Corporate Faith

Most people hate advertising, even when it's not intrusive to the extent that it has become online, it still sits as a point of contention for most people because there is a distinct lack of trust between consumers and advertisers.  As is the case in politics, over many decades of politicians making promises that were never kept, people came to an expectation that a politician's word is worthless so too is the expectation of advertisers, over many decades there has been a mentality that has become ingrained in society as a whole where people don't expect adverts to actually live up to the claims they make.  That doesn't mean people don't complain about being mis-sold things when they don't do what they were advertised to do, but in those cases I don't think the advert is really responsible for their reaction, I think it's just a case of being dissatisfied with a product and knowing that you can use legislation that governs advertisements as a means to getting a refund - if their expectations garnered from the advert were probed in depth I think most people reluctantly would admit they never expected the product to actually deliver.

There is perhaps an irony that although those laws are often a bane to many advertisers when they are held to account for the claims they made, if those laws didn't exist and advertisements were allowed to say anything they wanted as was the case in decades past, people would actually be even less willing to take risks on products they never bought before knowing that if they don't like it they can't use the advertisement as a justification to claim a refund.  I think when it comes to the claims most advertisers make, it's not a case of the consumer actually believing what is said in the advert, but rather more simply the advert raised the consumer's awareness of the brand.  I'd love to see how effective an advertising campaign would be if their advert on TV consisted only of one short 10 second clip where someone simply said the brand name and product name, what it was and where to get it "Bing Bong Shampoo available at Walmart" with a picture of the shampoo bottle, that's all, absolutely no effort to try and sell you it, just one short 10 second clip that lets you know it exists, what it's called, and where you can get it - how much impact would that have?

The idea of trusting a company and what it says is something that I feel is dying, and I think that's a good thing because corporate entities are rarely held to account for anything they do, being that they are incorporeal and that there's no individual that can be charged, the corporation gets told off by a regulator, pays a fine if one is levied and that's it, they move on with nothing stopping them from doing the same thing again.  It's rare that a regulator would impose a fine or consequence that posed any existential risk to the business as governments do not want to be seen as the cause of a liquidation and ultimately be to blame for job losses.  In effect, corporations use their employees in this regard as a ransom against governments to limit their punitive responses.  In 2018 there was a study conducted by BBC News into the trust of consumers in regards to banks after the 2008 financial crisis which found after 10 years from the crisis, consumer trust had not been regained by the banks and most people still felt the same animosity they did after the crash happened, they just didn't act on it or be as vocal as they were in the immediate aftermath.

There is of course another element at play here, that is the element of information or misinformation depending on your point of view.  Companies have behaved in ways for decades where they twist the truth as far as they can within the law, some even cross that line as I said above and simply pay the fine and move on when they get caught.  There is however an abundance of sources of information online that are more than willing to take corporate claims and put them under scrutiny.  One such example of this is a series of YouTube videos called Honest Ads, a series of spoof adverts that show you what you'd actually see if adverts were honest and told you the truth, these aren't all intended to be funny, some of them are intended to be brutally honest and shed light on the inanity of the methods used in advertisements to make you buy their products.  Nevertheless they highlight the disconnection and disassociation we have between product and performance as a direct result of the mentality that advertising has created, in essence we recognise that advertisements are no longer intended to inform but simply to entertain and like any form of entertainment you can only achieve true enjoyment when you suspend disbelief and buy into the fantasy - the trouble is that last part actually costs us money when we buy the products as a result.

When did someone decide that people weren't able to process the truth?  This isn't something new or unique to advertising for that matter, it's happened for as long as adverts have been around, you can even argue that it is present in various socioeconomic structures, political structures, and even arguably within religious institutions.  Even adverts from the 1950s and 1960s made spurious claims about the health benefits of cigarettes and alcohol at a time when laws weren't as strict about what they could get away with.  Advertising from its inception was never about truth and honesty it was about convincing you to buy a product by telling you whatever they thought you needed to hear to make you do just that.  When people ask "Why don't you trust companies?" the simplest answer is to ask in retort when was the last time a company actually give you a reason to trust it? - the same retort applies in all instances above, many criticise society as it evolves and sheds old beliefs and claim society is declining as a result, one could simply arguing that society is sobering up, yes we're coming down from a high but that come down isn't a decline in society, it is the realisation of the world we have created that we are seeing through clear sight for the first time and the horror that evokes and the anger and depth of the reaction to it is not the result of the come down but the result of decades of stupor spent oblivious to our impact.