Will advertising destroy everything?

In a 2020 Ipsos study in the UK, advertising executives ranked as the least trusted of all professions. The second-most distrusted profession was politicians.

One of the factors leading to this is the increasing focus on “doing good” and “social impact” that is lauded in creative awards. Most of these campaigns are scams. Now, I know there will be an uproar — but how many of these campaigns actually achieve anything? Or how many even run for longer than two weeks? How many have real results vs social media quotes from the creatives’ friends and PR fluff to prove effectiveness?

Consider the infamous Loeries award for a campaign that apparently provided poor kids with free books over USSD in Uganda. Not only did this not happen, but it was also not even technically feasible. But judges believed the video award entry.

Beyond questioning the ethics of wanting awards over honesty, advertising industry judges just aren’t equipped to understand what they are judging beyond “that’s a cool idea”. Which makes sense, because advertising is about ideas, and while executing a campaign for a new product is hard, it doesn’t mean you can build the actual product.

The problem with advertising is that it’s easy to produce. A great idea completely separated from the reality of delivering on its promise becomes misleading tokenism. For things to really change takes years and sustained investment. If media awareness created change, Greta Thunberg’s coverage would have single-handedly ended global warming. Plugging into a zeitgeist for an award makes brands feel like they are doing “good things” and gives them a false sense of achievement instead of realising that they have real work to do. Awards let brands off the hook of doing something.

False awards are the least harmful side of this, though. Recycling was a marketing campaign to deal with the rising tide of plastic pollution in the 1970s. Backed by the plastics industry, the Keep America Beautiful campaign promoted the idea that plastic pollution could be contained by recycling if only people did their bit. It made plastic pollution seem harmless and manageable and that using more plastic was acceptable. The plastics industry boomed. If you needed proof that advertising works, this is your case study. Everyone knows that only 9% of plastic is recycled, and that is in developed markets. Some SA retail brands even use the recycling symbol with the copy “not yet recyclable”. Even if you wanted to recycle, the brands you trust try to mislead you unless you read the fine print.

And more recently, due to the rise of retail investors wanting to invest in environmental, social and governance (ESG) stocks, fund managers are rating companies that meet the ESG requirements. Only, they don’t really. It’s just marketing spin that has shoved trillions of investor dollars into companies that aren’t doing anything for the environment or society. It reached peak absurdity when Exxon was included but Tesla excluded as an ESG stock. After an exposé by the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, there are now investigations by the US Securities & Exchange Commission and some bankers may go to jail. Large local fund managers still promote these same tracking metrics, though, unperturbed by the global fallout. No advertising agencies were harmed in the making of this scheme.

H&M promoted an environmentally conscious range of clothing that supposedly used less water and wasn’t as harmful to the environment. Only, it didn’t actually use less water — H&M just charged more because there is a growing demand for eco-friendly clothing. It’s now facing a class action lawsuit from its customers.

The people who undertake these actions aren’t bad people. They are good, they care. We often ask how human beings can undertake structured atrocities, things that require thousands of people to follow along even if they know it’s not right. It’s by creating an external set of values that they are working towards, like shareholder value. At the end of the day, it’s not your fault, you are only doing your job.

Nevo Hadas is a partner at dydx.

The big take-out: A great idea completely separated from the reality of delivering on its promise becomes misleading tokenism.