Would you trust a pathological advertiser?
By Ben Pearce, Creative Head, Joy Agency
“Trust me, I’m an uber driver.”
“Trust me, I’m a Sydney property developer.”
“Trust me, I’m in advertising. Call now!”
Who do you trust the least?
If you picked the uber driver or property developer, unfortunately Australia disagrees.
Despite only aspiring to make clients rich and famous, advertising professionals are less trusted than the people delivering high speed rail from Sydney to Melbourne.
And it’s not just here. In Britain, people have more faith in the politicians delivering Brexit than they do in British advertising professionals.
But if you’ve ever made a major campaign, you’ll know we are immensely trusted.
I can’t think of any industry that trusts a bunch of creative misfits to influence a brand’s sales and reputation. Often with more money than an average Sydney house and sometimes with the marketing person’s career on the line.
So if companies can place such an immense amount of trust in advertising people, why can’t the public?
Most people I chat to outside the ad-bubble have blunt opinions about advertising. But if I show them an ad I think they’ll like, they say ‘Why don’t I get to see ads like that!?’
It may be that our best efforts aren’t getting in front of them, but I think it’s a little more fundamental.
People hate advertising, unless it’s interesting to them.
It seems we hate being sold to, but for some reason don’t mind it so much when we’re being entertained. Done well, advertising turns dyed-in-the-wool ‘wouldn’t make me buy it’ Aussies into super fans. It can even bring out the genteel Australian lilt at 20 to 8 in the morning.
Yet despite possessing the superpowers to turn a country of ad-haters into passionate brand advocates, it seems we’ve given up on our own brand. We’re falling over ourselves to replace ‘Advertising™’ with ‘Consultancy™’, ‘Data-driven Future Focalists™’, ‘Story tellers™’, ‘Channel Polygamists™’ or even (sadly I didn’t come up with any of these) ‘Persuasion Partners™’. The work still looks, smells and tastes like advertising, but we can’t ever bring ourselves to call it that.
If the industry is somewhat suspect about the word ‘advertising’, what hope do we have getting the public or clients to trust us?
We could stop spending head hours ‘repackaging’ our offering and use that time to make the work better. I don’t think people care if something is ‘channel polygamy’ or ‘brandter’ as long as it’s interesting – to them.
Will we ever earn the publics trust? Maybe not anytime soon. But we might be able to persuade them to like what we do – if we can decide what that is.
