Tricks of confidence

France’s equivalent of the Advertising Authority has taken a prime-time slot on France Télévisions to tell us how much we viewers appreciate, enjoy – love, even – the fruits of their labours.
We do? Is that a fact, now?
Pah!
Listen, chaps, I used to work in advertising once upon a time.  Gosh, there’s a revelation for you.  Since I’m in soul-baring mode, I might as well also admit that I have worked in internal communications within blue-chips and in communications strategy in organisations ranging from the thoroughly global to the decidedly particular,  and in media relations on both agency- and client-side. In addition to all that, I was a journalist – one who specialised in business and investment (much of which I actually managed to understand, just in case you were wondering).  All of which cumulatively adds up to a reasonable amount of knowledge of not only advertising but also how messages are transmitted in general.  And a group of overt persuaders motivated entirely by flagrant self-interest attempting to tell an audience that said audience appreciates what is done by the persuaders is – these days – tantamount to the MPs of England and Wales trying to convince us that they represent our interests as opposed to their own. A joke of the sickest kind, in other words – one that ultimately affects all of us.
On the other hand it is undeniable that these French creatives have been responsible for some of the most entertaining ads this century: the Evian babies, the Twingo campaign … In the cinema alone, advertising has nurtured and handed to the rest of us on a plate, duly freshly garnished for our edification such gloriously quirky talents as Etienne Chatiliez.  In fiction, British advertising has yielded Fay Weldon and Salman Rushdie among numerous others. All ex-advertising – but isn’t that the point: they’ve all moved on permanently.  All going on to use their talents in a more concentrated but also much more lasting way.
Anyway, thank you ad industry.  Gratitude is due.   Up to a point. Up to a point beyond which we don’t, can’t, won’t – and quite conceivably shouldn’t – go.  Thus, as for loving it:  no.
Advertising is essentially a confidence trick, the aim is to convince people that they want or even need something you, the advertiser, are trying to sell when more often than not the people don’t want or need what is on offer and in many cases can’t afford or ethically or in other respects justify the purchase of whatever it is. Not least, in order to fork out the vast number of Euros to pay for this self-promoting and self-deluding nonsense agencies are demonstrating that they’ve ripped off their clients even more than the clients already suspected. As the clients – or more likely their respective finance directors – will already regard agencies’ charges as exorbitant, this latest confidence trick is liable to give the FDs some useful ammunition when it comes to account renewal time, thereby further shrinking an already reduced and struggling sector. So advertising which has to advertise itself is a double confidence trick – one where the former clearly cancels out the other.  Nobody’s fooled, still less when the whiff of desperation turns into an overpowering stench – as it does in this ad for advertising itself.  So advertising’s latest ruse is almost certainly doomed to fall foul of the law of diminishing returns by means of an excess of far-from poetic licence.  Rats are being smelt, seen in the air and nipped in the bud*.  And my cup of crocodile tears runneth over … only it doesn’t, of course.  Who’d want to see anyone lose their livelihood, let alone anything else? Not me.

*Ref. from Fowler’s English Usage on figures of speech

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