Advertising
Admen and snobs
Paul Johnson
Tulian Barnes, the gifted novelist and J normally shrewd TV critic of the Observer, got himself into an indefensible posture recently, when he rebuked the playwright Alan Bennett for performing the 'voice-over' part in a TV advertisement for a washing machine. His point was that a playwright, being an authentically creative and therefore morally respectable person, should not descend into the mud of huckstering. Of course Bennett can look after himself, and did so. He said he did it for the fun of the thing and to exercise his skill; and anyway, why was Barnes, a creative novelist etc, descending into the in- iquity of TV criticism? Tulian Barnes, the gifted novelist and J normally shrewd TV critic of the Observer, got himself into an indefensible posture recently, when he rebuked the playwright Alan Bennett for performing the 'voice-over' part in a TV advertisement for a washing machine. His point was that a playwright, being an authentically creative and therefore morally respectable person, should not descend into the mud of huckstering. Of course Bennett can look after himself, and did so. He said he did it for the fun of the thing and to exercise his skill; and anyway, why was Barnes, a creative novelist etc, descending into the in- iquity of TV criticism?
What interests me, however, is why Barnes, not by nature a moral and intellec- tual snob, should display this atavistic hostility towards advertising. The prejudice against the adman is ancient, classless, suprapolitical and quite impervious to evidence. One thing on which left-wing MPs and Tory knights of the shire usually agree is that advertising is a dubious, anti- social and almost criminal activity. Its in- trusion into politics is particularly resented, and Saatchi and Saatchi have become part of Labour's demonology, along with the Daily Mail and Norman Tebbit (Saatchis were responsible for the ad about which Barnes complained). In the week after the election, Panorama featured — and great prominence was given to the text in the Listener — a report by Michael Cockerell, hinting that it was the Tories' hyperexpen- sive advertising campaign which won them the election. The hint was reinforced by another Listener headline on a Robert Fox BBC radio story about Michael Foot: 'He was out-Saatchied at every turn'.
Absolute nonsense of course. Profes- sional advertising had very little to do with it and was not (in my view) particularly ef- fective. The advertising which really mat- tered in the campaign was all provided free by the media, and it was by their mishand- ling of this — while the Tories managed to avoid dropping any catches — that Labour lost the propaganda battle. Attending Labour press conferences, day after day, was a first-rate education in how not to run an election. In the end, politicians have to sell themselves; the expert admen can only add a bit of icing to the cake. The truth of the matter, I suspect, is that the Labour product was unsaleable; and as anyone in the business can tell you, if the commodity is no good, no amount of advertising can ultimately succeed. But;i have no doubt the Left, aided by the BBC, will continue to use this excuse and will seek to protect Labour's absurd policies by drawing on the copious wells of anti-advertising prejudice.
Writing recently in Campaign, the ad- man's weekly, Bernard Barnett notes that this prejudice is particularly marked among journalists. That is odd. Morally, I should say, there is very little difference. Both journalists and admen are engaged in the socially desirable, pursuit of conveying in- formation to members of the public on sub- jects which, in varying degrees, are of im- portance to them. Both engage, almost in- evitably and often deliberately, in the selec- tive presentation of facts. Both exercise all their ingenuity in getting their message across. Both, in theory, operate within codes which are designed to promote high standards of accuracy and public respon- sibility. But in practice I would say that the Advertising Standards Authority, under the vigorous chairmanship of Lord McGregor, is far more effective in enforcing its rules than the Press Council (or, for that matter, the BBC Board of Governors, and the Cor- poration's complaints procedure). It is true that advertising agencies are hired openly to
present a case. but so are barristers and not many people regard the law as a disreputable profession. A man who thinks he has a good product has a natural right to engage expert services in getting it known — and the public has an equal right to hear about it.
But if, morally, there is little to choose between journalism and advertising, profes- sionally there is quite a lot. I believe that British journalistic standards are falling, largely as a result of the activities of the NUJ and other monopoly or quasi- monopoly unions; while British advertising standards are rising, and are now, by and large, the highest in the world. In terms of design, layout, typography, use of new materials and technology, graphics, photography and sheer ingenuity of ideas, British advertising agencies are streets ahead of our newspapers and even our magazines. The contrast is equally marked in TV, where the average professional stan- dard of the ad is very much higher than the programme. If you listen to people talking and laughing about TV in a supermarket, the odds are that an ad will be the topic. Barnes was particularly unfortunate in the one he chose to criticise: the frog-ad for Servis washing machines, which happens to be my current favourite, is a sensationally successful piece of television.
The prejudice against advertising is par- ticularly marked among left-thinking in- tellectuals, especially in the media itself, and not least among tendentious TV and press reporters notorious for their selecti- vity. It springs, of course, from the much deeper and ancient prejudice against the middleman and the whole marketing pro- cess, of which anti-semitism is a historic symptom. Marx thought that while produc- ing food and goods was a meritorious ac- tivity, the middleman was a parasite; Lenin took the same view — hence his revealing slogan, 'Anti-semitism is the socialism of fools'. Marx's theory, and the Leninist structures set up in the Soviet Union and its satellites and imitators, made no fundamen- tal provision for the process of distributing and selling goods: one good reason why shops behind the Iron Curtain are empty. Advertising is a very important part of the distributive process; just how important is only recognised when it is not there. But of course many media people, brought up on the varieties of sub-Marxism so prevalent in the universities during the 1960s and early 1970s, retain the fallacies and biases they absorbed there.
Not so today, however. Bernard Barnett notes that among undergraduates today advertising is becoming the top career choice. I can confirm this from my own knowledge. It is not unusual for an adver- tising agency, with a single vacancy, to get 2,500 applications from third-year students and new graduates. Clever young people recognise that advertising, at present, is one of the best fields for developing their creative gifts. So intellectuals who feel it is still safe to be snooty are merely showing their age.
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