manages real value (credit) for EVERY Tweet, blog post, SMS, shared video-bookmark-link, comment, etc., that funds the most socially worthy charities (i.e. efficient, right-focus) in your name (or trade the credit points), while never exposing the identity of any member - GUARANTEED.
what the f$%ck is this? passive charities? worse than religious wars -- we need carlin, or maybe we can let this woman try to make a sistine chapel. just for the keeping artists employed advertising is one of the most important industries out there, hell without it vonnegut would have been a dentist. godamn i just read someone said advertising is immoral? where the hell am i? the declaration of indy was a goddamn ad. so is the bible. only kings can make the distinction between art and commerce and their ad was the divine right of themselves. informative ads are impossible because of the audience, not the ads. if these are the responses here of all places? -- Laura, just rook em into buying something they don't need. they deserve it. and make sure it is crap so they can see everyday the broken down pieces of thees broke ass ideas
Alex Berryhill
I am aware of a company, a start up, that looks to harness the value of the topics that people are passionate about, and assign a legitimate, monetary value to said topics, and donate that to charity. This works by having people, like yourselves, volunteer your social media accounts to be passively observed by the service, and for every bit of feedback you produce on anything, it donates 80% of the market worth to 5 charities that you have hand picked, IN YOUR NAME, allowing you to change the world in the way that you see fit. On top of the donation, the user also receives equal donation credits, exchangeable with for profits, additional tax credits, and/or rewards. On average, according to this system, people generate about $0.60/day to their charities, which is 219 dollars per year, so if 1 million people signed up, it would generate 219 million dollars a year towards human advancement.
With this, no longer would people see advertisements as a nuisance, but they would see them as an opportunity, wouldn't you say? Also, since cause marketing has a 2010 Cone Cause Evolution Study bench marked increase in sales, we can create a society that not only prospers charitably but fiscally. The name of the company is Social Market Research for Charity. http://sites.google.com/site/socialmarketresearchforcharity/
Will Germain
Will Germain
Will Germain
tina fosse
So really: Product information IS very important! But not to be found in ads which are paid for by the producer. Not in this (capitalistic, based on consume) system. There is no way to satisfy the producer as much as the consumer. One side is bound to "loose" and it will always be the consumer being told what he needs.
Advertisement is based on building up needs. No needs - no consume - no system as we know it. Without being told all day by ads what we need combined with the end of artificially raising fear we'd quickly realize how little it is we really require to lead a satisfied and rather happy life.
This can not be done by ...what..."green ads"? True information has to be disconnected from any monetary interests.
Katia Martin
Caroline Penca
Obviously, advertising is a business that is almost completely centered around the client's needs and wants, so if the client is paying to use an image of a woman that has been photoshopped down to nothing, then that's what they're going to get. I think that advertisers could take the initiative to suggest using more realistic images and back it up by showing how women may respond more positively to such images. But, as others have said, part of the responsibility lies with the companies themselves to do things like using more diverse people in their advertisements or to create products that are more environmentally friendly.
Also, like others have said, if a product is bad, it will not sell, and it is also illegal to be disingenuous in advertisements. While not everyone will follow these laws, if you see a company doing so, you can report it to the Better Business Bureau or, as someone else said, find their social media pages and voice your opinion. Most companies these days will do whatever they can to correct mistakes in order to save face. Finally, while I agree that advertisements can be disruptive when watching TV or watching videos on the internet, without them, the programming wouldn't cost as little as it does or be free (i.e. Youtube). Same thing goes with radio.
Aaron Wolf
Advertising that is truly respectful should give viewers full control to avoid the ad if they prefer, should reveal conflicts of interest explicitly, and not include any information or images that are completely unrelated to the idea or item being advertised.
For example, I would like to see a world in which the only ads that have music are ads for music or very closely related things. A food ad that includes music is inherently about eliciting emotions to bias the viewer. I know that a decent amount of clever music has been composed for ads, but still (and I'm a musician even)... But this is the ideal, and reality isn't going to get to this. The more we stop explicit ads, the more they'll just be interwoven in product placement and such... But that's why we need explicit markers of conflict of interest. I'd like to see a little symbol over the screen in every movie or TV show or internet video that reveals when the use of a product or idea was a paid placement.
As to being informative, that's fine if it really only goes as far as informing people. I generally hate ads, but I have actually appreciated learning about certain products when the ad is literally a focused description of a great product.
Gisela McKay 30+
I think the only ads I can think of that have been a "force for the good" have been anti-ads. In other words, ads designed to counter the effects of other ads, which seem like a giant waste of cash. If only the original ads had been held to some sort of standard, they wouldn't have run.
All I know is that now I want a house hippo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLG2JP0P5JE