One of the things that has long baffled me about the advertising industry is that, although we pay for most of the media, we make no active attempt to influence its output.
No other large-scale buyer of goods or services acts in this shamefully wimpish way.
We have endlessly talked about the need to consolidate media buying power, and then all we do is to use this power to drive down prices. At present, this is a completely misdirected effort.
Because, at the moment, it doesn't really matter whether you are paying £20,000 or £10,000 for a full page in a British newspaper. What matters is that 50% of your £10,000 is being spent on paying journalists to write doom-laden articles discouraging consumers from doing anything except to cower inside their homes waiting for redundancy and repossession.
In short we are currently using our clients' money to pay newspapers to destroy our clients' businesses.
It reminds me of a Viz bus-side advertisement that reads "Smoke Tabs." Underneath is written "HM Government Health Warning: Don't Smoke Tabs"
What is the point in spending £10,000 to buy an advertisement in the Daily Mail that says "Buy Stuff" if that £10,000 merely pays for the three adjacent articles which tell readers "Don't Buy Stuff!"
In the good old days before CSR, when large American Fruit companies saw their supply-chain threatened
by pinko governments in Latin America, they didn't sit around wringing
their hands. Not a bit: they paid their chums in the CIA to start a
little insurrection and install a more fruit-friendly regime in the
Presidential Palace. We should do something similar now.
Group M and the other large media buying houses should simply withhold all advertising money from British media until they learn to cheer the f*** up. And, correspondingly, we should lavish advertising money on feel-good media.
Imagine the phone calls. "Hello, Daily Telegraph, we were going to give you £100K to run a series of ads for IBM, but unfortunately you ran an article on repossessions yesterday. So instead we're going to put all the money towards sponsoring "Dogs do the Funniest Things on ITV3 and a gatefold pull-out in Hello! Now, don't do it again, right."
That would sort the bastards.
We should also withhold all money from Rupert Murdoch until he launches Sky Good News, a 24 hour channel featuring kittens doing amusing things with wool - perhaps occasionally interspersed with stories of people who've survived cancer.
The economic problem - what Keynes calls the paradox of thrift - would be solved in a month.
