Ad land’s truth problem

A concerned creative director once asked me, “Why do you care about this? You do realize we’re just paid to make shit up to sell stuff?”

I’ve had media executives admit, “Sure, the numbers are real. They’re just not tied to anything I would, you know, confidently call real.”

If you’ve spent any time in ad land, dealing with everything from dubious client claims to shall we say hyper-creative agency award entries, chances are you’ve seen all sorts of bullshit artists practicing their art on each other.

But after almost two decades in this game, I’ve worked with plenty of ethical businesses and agency professionals who respect their customers and stakeholders. And I’ve learned that things built on vapor tend do a lot of harm before they fade into thin air. I remain confident in the proposition that it pays to be do the right thing, not just empirically, but morally. That may sound sanctimonious or, well, moralistic, but that’s only because we’ve become so alienated from the biological instincts governing our social behaviors.

Sound far fetched?

Check out some of the experimental work into fairness Frans De Waal has been doing with these little guys…

Ok, so that’s wild. These little guys would rather receive no payment at all than submit to unfairness (far from the ‘economic rationality’ and ‘individual self-interest’ baked into the remedial axioms of our economic and cultural systems.) Cooperation and fairness appear to be hardwired into our primate sociality. And it goes even older and deeper than that. Crows similarly refuse to get paid less for the same work. Alpha rats will let smaller rats win in play fights about a third of the time; if they don’t, no rats will play with them anymore. And elephants and whales seem to have arrived at similar cooperative systems despite their separate evolutionary paths. As de Waal points out, “To deny the evolutionary roots of human morality, would be like arriving at the top of a tower to declare that the rest of the building is irrelevant, that the precious concept of "tower" ought to be reserved for the summit.”

Since everything we do in marketing and advertising is a form of social signaling, the claims and promises we make, the behavioral modification systems we build, and the teams we bring together to do so are never free of moral dimensions.

The modern world, while having made great strides in creating more just systems of exchange and reward, has devised an ingenious solution to reducing the negative emotional and social impacts of unfairness - make sure the wronged party doesn’t perceive the wrong. Better yet, also hide the unfair advantage from those who benefit from it, lest they feel a chimpanzee-like bout of conscience and refuse to play the game. In short, divide and deceive. If a monkey (or consumer or vender or employee) doesn’t see the other monkey (or brand or company or employer) take more than their fair share, then there’s no problem, right? And if you make it easier for extractors to extract without feeling the impact of their actions on others, it’s even easier to keep broken games going without getting cucumbers thrown at you. Put a screen up between cucumber groups and grape groups, hide externalities and hidden costs, and use rhetoric to obscure inequities (the core function of political and PR talking points). And voila. All is well.

Only it’s not, because a lie is robbing someone of the truth and replacing it with a bland cucumber or one dressed up to look like a grape. In either case and on a long enough timeline it leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouths. Especially for those being asked to deceive. As Frans de Waal notes, this is far from a natural state of things. “You need to indoctrinate empathy out of people in order to arrive at extreme capitalist positions.”

At Ancient LLC, our clients and collaborators believe that our commercial actions and communications have a karmic (that is, long-term, systemic, predictably causal) impact on the lives of people and societies. This impact can create a karmic surplus by championing actions, ideas, and causes that ennoble the lives of millions and transform culture for the better. Or they can create a karmic deficit by distorting the truth, perpetuating toxic stereotypes and ideologies, disguising or externalizing harmful side-effects, or creating extractive and addictive systems that run counter to users’ ultimate self-interest. Ancient wisdom and sound business practice counsel that deceiving your customers ends badly on a long-enough timeline. So a commitment to moral truth is nothing short of the minimal condition for the growing and nurturing of trust. Without which there would be no culture, let alone commerce.

In the end…is the beginning

A conviction that aesthetic, empirical, and moral truth are to be discovered and not just constructed, is central to creating a consensus reality on which we may build lasting relationships. With our teams and partners, with our audiences and customers, with our communities and cultures. A reality where the highest quality things and ideas can compete and win in fair and transparent marketplaces. A fair and just reality vs. a cynical power fantasy.

Truth matters.

That’s the core thesis of an article I wrote about advertising’s tortured relationship with reality. In light of the cultural disintegration of The Real that’s taking place in America right now, let it serve as a moralist’s warning about the dangers of bullshit and a hopeful vision of a different, more inclusive, more just reality we can all work to resurface and reimagine together.