Ad Land’s Truth Problem

I once had a creative director ask me, “Why do you care about this? You do realize we’re just paid to make shit up to sell shit?”

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

I’ve seen researchers and analysts asked to ignore or fabricate data, well-intentioned product marketers approach advertising as a way to compensate for product deficiencies by lying about them, and juries award work based on the creativity of the award submission (It would have been amazing if it had actually run!) If you’ve spent any time in ad land, chances are you’ve had the joy of watching all sorts of bullshit artists practice their art on each other.

A colleague captured the creeping cynicism seeping into our industry and agency cultures, confiding in a moment of despair, “You know this whole advertising thing is a joke, right?”

Having worked with plenty of ethical businesses to build successful, reality-based brands, I remain confident in and committed to the proposition that truth is the fundamental building block of brands. It is the canvas on which we paint when we use creativity to solve real world problems. To be sure, ‘the truth’ has been much abused by decades of political spin, PR talking points, and marketing BS. But only truth can forge trust. And only trust can fuel the communications, transactions, and, ultimately, relationships that drive world-class brands and companies forward.

Can we really know the truth? Isn’t truth just what dominant discourses and power players say is true? Isn’t the truth always a culturally and historically contingent social construction?

No. Fortunately, it’s not.

We live as embodied beings with evolved minds in human communities fully nested in an ancient world that’s all too real in its vastness and complexity. Our environment has undergone enormous change since we first started building our personal brands on the cave walls of Lascaux, but our social minds remain largely the same.

In my workshops and brand design practices, we work to surface the aesthetic, empirical, and moral truths at the heart of the strategic problems we are trying to solve. This process is essential if we hope to achieve alignment, collaborate constructively, and maybe even have some fun doing it.

So don’t despair. The truth is out there. It comes in three flavors. And I can prove it.

I. Aesthetic Truth

Creativity is novelty, right? Upending conventions. Avoiding tropes. Doing something original. Creativity viewed as iconoclastic self-expression leaves room for only one valid critique: “I’ve seen that before.” Only this take on creativity as irreverent novelty is false. Whether we’re naming a product or building a brand identity, the symbols and language we use are ancient, acting on perceptual systems that predate us by millennia. Pure novelty is, therefore, incoherent. And contrary to the cliche that “there are no wrong answers”, there are, indeed, objectively better and worse solutions for even the most apparently subjective or aesthetic design decisions.

II. Empirical Truth

By the end of February, 2021, nearly half a million Americans will have lost their lives to Covid-19. Many of us, myself included, don’t want this to be true. But reality doesn’t care much about what we choose to believe. We’re smart enough to identify perennial patterns in our world - the things we call facts - that occur with such regularity we can use them to accurately map the unknown and predict the future. Without these empirical truths, there can be no planning, no strategy, no science, only empty rhetoric and delusional politics. Whether it’s WMD or climate change, this tribal, wish-fullfilment approach leads to only one thing in the long-term - system failure.

III. Moral Truth

You don’t need to be a game theorist to know that people will eventually stop playing broken games that are stacked against them. Without fair play and transparency, markets stop working. Trust breaks down. All truth claims become suspect. And all stakeholders, from employees to customers, start seeing themselves as competitors locked in a zero-sum game. Since a brand is a promise to deliver life-enhancing value, without integrity a brand can’t keep its word. The most purposeful brands understand that putting good work into the world is inseparable from performing good works in the world. And some version of that truth is the moral of the stories they tell.