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?
