Advertising Authority
'Those who devote their lives to advertising and understand the functions and methods of advertising—the advertisers, the agencies, the media owners—should be in the majority . . . to regulate the content of advertising effectively, without robbing it of the freedom it needs to make the advertising investment pay, we need a body of advertising professionals and not a general committee.'
THE speaker is the Managing Director of the J. Walter Thompson Company, • addressing fellow advertisers earlier this month; and it prob- ably represents the opinion of the great bulk of the profession. Yet in this same speech Mr. Torn. Sutton gave the warning to his listeners that ad- vertising could fall into disrepute by breeding public cynicism; and this in fact is what has been happening. The proportion of advertising which is demonstrably disreputable is small, most of it in and around the patent medicine, drug and tonics market; but the failure of the profession to put forward any realistic proposals to control this very lucrative sector brings discredit on advertis- ing as a whole. In the circumstances it is not surprising that demands have been heard in Par- liament and in the press for greater control, and if necessary State control, of all advertising.
Mr. Sutton fears what he describes as the dominance of the amateur,' should an Adyertis- ing Authority be set up. Past experience sug- gests that amateurs- -particularly if they are con- sumer representatives- are rarely dominant on such committees; precisely because they are amateurs, they are too often either inarticulate or futile pursuers of lost causes. But this is largely due to bad selection. What any committee of this kind needs (and none needs it more than the Independent Television Authority) is the in- formed critic--a cross between the Ombudsman and the devil's advocate. Such spokesmen should indeed be drawn from the ranks of the advertis- ing profession—but by the same process as gamekeepers are recruited from poachers. The example of the Press Council, which is now pre- dominantly a mutual admiration society drawn from the lower reaches of the press, should be a warning.
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