Truth in Advertising

Well I was a kid, I remember occasionally coming across the phrase, “you could be sued for false advertising.”

How things have changed.

I realize I’m a fairly cynical person generally, but I wasn’t always this way.  I had to become cynical and skeptical because so many scurrilous advertisers were making, well, not actual “promises,” but they were certainly actively exploiting my vulnerability and innocence, by implying that by buying their product I would achieve nirvana.  If I am complaining, well, I paid for the privilege.  

Let me ask you this question.  Do you place any blind trust or faith in any advertising you see anywhere?  When you see an ad for some new abdominal exercises device, do you actually believe that these spectacularly sculpted models demonstrating it got that way by using that machine, or does your eye travel to the fine print of “results not typical”? 

The amount of cynicism one must have to navigate a single day of standard advertising has actually, in my opinion, become a menace to society.  Just to give you an example, one of my facebook friends pointed me towards a web site where I could supposedly sign a petition to ban a pesticide that is killing all the honey bees.  Now I have to tell you, I’m fully aware of the importance of honeybees, and I am fully and passionately against the wholesale slaughter of honeybees.  However, I am so used to people shading the truth as they try to push their own agenda or sell me some miracle pill that I have started to see the entire media world as a source of biased self-serving information.  

When I saw this honeybee-saving site, my first reaction was, is this yet another exaggerated-threat ploy for people to gather my information and send me fund-raising literature?  or perhaps is it just a hoax being run by a high school kid in Slovenia?  Or is it a scam being run by a crackpot in Montana, who got fired from the chemical company and he is drumming up this supposed threat to honeybees to drive down the price of the chemical company’s stock?  These are all very real mathematical possibilities.  I don’t have the time to sit down and research this thing.  A cursory statistical analysis leads me to assume that it is, in all likelihood, just one more scam, so I just ignore it.

The trouble is, what if it’s for real?  What if this is an actual fix to an impending problem that I should really pay attention to?  My perceptions have been calloused over.  I have been trained to ignore all shouts of alarm.  

I wonder just how many companies realize that their constant pushing of the edge of the credibility is creating a culture of disbelief, where it is becoming harder and harder to impart any information to anyone.  I wonder what’s going to happen if, someday, like the little boy who cried wolf, somebody somewhere realizes it is very important to tell the truth and for people to act on it, but through decades of training, we just assume that their very real cry of alarm is just one more staged publicity stunt.   

If the coin of the realm is the presumption that everybody is lying all the time, how can we ever hope to achieve any real communication?

© Justin Locke