Propagandium has a love hate relationship with advertising. Because advertising both builds and destroys great things. It is both the ultimate whore and the wisest man. In our modern society there is no way around it. Propagandium tries to unravel how advertising came to be what it is today and how to best live with it.

Advertising is all around us. Ok, there are still places on earth where it’s not omnipresent, but only because these places are almost devoid of people. People with money, that is. The more people you have with even higher amounts of money to spend, the more advertising you’ll have. This is why you encounter over 10,000 instances of advertising a day. The most of you will have a computer, a television set and a microwave. You listen to music, you watch movies and you eat food. You’re consumers. Nothing wrong with that, consummation in it’s pure form gives us joy.

The vast majority of you will visit places where many other people aggregate. Roads, train stations, city centers, malls. Even television could be seen as a place where many people meet at once. What wonderful places to spread a message! Through large billboards, posters, signs and television spots you can tell these people what your message is about. For instance: you could let the whole world know you love your partner. It would cost you a few billion dollars to do so, but it’s possible.

Advertising is expensive and therefore must at least generate enough response to justify it’s costs. This is true for advertisements of non-profit organizations, states, political organizations and most of all commercial organizations. All have a message to sell. With the first three the message usually is an idea. With commercial advertising it’s usually an actual product. All these organizations can be seen as producers.

Producers would love to tell you their message personally. Unfortunately that will cost a lot of manpower. Manpower is expensive. If one person could reach one person per two minutes -this is nearly impossible, but for the sake of argument- and tell them your message, he would reach 240 people a day - on a eight hour per day workload. Let’s say you pay him twenty dollars an hour. Per person reached this will cost you 66 cents. Most mass advertising will cost you roughly 5 cents per person reached. (Or better said: per person that could possibly be reached.) The more people you’d like to reach, the more money it will cost you.

A good example of personal versus mass communication is a US Presidential campaign. The candidates try to meet as many people as they can, but out of the total electorate it’s still a very small percentage that they actually meet. Most US residents know their candidate through television. If a candidate would want to shake every possible eligible person’s hand for five seconds, he’d be continually shaking hands for the next 31 years.

Over the last century the mass market expanded rapidly. This forced producers to reach their potential costumers in a different way, since it was no longer possible to reach them all personally. The mass media brought a solution for this problem. Advertising or propaganda gave producers an opportunity to expand their voice, to reach ever increasing amounts of people. Propaganda is now a deviled word, but it’s basically the same thing as advertising. While advertising has been around for a long time, it really started picking up in the 50’s with the introduction of the tv and has been evolving quickly ever since.

Advertising has become a strange breed of communication, marketing, psychology and design. Though you can learn one of these things on many an institution, hardly ever are they all taught in one study. The result is that advertising people hardly ever have enough skills to cover all the bases that are required to do their job well. There’s especially a large gap between the marketers and the designers. Both claim that the other has no knowledge of what the other one is doing. Which is often true. A good creative is basically a marketer who can design. That means you have to have not one, but two skill sets. That’s why good creatives are rare, and partly why most advertising doesn’t work: it’s either well designed without a clear message or it looks bad and delivers a very straightforward message.

But the main reason why the vast majority of advertising is bad is because of the producers. Producers are usually very self-centered. They have very little interest in their costumers.

Most producers only see costumers as a necessary evil: in order to sell products you need people to buy them, other than that they should be happy with what we give them. Producers hardly ever realize that they are consumers themselves, that consumers are people, not numbers. They get outraged when other companies treat them the way they treat their own costumers. Yet they do not see that they do exactly the same thing.

In the advertising business producers are called clients. As said before advertising is a breed of communication, marketing, psychology and design. Almost everybody knows a little bit about these things. But not enough to make great advertising and therefore they hire people who are more specialized in it. Compare it to having heart surgery: you know where and what your heart is, that it should work properly in order to survive, yet you’d prefer a specialized surgeon to do the operation for you. Unfortunately for creatives the same amount of trust most of you put in the skills of your doctors and scientists, you do not put in them. Can you imagine telling your doctor that he shouldn’t operate on the liver but on your bladder instead? Yet this happens in the advertising business all the time.

Clients hardly ever realize that advertising is not about them. It’s about their costumers and how the client can be of assistance to them. Generally clients think that stating “I’m Producer buy my Product” is enough. They don’t realize that the ad is read by potential customers that want to be informed. Thus they need information. Only by giving the right information and the right amount of information, you can effectively persuade anyone to buy your product, without having the persuaded person feeling tricked. And
he’ll be thankful for it, which is expressed through costumer loyalty.

Clients generally underestimate their costumers. They always want their advertising to be dumbed down so everybody can understand it. Partly this is good, because that way you’ll reach the bottom 10% of your target group and you can be sure that everybody will understand your message. What clients forget that this dumbing down will offend the top 33% of their target group. People don’t like it when you treat them as idiots. Besides it’s hard to be subtle if you want everybody to understand. So the quality of the message suffers.

Sometimes advertising is great. I’m sure everybody can recall an ad that touched them, that made them smile or laugh or think. In these instances the client will have stood out of the way of the creative. The creative on his end will have put both his skill sets to full use, in order to get the message of the client across in the most efficient way possible. Making great advertising is a combination of finding the essential truth behind the product and conveying this truth to the people that might benefit from it.

That’s also where things go wrong. Most of the time the creative and the client cannot identify what the essential truth of their product is. Resulting in spreading the wrong message. Then there is the problem of identifying the right target group. The wrong people are targeted, resulting in tremendous waste and annoyance with the people that where unjustly targeted.

Then there’s the consumers themselves. Because we are consumers we are searching for things to consume. We’d rather consume something of good quality than something of bad quality. But usually the best quality will cost quite a bit of money and we have to settle for the product with the best quality/price ratio. That’s why there are different categories of products. The cheap product with low quality, the middle priced products with average quality and the best quality products with steep prices.

Unfortunately there are companies that try to sell products with lower quality for higher prices. Usually these companies don’t last long. After one or more disappointments the consumer loses faith in the company, will ban it’s products and is going to tell all the people they know about their disappointment. Bad word-of-mouth and loss of repeated business will kill the company. Especially if the press picks up on it. Advertisers love good word-of-mouth because it doesn’t cost them a penny and they hate bad word-of-mouth because there’s nothing they can do against it.

Good or bad: word-of-mouth advertising is hard to create, control or kill. It used to be the only form of advertising that didn’t come from the producer himself. Nowadays some companies have specialized in creating hypes. The results are mixed. Although people can create word-of-mouth, there’s still no way to control it.

Many consumers will tell you that advertising flat out lies to you. In some ads by con-men this is true. In most cases advertising doesn’t lie, though, but it does tell a very one-sided story. For example: it informs you about the good effects of the product, but hardly ever talks about the bad ones. Advertisers are very concerned about being misleading, however. They know that they can trick you into buying once, but that their business mostly profits from repeated business. In the case that the client and the creative have not found the essential truth, the ad can be misleading. This is not intentionally, though, and is more a result of lack of skill than purposely misinforming the public. These bad forms of advertising have made the public sceptic about advertising and rightfully so.

But on the other hand consumers all too easily forget that for a large part they depend on advertising for their flow of information. And then there’s the nice side effect that advertising makes quite a few things affordable. Especially the media depend on their advertising revenue in order to be affordable. Without advertising they would become far more expensive and most would simply cease to exist.

Not all consumers are smart consumers. Some consumers blame advertising for their own mistakes. If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Many people know beforehand when they buy a bad product. But the temptation is too big for them, and the promised profit exceeds the risk taken. You cannot expect a cheap product to be of the best quality. Small print is there for a reason and should be read. If something is not clear you should ask questions. Producers and creatives know that a lot of people are gullible or plain simple. They should not take advantage of this, but that will only happen in a perfect world. Be aware that advertising cannot always be trusted.

Many people believe that advertising makes us want things we don’t need. This is simply untrue. Advertising is only effective if it taps into an urge that is already there. It cannot create an urge for you. It offers information on a solution for your urge or problem. It’s up to you to read the information, process it and act out the instructions that are given, which usually comes down to: buy this product.

The shallowness that advertising suffers from is only a reflection of the shallowness of the public. Why are people in ads almost always beautiful people? Because we believe beautiful people more readily. And because we want to be beautiful ourselves. Why do we believe the promises advertising makes us? Because we want to believe them. And because advertising on the whole delivers it’s promises. Especially in the United States you’d get sued if you wouldn’t. Compared to the lies and mistakes the regular media spit at us, advertising is a haven of integrity.

In conclusion: advertising is more than a necessary evil. On one end we have the consumers that are searching for products to consume and on the other end organizations that produce products. Advertising is nothing more than a tool for producers to let consumers be aware of their product. Creatives are people that have specialized in maximizing the results of this tool. Because of lack of skill at the producers side, or lack of skill on the creative side, there is a lot of bad advertising out there. The advertising business will continue to evolve and hopefully all the people in this business will become people with two skill sets that are so good at what they do that clients have no problem getting out of their way. Then, and only then, will advertising grow to it’s full potential: a positive, creative tool to spread the truth, trusted and appreciated by the public.

Until then, there's still much work to be done.

Feel free to send any suggestions, comments or questions.
(c) 2004 Propagandium.