Advertising

Double standards

Philip Kleinman

At the risk, about which I have already been warned by my amiably aggressive colleague Bill Grundy, of trespassing on his territory, I would like to consider this week the curious case of the Guardian and the ad that got away. It is a case full of interest both for students of attitudes to advertising in general and for those whose concern is with the advertising function of the press in particular.

The add I refer to is the one placed — in national newspapers included the Guardian — by the mysterious Club of Ten, about which the only thing that is certain is that it is a pro-South African pressure group represented by a Mr Gerald' Sparrow. Headed 'An Analysis of Indignation', the ad referred to Guardian journalist Adam Raphael's awardwinning series of reports on black wages in South Africa last year. In polite but sarcastic terms the ad suggested the Guardian take an equal interest in black African and Asian countries where workers' conditions were worse.

Both the Guardian and Mr Raphael found fault with the ad, which they accused of containing factual inaccuracies, in particular about the level of wages in Hong Kong. Mr Raphael indeed carried his accusations into the correspondence columns of other newspapers as well as writing a piece in his own paper alleging that copy for the Club of Ten's ads was prepared in South Africa and transmitted to London via the South African Embassy.

In a letter to the Guardian Mr Sparrow denied that his group was financed by the South African Government. (Whether or not it is may be an interesting question but is irrelevant to the purpose of this article.) "If," he asked, "the Guardian objected either to the advertisement or to the Club of Ten,

why accept it — and the large fee paid for it?"

Why indeed? The paper had, as it happened, given an answer to the question before it was asked. In a short leader it warned its readers about the deficiencies of the ad but nobly declared that precisely because the paper's own policy was challenged it felt it right to print it.

But the answer itself raises a further point, which is this. If the Guardian had agreed, in the interests of freedom of expression, to print a lengthy pro-South African piece, by Mr Sparrow or anyone else, in •its editorial columns — which is conceivable, if unlikely — it would almost certainly have insisted either on removing what it regarded as inaccuracies or on attaching a rebuttal on the same page, as is commonly done with letters to the editor. Why behave differently over an ad? There is, after all, absolutely no reason why, when an advertiser asks for a full page, the paper is obliged to sell it to him.

The answer to this question is, I think, a double one. Firstly, and simply, newspapers do not like turning away money, whosoever it is. Secondly, they do not take advertising seriously. As evidence of this latter contention let me quote the Guardian's own reply to a question I put to it last year regarding an earlier insertion by the Club of Ten.

That ad included an unsupported statement that "The Church of England ... is beginning to have grave doubts concerning the support of the 'Programme to Combat Racism' organised by the World Council of Churches." Tackled about this and other questionable phrases, the Guardian's official response was that all ads "tend tc simplify the world" and that "one does not expect the same soulsearching from advertising copywriters as one expects from one's reporters."

In other words, ads tell lies, and everyone knows it, so it makes no difference what they say. This attitude is widespread despite the fact that a multimillion pound industry is based on the supposition that what they say does make a very great difference. The same industry's own Code of Practice, furthermore, points a high standard of truthfulness, even though the code is not always rigorously observed.

Television is not allowed to carry political advertising, other than party political broadcasts. If it were, there is no doubt that the IBA's control system would weed out the kind of inaccuracy of which the Club of Ten has been guilty. The press has to cope with a vastly greater number of ads, and in practice the only prepublication control is exercised by newspaper advertisement departments and, in cases where they doubt their unaided judgement, editors.

Not that the press never rejects ads. Newspapers from the Times to the Daily Mirror have turned them down on the grounds a indecency, which usually means an overdose of female nudity. When

it comes to the greater indecency of untruthfulness, however — for instance the blatantly misleading claims put out for some slimming products — the tendency has been for newspapers to raise no objection until the ads have been condemned by some outside body such as the Advertising Standards Authority.

Nevertheless the mood of today is that advertising copy requires precisely the same 'soul-searching' as does editorial. One may hope that little by little even newspapers may come to agree.