An open letter to the Guardian's George Monbiot
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Dear George, With regard to your latest column in the Guardian (’Advertising is a poison that demeans even love blah blah blah’) I must pick you up on a few points.
You’re an extremely intelligent journalist and I admire the way you bang the drum on a lot of serious issues. But suggesting that the advertising industry is “the real enemy” among banks, big business, lobbyists and politicians is as crass as it is lazy.
And, by the way, if you think I’m just playing to the crowd, my usual constituency will have largely stopped reading this particular column already. After all, this isn’t the first time the ad industry has been associated with terms like ’evil’ and ’poison’.
Nor am I arguing against your contention that there are some annoying and just plain bad adverts out there. But all that other stuff that you argue is the fault of ’evil advertisers’ is just bobbins I’m afraid. You draw a causal link between the “power and pervasiveness” of advertising and how little the average household in the UK manages to save a year (£296 according to the latest government statistics). I think that figure probably has as much to do with soaring household utility and food bills, the rising cost of petrol and the wider economy, as it does with advertising.
You also attack advertisers for using morally redundant smoke-and-mirror methods of hooking customers and encouraging them to buy unwanted goods and services manipulation, neurobiology and so on. To a certain extent you’re right. Advertisers and marketers are pretty much trying to sell stuff. They have stuff to sell and to do that they have to put that stuff in front of their most likely customers and make it appealing to them. If that didn’t happen, we would lose the impetus for consumers to spend and the trigger for businesses to grow. I’m not sure what you see as the ideal here, George, and I’m no economist, but I think the woeful situation we (and the rest of the world) are in requires exactly the opposite to happen if we’re to get out of this rather dark place.
You seem to forget all the good work that goes into what you call advertising and I call marketing. The industry has cottoned on to the fact that irrelevant ads are always going to be annoying and is trying hard to make its work better targeted.
(This is something else you have a problem with. But really, George, if you don’t want helpful suggestions offering you stuff based on your Google searches then stop using Google to search for things.) Good branded content, sales promotions and loyalty schemes are offering far better entertainment, value and relevance than your column suggests. And regarding the ads? Whether they be in the press, on TV or online, if you don’t like them, just do as most people do. Ignore them.
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Readers' comments (14)
Keith Trivitt | Wed, 26 Oct 2011 2:17 pm
Well said, Mark. The "advertising is evil" mantra that many in the media continue to push has grown old and stale, just as the out-of-touch and redundant ads that this brigade often rails against. The fact is that marketing is not nearly as awful or pervasive or detrimental to society as many would like to believe. Far from it.
As we say (and have proof to back it up) at the Public Relations Society of America, public relations (and marketing) has served immeasurable public good.
Both have helped change attitudes behaviors toward some of the world’s most pressing social issues, from breast cancer awareness to drinking and driving to smoking and obesity.
In its best form, marketing helps inform the public about key issues, products and services that are deserving of attention and can help enhance society and add value to the public good. Unfortunately, the marketing industry has not done enough to express its many positive attributes and benefits to society, which partly explains why the type of misinformed and negative sentiment is expressed by The Guardian’s George Monbiot and others.
If the marketing industry is to end the baseless attacks against it, then it must do more to demonstrate not only its value to clients and the business community, but its greater value to society. That isn’t always easy, but it is imperative, particularly at a time of rising global cynicism.
Keith Trivitt
Director, Public Relations
Public Relations Society of America
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Anonymous | Wed, 26 Oct 2011 10:49 pm
Has the marketing industry really not done enough to express its many positive attributes and benefits to society? How about these people?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_%26_Knowlton#Controversies
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Adam Dixon | Thu, 27 Oct 2011 1:10 am
Well, the advertising industry is part of the problem within our business culture. It and other elements of this culture need to reform as George said so the stress on people and the environment is reduced.
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daren bristow | Thu, 27 Oct 2011 2:09 pm
I find it ridiculous that the media, the guardian in particular can call advertising evil when they print self fulfilling, doom laden prophesis about our economy.
The Guardian and its scare stories, along with the 24 hour news media have talked us into a recession that can only be fought of by private industry selling its wares. Marketing evil? How about the newsmakers becoming the news, how rightious is that?
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JunkkMale | Thu, 27 Oct 2011 2:23 pm
The content demands of the 24/7 media environment ensure that the likes of a Mr. Monbiot has to crank one of these out to keep his ratings, and hence pay (some irony there) grade maintained.
His comments are a hoot, and those in response, pro and con, as interesting as they are inevitably tribal.
Having run foul too many times the comment nicht frei of the Graun's hypocritimods to feel like wasting much time there, this did however resonate...
"it offers us little choice about whether we see and hear it, and ever less choice about whether we respond to it"
As much for its inaccuracy where targeted as the precedent-busting selectivity at play.
I can think of almost no instance where an ad-supported medium cannot be easily avoided by choice, and protest made in tangible terms by withdrawal of a sub or eyeballs.
However, his paper would be the first to shriek if any move was made in any areas of media where the public not only have no choice, but are compelled to provide financial support no matter what their feelings on the service they are issued.
There is a little too much 'unique' around in the world of well-paid commentary to make such folk worth paying much attention to.
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mehul garg | Thu, 27 Oct 2011 2:36 pm
Can anyone also tell Geroge that if advertising didn't exist there will be no print or online medium to write such baseless columns - as it is the revenue generated through advertising that pays the bills.
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david wethey | Thu, 27 Oct 2011 3:06 pm
Well done, Mark, for challenging George Monbiot’s rant against marketing and advertising. He’s been getting away with lies and half truths about our industry for too long. To give just one example, he said in his latest piece: “Advertising claims to enhance our choice, but it offers us little choice about whether we see and hear it, and ever less choice about whether we respond to it”. Decent of him to admit that advertising enhances choice. There’s no “claims” about it. Advertising is absolutely about increasing choice. He is also way out of date on both the other counts. We have always been able to turn the pages to avoid ads in magazines and newspapers. We don’t have to gaze at posters. We can make the tea or go to the loo in the commercial breaks. But there is so much delayed viewing nowadays with Sky Plus, TiVo etc that we can edit out the ads completely. As for not being able to respond to advertising, hasn’t George heard about consumer conversations? Has the digital revolution passed him by? Command and control is dead. The consumer is in charge – not Coca-Cola or Lord Gnome.
Nor is there any evidence that this very same consumer thinks advertising is evil, or wants to ban it. We know, all consumers know, and even Monbiot knows, that marketing and advertising are tightly controlled and regulated every inch of the way to keep it honest. His strangled angst-ridden last paragraph gives the game away. Even he must grudgingly accept that the only alternatives to media funded by ads would be either state control or a media that is pared down to the bone and prohibitively expensive.
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Anonymous | Thu, 27 Oct 2011 3:15 pm
I think George might be on to something. Without a marketing industry to fund it, there'd be no media industry, and without a media industry, there'd be no journalism. So, in George Monbiot's utopian world, we'd be spared having to read George Monbiot's tedious rants.
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Sophie Davies | Thu, 27 Oct 2011 3:43 pm
I think Moonbat is beyond redemption.
He works for a newspaper that cannot survive without Government subsidy (advertising Government & public sector jobs - the irony) & who's parent company uses tax havens to minimise its tax bill in the UK. Nothing wrong with that - but they do criticise other comapnies for doing the same.
Seriously Mark, do not give the extremists at The Guardian the oxyegn of publicity.
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John | Thu, 27 Oct 2011 5:02 pm
There is little point arguing with Monbiot, his views are the product of a quasi-Manichean belief that the world of commerce, of things, is polluted and that therefore anything that espouses commerce is perforce evil.
Commerce is not evil, in fact, to my mind commerce represents the best of man - the ability to do a deal is perhaps our noblest quality. Without commerce we have war. Arguably, advertising is the one thing standing between us and the apocalypse.
O.K. perhaps I exaggerate, but you take my point.
And of course there's too much bad marketing and advertising, but then there's too much *bad journalism*, and I would never seek to dismiss the validity of the form on the basis of it's worst representation.
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