For ad men, that’s pretty good.

The book is called The Age of Persuasion, How Marketing Ate Our Culture. I’m totally enjoying it. But here’s what I’m talking about. In the preface, he reflects on the radio show he launched in 1995:

In the summer of 1995, I launched a twenty-five radio series, O’Reilly on Advertising, on CBC’s Radio One, eager to fill what I saw as a huge information void. Of the thousands of books, films, courses, and programs about advertising and marketing, few, if any, were created by people within the industry for people outside the industry.

Then turning to his more recent radio show, he adds:

This program has allowed me to fill another curious void: the thousands of works critical of the impact of advertising and marketing on modern life and culture are created, almost without exception, by people who have never worked within the advertising business.

Wow. If true, that is totally significant. it means that people who work in the advertising business don’t criticize themselves, the techniques of their trade or the affects they have on our communities. Ever. Wow. That is a huge criticism that O’Reilly almost, but not quite, made of advertisers. ²

The point I’m trying to angle towards is this. There is no one better suited to sell us on sales, than a salesperson. And advertising is sales. So there is no one better suited to sell us on advertising, than an advertiser. Well… maybe a salesperson. But do you get my point? Advertisers everywhere are advocates for their various clients now and then and once in a while. But advertisers everywhere are advocates for their jobs, their careers, and their industry, all of the time.

The question is, what are we buying?

In order to draw out this comparison, first consider that as of December 10th, reporters and opinion makers were still largely guessing that Tiger Woods wouldn’t lose any sponsors. Well he did. Many of them, I think. Companies became afraid of being associated with Tiger Woods. Wow. Now some didn’t drop him, they just suspended him, I believe. Probably, and I’m totally making this up, some of his sponsors just pretended to drop him and made him sign carefully crafted legal agreements and then forced him to adopt a 9-step process to rebuild his public image.

It is notable that sponsors dropped or suspended Woods in such a short period of time. If you do a site search for “Tiger Woods” on the Calgary Herald website you get a list of 165 articles. Now these articles are listed chronologically. And 12 of those articles occur before they reported on the infamous car crash on November 27th with this article: Woods’ wife rescues golfer from smashed up car. By December 3rd, the Herald published: Sponsors willing to give troubled woods a mulligan. By the 1oth of December the Herald had written: Sponsors begin to shun woods. By February 22nd there had been roughly 150 articles including: Dalai Lama weighs in on Tiger Woods. ¹

Some might argue that this is evidence that the Calgary Herald wastes time and resources writing about socially insignificant issues. Some would argue that the energy that the Herald puts towards this issue is evidence that they lack journalistic integrity. But these issues are not mine today. Perhaps I will quickly note, however, that since these articles are about Tiger Woods, they are actually affecting, even constructing, the public opinion about Tiger Woods. They report the news and they make the news all at once. But this is a digression.

The point, and the point of comparison, is that an individual’s billion dollar brand was tarnished so much that in the span of a couple of weeks, his sponsors had to either drop him, suspend him, pretend to drop him, or at the very least, hold tense stakeholder meetings and press conferences. Wow. Now try to imagine what could possibly happen to the Olympics in order for that to happen. It’s almost impossible to imagine. The brand is too diversified. It’s too secure. And partly, I would argue, the public opinion shapers, like the Calgary Herald, have too much invested in the Olympics and the Olympic machine. When the Woods scandal came out, the companies involved with Woods pulled their ads featuring him. But if there was Olympic scandal involving individuals or teams, they would just switch individuals and teams. There is nothing that could happen that could cause the Olympic brand, in toto, to crash that hard, that fast. Even if some athletes became embroiled in some kind of publicity disaster, there would still be thousands of others. And even if some entire teams, or a few countries of teams became publicly toxic, there would still be entire other countries of teams to cushion the brand.

Of course, knowing this, it’s no wonder that the IOC carefully developed, and then enclosed, and then protected that brand within a vast legal framework in order to sell it to the highest bidders. How better to support the cause of amateur sport and international peace & cooperation?

And it’s not just me. Fair Trade is an important part of coffee culture in Victoria, and beyond. Of course, there are many people who don’t care about these things. There are even those that think that the price controls of Fair Trade coffee is a ruthless attack on market capitalism.

But the vast majority of people that think about Fair Trade coffee, think it’s cool. On my view, you have to understand the coffee trade in the context of four hundred years of colonization to really see why it’s so important. Coffee grown in South America, for example, is grown as a cash crop by regions that have suffered centuries of invasion, debt incurred by corrupt regimes imposed by colonial interests, civil war caused by the resultant political instability, disease, genocide, religious persecution, and human rights atrocities that still continue to this day. So desperate communities will grow coffee beans at great social and environmental cost and sell them for very little. Four centuries of colonial abuse has taken away the ability of many communities to negotiate a better price.

Years ago, some clever do-gooders thought they might be able to help some coffee growing communities to negotiate a better price for their coffee.¹ These do-gooders wanted to get a price for these communities that allowed them to save and build and to do more than live in abject poverty. They reasoned that if some coffee buyers shared the same values they did, that they would pay a little more so that others could live a better life. But how would customers know whether they could trust that the extra money was actually going to the farmers?

The solution was to create an arm’s length third party to assess and approve trade scenarios to certify that communities were actually getting a fair price. Now the term, “fair price,” is an interesting one. Free market purists will scoff at the term, arguing that a price is set by demand and supply and the willingness of individuals to pay. Free market purists will argue that there is no such thing as a “fair price.” But pretty much every other sane human will agree intuitively about the fairness of pricing, and this is all that counted.

So here we are in Victoria, years later, and there are many coffee shops that will serve only certified Fair Trade coffee. The certifications come from Transfair or, I think, a variety of twenty other international certifying bodies. And most coffee drinkers have heard of fair trade coffee. And this idea, “fair trade,” has become a valuable part of the brand of any company doing business in coffee.

And here’s where it gets interesting. It gets interesting because every coffee shop wants to be thought of as community oriented, and socially responsible and a good global citizen.

Starbucks, for example, will take out one page ads in the Globe and Mail telling readers about the way they serve Fair Trade coffee. And when I find myself at a Starbuck’s and the barista asks me whether I want dark or medium, I say, “oh, just give me the Fair Trade one.” The barista will inevitably say that they’re both Fair Trade. Now, inwardly, I’m smiling when this happens. Because I know that Starbucks only brews certified Fair Trade coffee one day a month.² So then I say ask them to show me the label and what certifying body says its actually Fair Trade. And the poor embarrassed, and someone surprised, barista has to admit that it’s just Starbucks that says it’s fairly traded.

And that’s the difference between certified Fair Trade and fair trade or fairly traded. See, any free market capitalist can say the price they pay to cash crop exporters is fair. Anyone can say they serve fairly traded coffee. Yup, we bought this stuff from a family who couldn’t make the mortgage payments and were going bankrupt from medical costs and whose child was born deformed from the pesticides and fertilizers they are required to use, in order to pay the militia that was trained by the CIA – but don’t worry, we payed them a fair price.

This is why the third body certification process is so important. This is why I ask the barista to look for the TransFair logo. See Starbucks may very well pay all of their suppliers a good price. But unless they get certified, I don’t trust it. And I think they’re creating an illusion when their ad has the TransFair logo on it because they brew the certified Fair Trade coffee one day a month. This is pretty effective branding because most consumers don’t pay enough attention to see through this. This is also effective internal branding, since most of their employees even believe that all of their coffee is FairTrade. It’s a very convenient omission.

Now, in their defense, it’s not just Starbucks that does this. Actually that’s not a defense. But it is a dispersal of guilt. Well whatever. The point is that lots of coffee shops serve fairly traded coffee. When pressed on this issue, many coffee shops train their employees to say that they don’t serve certified Fair Trade coffee in order to pay the farmer more. The reasoning goes like this: since the certification body has infrastructure costs to pay, the certification process is more expensive, and that cost takes money away from the farmer.

I think this is unfortunate. I think it’s a fancy way to undermine people’s confidence in the certification process, while getting the benefits of the brand value that the very same certification process created. It sounds to me like the very same argument put forward by companies that claim governments shouldn’t regulate, because it costs the consumer.

Well the answer to that question is too long ¹ for this post. So instead what I’ve tried to do here is outline a few of the challenges facing the modern journalist by summarizing six challenges of publishing in this modern context.

Six challenges

First of all, newspapers are a businesses. They have clients. And their clients are businesses that want to advertise. But they lose these clients when the newspaper promotes views and says things that don’t align with the bottom line interests of said clients. So an oil company based out of Calgary, for example, has a fiduciary duty to be opposed to policies that limit their profitability. That in turn means that they can’t spend money on advertising with broadcasters or publishers that promote policies that hurt their profitability. And that means that journalists have to write in ways that don’t make their editors choke on their ties.² I call this the challenge of compliance.

Second, this is happening in an internationalized context where newspapers are losing market share and profitability because of “the google”, or the “interweb”. So the pressure on journalists to say something of more interest and value than say, a blogger, is immense. I call this the challenge of attention.

Third, issues are complicated. Climate science is complicated. Social policy is complicated. Police brutality is complicated. Did so-and-so “die”? Or were they “killed”? This is sometimes a very tricky business. And given the possibility that someone with money or an agenda might sue you for libel, it’s easier to just write about the sports. In a complicated world it can be very hard to find out the truth or reasonable approximations of it. I call this difficulty, the challenge of integrity.

If finding the truth and understanding complex situations is difficult, try doing it on a timeline. And that’s the kicker: publishing for a newspaper means saying something on time. The traditional newspaper has a press that runs on a rigid schedule for economic reasons and reasons of scale. And because newspapers, and the old people that read them, hate trees and don’t understand the interweb-thingy, they still produce content on this rigid schedule. This is the challenge of production.

Fifthly, the pressure for journalists to understand a situation, produce some engaging copy, say something non-threatening for their advertisers, not get sued by a person in the story, get it to print on time all the while bearing the weight of the future of the newspaper, is intense. The financial future of all the staff is on their shoulders and the weight must be spine-crushing. After all, if Canwest fails to avert their bankruptcy and the whole empire tanks, the Aspers won’t lose their retirement savings or their house. Contra a common capitalist myth, it’s actually the employees that bear most of the real risk of the Canwest empire crumbling. Employees that have moved their families and invested in mortgages or are carrying the debt of their journalism degrees can’t afford for Canwest to go broke. So all of the myriad staff that it takes to design and print a newspaper, distribute it and find advertisers all rely on the content produced by the reporters. That’s a lot of pressure. The reporters are accountable to their fellow employees in a major way. I call this the challenge of positive-thinking-will-hopefully-keep-this-boat-floating-until-we-all-pay-our-mortgages.

And finally and perhaps most significantly, journalists need to worry about their own jobs. I actually don’t know this for certain. But this is the word on the street. Journalists, apparently, are losing there jobs. And, apparently, it’s not just Canwest that has been losing employees. So it turns out that reporters need to keep their editors very very happy. So, in deference to the first challenge, I also call this the challenge of compliance.

In Summary

1. The challenge of compliance (for editors)
2. The challenge of attention
3. The challenge of integrity
4. The challenge of production
5. The challenge of positive-thinking-will-hopefully-keep-this-boat-floating-until-we-all-pay-our-mortgages.
6. The challenge of compliance (for reporters)

This guy knows things about the future of journalism. Actually, he also has some good tips on just writing a blog. ³

Of course, that wasn’t enough to convince me of his points of view and eventually he said, “Meteorologists can’t predict the weather next week, how can scientists claim to predict global warming?” Now when he said this, some kind of alarm bell starting to ring deep down in my brain stem. Maybe he was just a little too slick. Or maybe, since I was so often speaking from a script, I was in a heightened state of script awareness. So at that point, I fell out of my own script and stuck out my hand and introduced myself. And he introduced himself. His name was Tim Ball.

We had an animated conversation about peer reviewed publishing, the dimensions of relative objectivity in science, global cooling, and socialism. Actually he accused me of being a socialist. And that was when my moment of glory came to pass in the form of a question I would ask in return. See, when he accused me of being a socialist I was provoked first to a moment of confusion – it just struck me as a non sequitur. But after the confusion, came clarity. And I asked him, “Do you work for the Fraser Institute?”

I still remember that moment and I remember exactly where we were standing – corner of Government and Yates in front of Eddi Bauer.

His eyes widened a little and he stepped back. Pointedly, he said no. I told him that equating concern for global warming with socialism sounded like something the Fraser Institute or the Heritage Foundation might do. He mumbled something and walked away. I quickly made some notes about the exchange, including writing down his name and went on with my day.

But that night I did a name search online for ‘Tim Ball’. Then I did a name search for ‘Tim Ball’ on the Fraser Institute website. And maybe he wasn’t an employee but I did find his name on lot’s of their communications. I was so excited! I met an important person who was clearly a hired gun for climate change denial and made his cover on one try! It was easy.

But unfortunately, many reporters and journalists have found him convincing over the years. Unfortunately, many so-called journalists continue to find him interesting. As of today, he’s still listed on the Fraser Institute website:

This is how his bio reads on the Fraser Institute website:

Dr. Tim Ball, one of the first Canadians to hold a Ph.D. in climatology, wrote his doctoral thesis at the University of London (England) using the remarkable records of the Hudson’s Bay Company to reconstruct climate change from 1714 – 1952. He has published numerous articles on climate change and its impact on the human condition. Dr. Ball has served on numerous committees at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels on climate, water resources, and environmental issues. He was a professor in the geography department at the University of Winnipeg before retiring. He has written a regular column on weather in the agricultural magazine. Country Guide, for 14 years. He is currently working as an environmental consultant and public speaker based in Victoria and has written, with Dr. Stuart Houston, 18th Century Naturalists on Hudson Bay, a book on the science and climate of the fur trade (McGill-Queens University Press, 2003).

But this is how he’s described in James Hoggan’s recent book, Climate Cover Up, The Crusade to Deny Global Warming:

There are few “skeptical scientists” with as little actual expertise and as much ambition as the Canadian geography professor Dr. Timothy Ball. Never a climate scientist per se, Dr. Ball quit his position as an associate professor at the University of Winnipeg in 1995, apparently ending an academic career that featured a lifetime output of just four peer-reviewed journal articles, none of which addressed atmospheric science. Yet ten years later, Ball-the-climate-expert seemed to be everywhere – on the radio, in the newspapers, on the lecture circuit, even testifying before a committee in the Canadian parliament.

Turns out that Tim Ball is paid by the Friends of Science that is funded through the University of Calgary Science Education Fund, set up by Barry Cooper who is friends with Stephen Harper, which is funded by the Oil patch. He’s also connected to the National Resources Stewardship Program, Tom Harris with APCO Public Relations, High Park Advocacy Group, Canadian Gas Association and the Canadian Electricity Association. He’s effectively a paid mouthpiece with fewer credentials than he and the Fraser Institute claims he has. But I met him and he’s quasi famous and so I guess I met an almost famous guy! And I made him. That was my moment of glory.

Then I scored the articles, on a scale of -10 to +10, on the following criteria:

How many soundbites are from libertarian, big-business think tanks? How many soundbites are from published scientists who work in the field of climatology? How many soundbites challenged the scientific consensus that climate change is caused by humans? How many soundbites encouraged or supported the notion that Canada ought to meet it’s carbon emission reduction goals? How many soundbites create confusion about the fact of climate change? What is the educational and informational value of this article? Is it evidence based?

Conclusions

All scores range from -10 to +10, where a positive score is a good article and a negative score is a bad article. This score is than multiplied by the word count to factor in the relative volume of the article. The scores are then added. If the sum total is a positive score than the Calgary Herald has been publishing good and informative articles. If the sum is negative, than the Herald has been publishing bad articles.⁴

Only three article scored in the positive end of the spectrum. Interestingly, the articles that were better in terms of their content were generally the shortest articles. There is one exception to this: the first article (and the shortest at only 117 words) scored a minus five. The average article length was 578 words. After factoring for the article length, the final average value of the articles from the Calgary Herald on the topic of climate change, on a scale of -10 to +10, is -4. Which sucks.⁵

The total negative points by the seven bad articles came to: -27369
The total positive points by the three good articles came to: 5404
The grand total is: -21965
The average value of each article is: -2197
The average article length: 578 words
The average value of each article: -4

Take climate change for example. The fact of climate change, by itself, is not perceived as a threat by Big Oil and their bottom line. But public opinion and the subsequent possibility of government taxation and regulation is a perceived threat by Big Oil and their profit margin. So organizations like the Conference Board of Canada, C.D. Howe and the Fraser Institute step forward to disrupt public opinion.

The first step is to get air time. To do this they call up their media buddies with the National Post or Cross-Country Checkup. Either by getting quoted directly or by influencing the analysis of the overworked, job-threatened and under-educated reporter, the underlying message and the framework for that message gets public exposure.

The second key ingredient is to pretend to be trustable. This happens through the use of expert titles and heavy reference to the number of researchers and academics employed by the think-tank. Crucially, they’re usually economists or communications people, but they never say this. The representative will generally pretend, and Rex Murphy will pretend along with him, that they are all experts in climate change science. Add to this the years of branding by the National Post and Cross-Country Checkup that they’re impartial and authoritative news sources serving our democracy and you get a potent recipe for believability. And this brings me back to why I think Rex Murphy is a jackass. He creates a call in show, branded for everyday Canadians, but brings in well paid representatives from right-wing think tanks to represent the wealthiest and biggest businesses in the country. He poses as a show for the people. But it’s not.

With this access to a trusting public ear the key message has propogated: climate change and it’s causes are uncertain. The underlying message has been confusion. The result is a public opinion that we shouldn’t jeopardize our mortgages and our jobs and our habits of consumption. This brings me to the December edition of FOCUS and a great article by Gene Miller. Rex Murphy has perhaps too eagerly defended Big Oil and too eagerly added his voice of dissent to the environmental movement. Rex calls the movement Big Green. Miller says:

“Big Green?” Those the ones associated with Big Feminism, Big Peace, Big Anti-Land Mines, Big Racial Equality and Big Anti-Child Slavery?

…you sound like the South before Lincoln, or the British before Gandhi. You sound like the flatearthers in Calgary. You sound like some gaseous table-pounder bellowing about how good-paying jobs in the oil-patch now are worth more than some speculative issues that maybe our great grandkids will have to deal with—woo-woo stuff like the bankrupting relocation of coastal infrastructure around the globe, global loss of freshwater, global loss of arable land, global desertification, the migration north of a couple of billion people, and the end of national boundaries and the nation-state. Deal or no deal, Rex?

Actually, we won’t be getting our energy from Alberta within 25 years anyway (my guess); and red deer will wander through the silent, empty office canyons of downtown Calgary. (Take oil out of the Calgary economic equation and the city folds like a suit from Kresge’s.) The world by then will be operating on a mixed-source energy regime that conspicuously excludes oil.

Miller is great. Partly what makes his article such a great example of a solid communications strategy is that he first focuses on the environmental and moral considerations of ignoring global warming. He then reconsiders his argument from an economic perspective for the sake of those that only understand these issues through the lens of economy. Stephen Harper and Rex Murphy seem to think that the economy has greater reality than our environment or climate. Miller, acknowledging their psychological impediments, attempts to parse his message in a way that they will understand.

In the wild of human to human interactions, more meaning is made than can be understood. It’s air and water. It’s simply everywhere. And whether we try to understand and rationally consider the currents of meaning that flow around and through us or not, there is more meaning than we can ever comprehend. The meaning shapes us. It animates us. So when someone says, “that’s not what I meant!” or “that’s doesn’t logically follow from what I said!” it might not matter. It is entirely possible for the meanings we create to be beyond our intent and within our responsibility.

Some of you will find this obvious. Others might find this to be a head scratcher. There are, of course, obvious legal examples. When you enter into a legal or written contract, it doesn’t matter what you intended by saying or writing such-and-such. What matters is what the legal meaning of the words are. These legal meanings are largely out of your hands. We hire lawyers and judges to sort through the words and figure out the meanings. This is not to say that they aren’t interested in intentions. They are. But in the end, you can be found to be legally responsible for meanings you never intended.

There are also obvious non-legal examples. In the context of a WordPress conference, you might intend to be speaking about adding pages, but if you use the language of posts, then you will be misunderstood and/or corrected. The extent to which you are misunderstood and/or change your behaviour is entirely your responsibility. You can’t expect hundreds of thousands of WordPress users to adopt your conventions, no matter how correct they seem to your personal logic.

But it’s not just  WordPress, or Canadian law, or an analytic philosophy lecture on Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. One might run into these meaning regimes and their pre-existing meanings in any given community. We will encounter meaning regimes in our families and our intimate relationships. We can’t simply ask everyone else to get on board our intended meanings without sometimes being willing to do the same. We share language and we negotiate the conventions and meanings of the terms. The catch is that the more fixed a given community or meaning regime is, the less negotiation there is. Intentions be damned, you will be responsible for your unintended meanings.

So I think this explanation of how and why I think the ad is racist is really for: 1) sympathetic readers who see the ad as clearly racist but can’t say why it is, or who perhaps are interested in a different take on it, 2) sympathetic readers who think the ad might be racist but aren’t sure if it is, 3) sympathetic readers who want to understand why the ad is racist but, try as they might, just can’t really see it, 4) unsympathetic readers who think I’m crazy but are still curious about the world and are legitimately interested in the views of others, and sometimes even can change their mind.

The tagline: “GREAT MEXICAN TASTE, WITHOUT THE RUNS”

So the implication of this tagline is that Mexican food gives people diarrhea. And food is made by people. And food is an essential part of culture. Food is also an important way that we racialize people. And perhaps most importantly, Mexican food is invented, mostly, by Mexicans. The thing is that you can’t tell stories about an entire people’s food without also telling stories about those people. So Mexicans are directly implicated in this. And the implication is basically that Mexicans give people the shits.

While many tourists travel to Mexico and have an experience of diarrhea, it’s patently false that all Mexican food gives people the runs. Some readers might think that the tagline is not a universal generalization; it is saying simply that some (not all) mexican food gives people the runs.

But this weaker and more generous reading of the tagline is disingenuous. The reason is that the act of positioning and repositioning yourself in a market place is a common branding practice. The point is not to reposition your organization against some of the Mexican food. The whole point behind the act of repositioning is to be seen as different from most Mexican food. The point is to occupy a unique space in the marketplace. And everyone has a sense for this. Thus a tagline that suggests that this restaurant is unique or different from the vast majority of Mexican restaurants is, in this case, suggesting that the vast majority of Mexican food gives people the runs. The sad fact is that this stereotype already exists among many North Americans and so this kind of racism plays heavily on existing racist ideas.

More then playing on existing ideas, this kind of statement would not be racist without the context of racism that it’s operating in. So for example, imagine an ad for a German restaurant that had the tagline, “GREAT GERMAN TASTE, WITHOUT THE RUNS”. This would have a similar humour about it. And this tagline would be similarly memorable. But it would also be a little odd. That’s because there is no cultural story and no racial stories that the tagline is relying on. And while Germans do suffer from a kind of racism now and then here in North America, it’s on an entirely different level from the kind of racism that Mexicans suffer from. ¹

This is how meaning is made. The meaning of our words and images and sounds that we produce, rely heavily on the contexts and cultures and languages that they are situated in. If I privately call my gay lover a fag, it’s really different than if I publicly call my prime minister a fag. Same words, vastly different meanings. And the meaning that is made also depends on the hearers. And writers of ads have a duty to ensure that the words that they write don’t contribute to the images, stereotypes, and falsehoods that propagate demeaning and derogatory constructions of an entire race, culture, gender, nationality, sexuality, ethnicity, class or religious practice.

The ugly meanings that this tagline is both relying on and creating, include ²:

• Mexican food gives people the shits
• Mexican food is dirty
• Mexicans are dirty

If the ad isn’t intended to be racist, then how can it be racist?

The short answer to this question is simply to say that intentional racism is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for racism. So it’s a common and important practice to distinguish between intentions and impacts when assessing whether a particular act or a particular artifact is racist or not. And it’s widely held that while intentions are interesting, it’s much more important to consider the impacts. Considering the impact this ad has on Mexicans is one important test for racism actually. It is common, for example, for people of a dominant culture or dominant race, to not notice they myriad subtle and not-so-subtle acts of racism. Probably most white Canadians who read this ad, don’t see or experience the tagline as racist. But none of this is evidence that the ad is not racist. The impacts of racism are most often felt by those who it is about.

They’re making a joke – how can humour be racist?

The humour card isn’t cool anymore so I won’t spend much time on it. Suffice to say that this kind of thing is usually more funny for the dominant class of people and since many obviously racist jokes are considered funny by some bigot, somewhere, this question of whether something is racist is totally orthogonal to the question of whether something is humourous.

They’re selling Mexican food so why would they be racist against Mexicans?

This is an interesting question! This is really why I was moved to photograph the ad in the first place. Branding and advertising have a history for playing on this kind logic:

1. People have racist ideas
2. We want these people to be our customers
3. We will use their ideas to reposition ourselves as unique and memorable, even if it’s at the expense of entrenching these racist ideas
4. We will do this because it’s not our job to make the world just but it is our job to get customers

But the tagline is true some of the time.

Maybe, but it’s implying that this is true most of the time. And that’s messed up

This is a good ad. I love the copy. It’s folksy – the language is down to earth. Heck, it could be my mom talking, the voice of the ad is that good.

“Fact is, truth is an essential part of any successful ad campaign. Smart advertisers have known this for years. That’s why the advertising industry created the Canadian Code of Advertising Standards. For more than 40 years, the Code has set standards for acceptable advertising in Canada. It helps ensure that the ads you see are truthful, fair and accurate. Check it out for yourself. Because the more you know about advertising, the more you get out of it.”

The ASC Code apparently exists to help advertisers, especially the not so smart ones. I guess the free market isn’t smart enough to regulate itself, so it needs a little help so that advertisers tell the truth. I haven’t read the ASC Code yet. And I’m here and now committing to reviewing it. I look forward to it. This particular ad assures me that ads in Canada are “truthful, fair and accurate”. But there is some small, cynical part of me that wonders if this would be worth advertising for if it was actually the case. I struggle with this kind of cynicism though because I do believe in education through advertising. Gosh, I even believe in advertising! But when I really ask myself, if ads are fair, I balk. True, sure. The best propaganda is always true. Let’s raise our standards though shall we? Truth is not enough.

If you don’t already trust ads, will one more ad help?

The question might be, do ads help us to live better lives? Or perhaps, do ads make us smarter? Wiser? These are reasonable expectations. Or the question could be framed on the flip side. Do ads make us stupid? Do they lie to us, despite being true?

This is why the language of “fair” is curious to me. This is a higher standard than true, and if ads are fair that is really interesting. Of course, the ASC might have a very low expectation of fair. What they mean by fair could be really weak – like, it could simply mean legal. Or, even worse, it could simply be another term for true. That would be somehow irresistibly funny since this ad would then be propaganda for the ad industry. It would then be meta-propaganda! It’s a bit of a trust issue isn’t it. If you don’t already trust ads, will one more ad really help?

To learn more about the Code, visit www.adstandards.com or call their recorded toll free information line at 1-877-656-8646. I’m going to.