Campaign

What is the single most underused word in advertising?

An online game I part-invented a few years ago invited players to compile a list of words only women use. Pelmet*, Hectic, Frantic and Ruched were all frequent submissions ; Ramekin was, I think, another.

I would be grateful for a list of words only men use (suggestions below, please).

And, while we are at it, what about a list of words only copywriters use? (Has anyone, ever, unironically referred to "Toilet Tissue"?) Or, more interesting still, a list of words copywriters never use?

And that's when it gets interesting.

I must admit, 17 years as a copywriter sometimes feels like a protracted visit to a respectable maiden aunt - where you have a strong urge to swear the moment you leave. The copywriter rarely gets to use 95% of the adjectives in the English language - for the reason that they're nasty. Outside a charity account, words like "Fetid" or "Pustular" don't get much airtime.

Nor, unsurprisingly, does the word "But".

You see an advertisement is largely there to deliver unqualified praise. It has no room for buts, howevers or thenagains, any more than for words like fetid.

A famous exception: "Volvos - they're boxy but they're good" was seen as proof of the writer's insanity.

Another famous exception - "Reassuringly expensive" also explicitly tackles a negative.

Most ads don't do this. Perhaps more should try. After all, you establish a certain plausibility by acknowledging that the purchase involves a trade-off.

Imagine for a moment that we weren't beset by clients who were desperate to see every inch or second of an ad devoted to an encomium of praise for their products. Would more copywriters, left to their own devices, start using the word "but"?

I ask this because, at time of writing, any advertising 2.0 event will contain a bar-chart showing the various sources of information we most trust to help us make a purchase decision.

Salesmen in shops, tramps, relatives, friends, zoophiliacs, the occupants of mental institutions: all of them seem to score more highly than "advertising".

Perhaps we should spend a moment asking why.

Okay, so our advice is commercially biased, it's true. But then so is a salesman's.

Yet a salesman, along with everyone else outside advertising has this one feature in common - they use the word "But"? "It's not the fastest car in the world, but it's reliable....."

Spend a few minutes listening to people talk about their holidays, their cars, their favourite wine or their favourite films. Ask them for a recommendation. Somewhere they'll always use the word "But".

It's expensive/not too everyone's taste/fifty miles further/prone to midges/not quite as pretty as Tuscany/slightly dangerous.... BUT - and then there follows the USP.

People aren't fools. They know that almost every purchase decision nowadays involves a trade-off. Sometimes I even suspect that decision-making actually requires a trade-off to make it satisfying. Many people who set out to spend £5000 on a painting will feel oddly quite cheated if they find one they really like for £2000.

We love making trade-offs. Stark & Stelios (where you fly easyJet and stay in a £300 hotel) and Prada & Primark are multi-brand versions of the same phenomenon. It's the joy of solving value equations in our heads. It's what makes an easyJet booking rather interesting.... "it means getting up at 6am but it saves £90." Or buying on eBay - "This bloke has a slightly dodgy feedback rating and the manual's missing - but it's really cheap."

If we love our purchases to involve a little value artithmetic, should our advertising not acknowledge this more often? Would people pay more serious attention if our ads occasionally just seemed more like, er, the truth?

This question goes hand in hand with Russell Davies's criticism of the Single-Minded Proposition or USP - which assumes a level of condensed, over-simplified (and boring) argument rarely found in real life decisions. As Russell remarks, "Noone ever says of a film, 'I enjoyed that - it was really simple'."

If we wish our advertising to enjoy the same levels of trust currently accorded to salesmen, perhaps a few more dual-minded propositions would help.

The truth, after all, is rarely simple. My wife says it can often be quite hectic. 

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* It should be noted that the word Pelmet may be used by men exclusively when prefixed by the word "Pussy" to denote a very short skirt.

We need an answer to Layard and James.

It should come as little surprise that our industry is under attack when half the Cabinet have read two books which depict advertising as a form of pollution.

(Or why the best way to defend advertising might be to attack PR.)

The two books which will have perhaps the greatest effect on our business over the next ten years were not written by anyone in advertising; most people in our business have not even read them.

We should. Or we at least need to know that Layard & James is not a wine merchant.

The two books are Happiness: Lessons from a New Science by Richard Layard and Affluenza by Oliver James.

The premise behind both is broadly the same. Since the correlation between increased salary and increased happiness seems to drop off at a certain point (around £40,000-ish p.a.) then the vast effort expended by the middle classes in raising their salaries beyond that threshold is misdirected - arising from an exaggerated belief in the happiness brought by material possesions. And it's advertising that deserves to shoulder much of the blame for this delusion. 

The two authors both suggest that income tax policy should be changed to reflect their findings - suggesting that any income above £50,000 (ie any income above that earned by academics in late middle-age, which both authors are) should be swingeingly taxed. But they also propose taxation on all pictorial advertising, declaring it "a form of pollution" which despoils the happiness of those exposed to it by inflaming an endless series of unquenchable desires. They also have evidence to suggest that populations in countries where a greater proportion of GDP is spent on advertising are less satisfied with their lives.

One might counter this assertion by pointing out that those countries where advertising comprised 0% of GDP did not make too great a fist of popular happiness either; I don't imagine it was any consolation to the victims of Stalin's showtrials to know that their tortured confessions could be broadcast without commercial breaks.

In a further act of fault-finding, I should point out that neither book adequately seeks to disentangle cause and effect. It is perfectly possible, for instance, that unhappiness makes you rich. Had Rupert Murdoch grown up in Cornwall requiring for his amusement little more than eight pints of strong cider and the occasional dog-fight, it is quite likely he would have been a happier man, but with a media empire markedly reduced in scale. A more easily contented Bill Gates would still have reached the top decile in World of Warcraft (on a Mac, presumably).

There is also Dr Johnson's dictum that "There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money." If nothing else, capitalism does a good job of taking the eternally dissatisfied, the over-ambitious and the too-controlling and redirecting their efforts towards the greater public good. (Had Martin or Rupert been born not in the West but in communist era eastern Europe they wouldn't have ended up managing a six-man Marxist media collective in Lodz - they'd have been running the secret police.)

You might even make the more controversial case that the reason that people's growth in happiness falls off so rapidly once they hit £40,000 is because, at that point, they start to pay too little attention to advertising. Rather than seeking happiness through branded goods, which are mass manufactured and widely available, they seek status in what economists call non-tradeable goods such as larger houses, more exotic holidays, second homes or private education, or in luxury items such as expensive wine. These are in finite supply and hence grotesquely more expensive than manufactured goods. It would be quite easy to prove that as a UK salary passes a certain threshold (let's hope to God it's £40,000) your expenditure on brands as a percentage of your disposable income starts to fall. Is that the root cause of Affluenza perhaps - too much coke and too little Coke?

But, actually, the fact that the authors' arguments are a bit dubious is not the point. What counts is that they are plausible - particularly to anyone who seeks to attack capitalism at its visible fringes.... a Labour cabinet minister, say. And, according to a reliable source, half the cabinet have been told to read these two books. 

More worrying still, many of the other proposals found in them are rather sensible - Layard's argument that mental health spending is far too low in relation to conventional heath spending is, once read, simply incontestable. 

So how shall we defend ourselves, when the time comes? I would not advise that we adopt the tobacco defence - that advertising does not seek to grow demand for a category but merely to rechannel existing demand within a category. Even if it's true, noone will believe it.

No, I propose another kind of defence - which involves an assault on a certain kind of PR and a certain kind of media.

Advertising, whatever its faults. is paid for. As a result of this, it does two good things. Firstly it funds the media within which it sits. And secondly, being expensive, it seeks to direct itself towards those places where desire already exists - indeed in the most targeted form of advertising (search) the advertisement only appears in response to expressed desire. Advertising does not do this perfectly, but it at least tries. Inexpensive mass products (cars are an exception) appear in mass media; more expensive items in specialised media.

Advertising is, then, at least channelled in its efforts. A reader cannot reasonably complain, having bought a copy of Vogue, that they have suddenly been tempted to buy expensive clothes any more than a someone can complain of inflamed desires on a visit to Spearmint Rhino.

Not all commercial messages enjoy these two virtues.

What seems to me to be reprehensible is a certain kind of materialistic publishing and broadcasting (some of it the product of PR) which has become a staple of every publication and many TV programmes in the last few years.

Why is the BBC making endless makeover programmes? Why is the Sunday Times endlessly suggesting I travel to Thailand? Why does Channel 4 want me to install decking? Why does The Telegraph want me to go to an uber-expensive restaurant in Mayfair? Why does the Evening Standard want me to buy £200 shoes? Why does The Spectator think I ought to go on a cruise to Antartica? Why is BBC2 trying to sell me a Ferrari? 

Isn't it a disgrace when the media, unbidden and unpaid for, devote pages and hours of programming to inflaming people's needless material desires.

Surely that's our job?

Nowadays, it seems, you are what you don't eat

In an age of surplus, people seem to define themselves every bit as much by the brands or categories they don't buy as by those they do. For some of the world's greatest brands, this is an alarming trend. Allied to the environmental movement, it could become sillier still.

Just after my second year at university, a bunch of ten friends and I planned to go on holiday together after our exams had ended. We had about £25 each to spend (no easy loans in those days) and so our decision was gloriously simple. We could go and charter a large boat on the Norfolk Broads. Or we could do nothing at all. So we went and chartered a large boat on the Norfolk Broads and (despite a few personal catastrophies) all enjoyed what was one of the best holidays it is possible to imagine. (I didn't actually see Maradona's "Hand of God" Goal, as I was holding the TV aerial above the set to try to stop the picture going fuzzy as the boat swayed at anchor.)

If you had asked any of us then what we would have done with a budget of £2500 each we would have described a fabulous group holiday. A villa outside Portfino, perhaps? Somewhere in the Caribbean? A yacht in Turkey? We were all wrong.

Unexpectedly, most of that party from 1986 are still friends. Even more unexpectedly, most of them are really quite rich. And yet we don't go on holiday together at all.

The reason is what economists would call rich-asshole syndrome. That with increasing wealth comes increasing choice. And with increasing choice comes increasing pickiness. Any idea mooted will be met with something like "Actually I don't want to go to Tuscany, I want to go to Umbria." Or (and I'm not making this up) "I don't want to go to Italy until we're much older. Besides we're planning to go to Bhutan that month anyway." 

One of the very few group trips we have managed involved seeing a total solar eclipse - where there is mercifully little debate about where you can go.

As with holidays, so with everything else. When consumers are oversupplied, three things happen. First, supply becomes fragmented into smaller categories. Secondly, people are inclined to simplify choice by summarily rejecting perhaps the majority of the categories on offer. Then most "educated" people reject the mass-market, popularist categories first.

One category which suffers grievously from this is the frozen food category. In many ways healthier, fresher and more nutritious than refrigerated ready meals, frozen food is almost entirely overlooked by a whole generation of middle-class housewives who shorten their trip to the supermarket by by-passing the frozen food aisle altogther. This is sheer snobbery. To overcome this prejudice, an upmarket brand called "Cook" has openened a whole chain of specialist frozen food shops in prosperous parts of Surrey and Kent which seem to destigmatise the category somewhat. 

But this category rejection is nothing new. Music did the same thing earlier. Indeed it is interesting to see how mainstream and vanilla the music charts once were. The best selling singles artist in Britain in 1964? No. it wasn't them. It was actually "Gentleman" Jim Reeves.

The 1970s saw rapid musical fragmentation into different genres, each with their own distinct crowd of followers. Even if more catholic music-lovers will explore several of these genres, one of their first musical decisions will be the rejection of more popularist forms - Easy Listening Country, Rap and Metal probably being the first to fail the cut. 

Economist Tyler Cowen writing in "Discover Your Inner Economist" cites studies that show how more "educated" people, as they grown in status, increase their dislike of low-status musical genres more pronouncedly than they identify with high status genres. Indeed Heavy Metal and Rap are unique in gaining higher scores for "Dislike it very much" than for merely "Dislike it."

Economists call this signalling. What seems interesting to me is that brand signalling (ie using brands to signal your refinement or status) now seems to happen negatively as much as positively.

Take brands such as Sky, Coca Cola, McDonalds, Tesco, easyJet, Ford, Birds Eye.  These magnificent, popularising brands seem to create an opposition that takes the shape of an unholy alliance between a particular kind of leftist and a particular kind of snob.

You would think that leftists would admire the above businesses for providing a large proportion of the population with affordable and egalitarian access to what were once luxuries. Eating out. Breaks to Prague. Tasty, non-alcoholic drinks. (I am always a big fan of Andy Warhol's observation: "what I like about Coke is that the president of the United States can't get a better Coke than the bum on the street.") Marx couldn't have wished for more. And, through innovative pricing and clever value ranges, easyJet and Tesco may do more to redistribute wealth than Gordon Brown.

Oddly, leftists hate these brands. (Even more oddly, to these same leftists, expensive and elitish French wines are quite acceptable.)

To hear a certain kind of pinko talk about low cost air travel is slightly reminiscent of Vita Sackville West's comment when public transport became visible from the upper floors of Knole: "What do they need buses for anyway? It will only encourage the working classes to move about".

Why does this "You are what you refuse to eat" approach matter so much? Surely these people are in a minority? In most of the country they certainly are. But among journalists and broadcasters those twin vices of snobbery and pinko sanctimoniousness are to be found, singly or together, in practically every practitioner of the trade.

That is why every single story on global warming will feature an easyJet or RyanAir plane, not a Thai Airways 747. And why every story on child obesity will show a child clutching a hamburger despite the fact that there are fewer than 1,000 McDonalds restaurants in the UK (there are 8,000 Chinese TakeAways alone) and despite the fact that Brits have been eating beef, bread and potatoes for over 400 years without apparent ill effects. (Pizzerias couldn't possibly be to blame - they aren't American and they sell Chianti, for a start).

This journalistic bias against the popularist (it also applies in music - scan every music magazine for months and you'll see barely a mention of a country artist) unites anti-Americanism with snobbery - often under the guise of environmental concern. For those of us who work with big, popular, American brands it is the biggest issue we face.

It is also an opportunity. To save money for my children's birthday party I tried to  persuade my wife to hold it at our local McDonald's and to promise unlimited supplies of Coke. I'd budgeted for maybe three going-away bags. The other 17 parents belong to that pissy group of people who enhance their social status by never darkening the Golden Arches.

Maybe it's time for one burger chain to borrow the positioning of Heavy Metal. Or of Milwall FC. "No-one likes us, we don't care." After all, it's the fact that your parents hate metal that makes it so great.