Advertising as the antithesis of science
By Michael Edmonds,
While the advertising industry comes up with some very clever and amusing ads, for example the clip above, I often find myself irritated by advertisements on television. And it is not just because they interrupt my TV viewing.
What I find most irritating is the often emotive manipulation used to sell products – playing on the viewers fears, guilt, envy and other emotions.
For years advertising companies have exploited psychology to work out the best way to part us from our money, often pushing the boundaries of what I would consider fair and truthful.
Indeed, I was quite pleased to recently see Ab Circle Pro advertisements banned on the basis that they portray unrealistic outcomes and could mislead the consumer.
Hopefully a few other exercise equipment advertisements will follow given many make, in my opinion, similar unrealistic claims.
When I think about it, advertising could be viewed as the antithesis of science; in science every effort is made to remove bias, to be objective and to focus on the facts.
Advertising attempts to introduce favourable bias towards the product, encourages beneficial subjective views and glosses over inconvenient facts.
With the Ab Circle Pro advertisements removed, I wonder if any more advertisements will follow? It seems to me that there a few others that make fairly dodgy claims.
Hmmm, where did I put the address of the Advertising Standards Authority again?
This post originally appeared on Sciblogs.
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See also
-
Relevance rules in the new age of advertising
Idealog #35, page 80 -
Experiments in subliminal advertising
Comments
Rebecca Caroe
Michael - your claim about advertising being the 'antithesis' of science is probably 68% true [tongue in cheek].
Read this checklist comparison:
You can't make wholly untrue claims in advertising - nor in science.
You have to be able to replicate the experience/experiment and get the same results - as in science
Statistics and measurements have to be verified as accurate - as in science
There is no requirement for humour or entertainment in science. But many adverts aren't funny either.
But without advertising there would be less or no
- billboards cluttering up our countryside
- subsidies for bus and transport companies to keep fares low
- free TV channels
- well-paid professional sports teams
- Rugby World Cup
So, you choose. the dry, clinical world of accurate science. Or the mildly irritating but sometimes amusing consumer advertising that enables much that we enjoy for free or at reduced prices to continue.
I know which world I want to live in.
Rory Sutherland
I think Rebecca is more or less right. Its contribution to human wellbeing is mixed - but net positive.
In many ways the belief that advertising is anti-science comes from a false understanding of what it means to be rational. It's rather like the typical scientific view that the placebo effect is “a bad thing, a kind of impurity” since drugs *should* only work through chemistry, not psychology. But if psychology can make you better, who's complaining? And if advertising makes you enjoy driving your car more, why worry?
A part - a varying part - of any product's value is subjective or contextual. If the brand and its emotional associations adds to one's enjoyment of the product, why is there anything irrational about paying for that enjoyment?
Ludwig von Mises was probably the best economist in understanding this false distinction between “real” value and “subjective value” when he made the point that a, in a restaurant, it is impossible to make a sensible distinction between the value created by cooking food and the value created by cooking the floor. One increases value through being tastier food; the other improves the experience by creating a pleasanter environment in which the food is consumed. The two are complementary.
Advertising - for reasons of game theory - also leads to better products since the value of a brand established over time makes it highly disadvantageous for the brand-owner to sell a bad product to make a quick buck - since the loss of reputation will hurt the business more than the short-term spike in profits benefits them.
But hucksters can use advertising - certainly. But they are held to far more stringent requirements there than in PR or in face-to-face selling.
A good read on the complementarity of advertising is Gary Becker and Sean Murphy's paper. Google it. Very interesting.
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