The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Media Television Ad Spend

Advertising's alternative facts and the dull truth

By Lindsey Clay

February 6, 2017 | 5 min read

You’ll probably have heard the quote often attributed to Churchill (the politician, not the dog) that a lie can get half way around the world before the truth has put its pants on.

television

Churchill said that before social media – although Trevor Beattie has wonderfully reimagined this.

In our age of instant, unquestioning dissemination, the truth hasn’t even sleepily fumbled for the light switch let alone some pants before the lie has merrily gone global. Maybe the truth should just go commando. Maybe we need more naked truths.

Stand on stage and state with confidence and an amusing gif that Shagchat achieves the equivalent of the world’s entire radio audience every other minute and some of those listening will believe you, especially if it suits their agenda. They’ll want to believe you. No one likes cognitive dissonance; our confirmation bias prefers reaffirmation.

And why wouldn’t they believe you? Why would you say that if it wasn’t true? You’ve been invited to speak. You must know things others do not. You are in a position of trust and, after all, you believe it yourself. Things, as you are repeatedly told, are changing rapidly. And Shagchat told you that when you were skiing together. Why would they make stuff up?

Well, it is a horrible fact now writ large on the world stage that people twist the truth for competitive advantage and this is as true in trying to secure advertising budgets as it is in any other walk of life.

Look back through the various blogs and articles Thinkbox has written over the years and you will see that time and again they were written because someone has been misrepresenting or talking bollocks about TV and we needed to get the facts out there. Sometimes it was their own bollocks; sometimes they were spouting borrowed bollocks.

The challenges of communicating the truth won’t go away and one of the reasons for this is that sometimes the truth looks rather dull when standing next to the exciting, trembling but fallacious possibility.

The Leave and Trump campaigns were many things, but what they said and offered were anything but dull. Remainers and the professional media could throw as many facts as they liked at them. It ceased to matter, if it ever began to.

As the best advertising teaches us, emotion works better than rationality and emotional messages about taking back your country, changing your destiny etc. are simply more compelling. Thankfully advertising is regulated to ensure it is true – unless it is on the side of Boris’s bus.

But of course we shouldn’t give up calling out the bollocks. The Spicer-like alternative facts that bounce around the ad industry need challenging. The next tranche, I sense, will be about the marketing power of live streaming. Already we are seeing headlines that give it a disproportionate sense of importance.

For example, I’m sure 6.8 million unique users globally opening Twitter’s livestream of Trump’s inauguration was a record, but I’d say it is only significant for being relatively small. It’s about one episode of Emmerdale – except it isn’t because the Emmerdale audience is the average number of people in the UK watching in any given minute, not the total number of people in the world who ‘opened’ it however briefly.

I hope for three things:

That people in the ad industry make decisions and recommendations based on the facts.

That they work harder to separate them from the misinformation and alternative facts (the high-profile intervention by P&G’s Marc Pritchard last week over ‘murky’ goings on online will hopefully do wonders here).

That those who do peddle convenient nonsense are called out – caught with their pants down so to speak.

Lindsey Clay is the chief executive of Thinkbox

Media Television Ad Spend

More from Media

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +