Ethics in Advertising: A Candle in the Dark
Does the truth matter?
The easy answer is yes, of course the truth matters. It is what we expect of ourselves and hope for with regard to everyone else, everyone we deal with personally or professionally. Or at least we expect the truth to matter if we live what could objectively be considered a moral life.
The more complicated answer is that the truth matters but that telling the truth isn’t always an absolute requirement, because doesn’t it always have to be okay for an “unless” to lurk somewhere in the background?
It’s Complicated
The truth matters unless you’re telling a little white lie to spare someone’s feelings when they ask for your honest opinion of their new haircut. The truth matters unless you’re navigating your kids through childhood experiences like the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus. The truth matters unless there’s a sophisticated situation in which shading the truth, whether by narrative or omission, provides a benefit or prevents unnecessary harm, or offsets casual, unthinking cruelty.
And, of course, this series of unlesses also illustrates a truth. Life is complex. People are always more than one thing, and in order to function within a society, we cannot pretend that we are modern-day Kantians, pure beings of moral philosophy who never utter anything outside of the absolute truth. You could say that the truth matters, absolutely, but that context is also important. Sometimes there’s a good reason to not crush someone in the iron grip of austere fact.
However: There are those among us who take this moral relativism to an uncomfortable extreme, and operate as if the ends always justify the means. They do not tell small lies out of tactical kindness to children, or to friends for the purpose of protecting their feelings. They tell enormous, never-ending lies, with seemingly no limits, for the sole and express purpose of benefiting themselves.
Often in business (and particularly in America), people act this way because they can, and because many norms and systems exist to encourage and reinforce the idea that if you get away with it, you win, and if you win, you deserved to win. Might makes right. To these people, the truth does not matter. It only gets in the way. They do not let quarrelsome things like truth or morals or ethics dictate the momentum or vector of their actions.
Tell the Truth
I don’t think it has to be this way, which is part of why I started Swash Labs in the first place. It sounds corny as hell to say it, but when I think about a potential client relationship or a new advertising campaign, I always want to begin from a place of integrity and honesty. I genuinely believe this because I think the truth is always more successful than a story which misrepresents a product or disrespects the audience.
If I am honest about what I can do and how I assign value to that work, the client’s expectations will reflect reality. Similarly, if I am honest about what a product can do, a consumer considering that product in good faith will never be disappointed or feel as if they’ve been lied to. People think there is a mysterious, magical formula which describes how brand value and equity is built, but that’s it: this thing does what it says it will do, and therefore I can trust it. It told me the truth.
People think there is a mysterious, magical formula which describes how brand value and equity is built, but that’s it: this thing does what it says it will do, and therefore I can trust it. It told me the truth.
This is why, in early meetings with potential clients, I will always say: “We do not lie in our advertising.” Partially this is because to build a successful, modern ad campaign, you must amplify what is true about a product or service or brand, and so whatever is actually true about a brand is what will be amplified. The other reason is because I genuinely think of advertising as storytelling, and because I genuinely want our work to educate, and inform, and entertain, and to be a force in the world with a net positive result, even if we can only move the needle a little bit.
In The Dark
The example I have always used of bad advertising is the low-quality TV spot where someone yells at you, more or less, in language that is always and only ever about the hard sell. In the past few years, though, I have come to think of this example as being unfair, because at least this pitch-person is yodeling in good faith. At least the price resembles what you will pay and what you’re buying is a known quantity.
The far more sinister version of this is when someone lies outright. This happens in corporate advertising, in politics, and especially in business. Digital media has made it easier than ever to push lies on a massive scale, whether via active disinformation campaigns or by engaging in the dishonest gaming of algorithms or metrics to make something seem more important than it is, or to give one company an artificially engineered (but very powerful) advantage over others.
I’m more tired of this behavior now than I have ever been. This may be a result of having run my own business for almost ten years, or it could be a byproduct of spending the last two years digging deep into research about how people have now come to use the internet as a weapon, either to terrorize marginalized groups or to perpetuate hate or to generate chaos or to wage a baleful campaign against reality itself. It doesn’t matter why I feel this way. What matters is what I plan to do about it.
When I was in high school – this would have been sometime in the late 1990s – I discovered The Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle In The Dark by Carl Sagan. Sagan wrote something in there which has stuck with me ever since I read it on a sunny fall day, riding on a yellow school bus on the way to a band contest:
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
The last line is the real kicker: Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
Do you doubt for even one second that this is true?
In adapting what I think is a central theme of Sagan’s writing – that you can be skeptical without being pessimistic – I know that our work at Swash Labs is moving in a new direction that also fits entirely with what our big idea has been since we began. In late 2010, I wanted to build a shop that would reflect and address the real, actual communications needs of small businesses and organizations at the onset of the age of social media. I knew brand communication would change radically over the next several years, and storytelling would have to follow. We would have to tell stories in new ways and, for the first time ever, we’d be able to measure and know more about how those stories were received than ever before in human history.
We’ve always told our clients that we want them to be good at telling their stories, and we want them to understand how to use the best platforms available to do it. “Some day it won’t be Facebook,” we say, “so only being good at Facebook isn’t the best thing you can do. We’ve both got to understand the why of what we’re doing, even more than the how.”
That’s always been true, but now it is even more important. The next ten years will bring another period of radical change. People don’t just rely on digital media to learn about brands and current events. Now, whether we like it or not, a person’s use of digital media can fundamentally warp their ability to objectively perceive or understand reality. Since 2015, this has had an enormous (and sometimes destructive) impact on everything from politics to business to human rights.
Either All of This Matters or None of it Does
Now, whether we like it or not, the truth matters more than ever. The stakes are too high to simply write off disingenuous or unethical practices – whether in advertising specifically or in business in general – as the plenary cost of winning. That is toxic-masculinity- zero-sum-game-might-makes-right-patriarchal-parochial bullshit.
My mom used to say that assholes want to do business with assholes, and I have found this to be true. If you’re in business, don’t reward bad behavior and don’t engage in it. If you’re in advertising, don’t lie, and don’t cheat. The jug fills drop by drop, and it is possible for our work – and I am including you, Dear Reader, in this collective – to actually improve the world.
While studying disinformation, I have spent many days over the last two years feeling discouraged or fearful. But, as you’ll soon see, much of that work has turned to developing ways for small businesses and political campaigns to fight disinformation, which in turn enables them to fight for and tell the truth, to take power back from Sagan’s charlatan, or to prevent them from ever gaining power in the first place. That’s been a real turning point for me.
To borrow a phrase, our work can be a candle in the dark. The truth matters, and our work should be in service of that idea.