We know advertising is dishonest so why do we care so much?

We can tell the silly season is over because things have just got a lot sillier.

For the past two days, the global commentariat was triggered by an advertisement, sending not just this country but the entire western world into a frenzy of bitter recrimination or flag-waving endorsement based roughly on the hoary old oxymoron about truth in advertising.

To repeat, the world lost its mind over an advertisement, a 30-second break from programming that we happily would otherwise have ignored by attending to our ablutions or lunging for the remote control and making it go away altogether.

For those old enough to remember, Gillette’s old slogan was “The Best a Man Can Get.” Gillette’s brand agency, Grey, decided to go a step further and point a finger at some aspects of male behaviour.

And with that the media went crazy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koPmuEyP3a0

Interestingly, Grey Australia has a campaign for the cosmetics company, Cover Girl, with the use of a slogan, “Let girls be girls”. It’s not a campaign according to the advertising company. It’s an “initiative” which “is about slowing things down, about ensuring makeup is fun, not a fix for flaws or a way to make improvements. It’s about girls embracing who they are — little girls.”

What both advertisements are really about is creeping in to wring consumers dry while desperately flailing about for some tenuous moral justification.

If we were to follow the advertising’s moral blathering, men need to walk the Hall of Mirrors and have a good look at themselves while girls should be left alone to consume products they haven’t before.

Advertising may veer into social comment. It’s a way not just of selling things — advertising was shot of that old chestnut decades ago — but to make the consumers feel righteous about choosing the product at point of sale.

It’s dreary, mundane nonsense from an industry that babbles incoherently about “flipping the zeitgeist”, “retargeting the demand side platform” and “navigating the audience extension.”

Honestly, you wouldn’t have these people in your house.

What should have gone through to the keeper was instead met with a flurry of comment from people who should know better but obviously don’t.

Mark Latham issued a one-man boycott of Gillette products on Twitter yesterday. Given Gillette’s parent company, Procter & Gamble is capitalised at $US227.4 billion, it probably should be able to ride that out.

More troubling was a call from UK presenter Piers Morgan for a global ban on Gillette razors. Where would this lead us? Well, with the proliferation of bearded hipsters around our inner cities, I doubt anyone would notice. Or at least not for several years. This summons up the old stock-and-trade cartoon of a long running upholsterer’s strike, where a ragged couch is seen sitting in a living room perhaps with a spring jutting out of the armrest while the caption reads, “The pain goes on”.

These sorts of angry calls for product boycotts have a shelf life of about a week before everyone forgets what all the fuss was about and plucks the Gillette product from the shelves not as an endorsement of the ad but because it is on special or because they feel some sort of brand association or sometimes for no other reason than it was the first thing the buyer grabbed off the shelves.

A quick look at the share price of Gillette’s parent company, Procter and Gamble on the NYSE revealed, shock, horror, it was down seven cents, opening at $90.71 and closing at $90.64. Was this slide due to the heated response to the ‘toxic masculinity’ advertising campaign? Well, no. The analysts say P & G stock is subject to the usual cost pressures associated with manufacturing goods and getting them to market.

Trucking costs are up 25 per cent in the US. The cost of petroleum is also up in the US or was last year and a company in the personal and beauty products industry will feel this cost pressure, too. Sad as I am to inform you of this, most of these products literally require you to smear vast amounts of petrochemicals directly onto your face.

It also transpires the Gillette brand is one of the company’s high achievers due mainly to the fact that Gillette has developed a direct line from warehouse to customer via the internet, Gillette Direct It is running along nicely according to the company’s annual report.

Advertising, for those who understand its effects, may drive sales up by three per cent or so or, in the event of a particularly disastrous campaign, may send them falling by roughly the same figure, sometimes a little more in the event of a titanic balls-up. And that’s about the strength of it.

What the commentariat with assorted insane contributions from social media went nuts over is a matter of three per cent here or there on the bottom line of a company few of us have heard of and couldn’t care less about.

For years, we’ve known the advertising industry is a cesspit of dishonesty that routinely showers us with a torrent of bullshit that is best left ignored and unwatched. We didn’t pay much attention to it before, so why do we now?

In these days where the human condition is set to permanent quivering outrage amid pointless obsessions with symbolism, we seem to have lost the capacity to be rational. To switch off and let the nonsense slide by.

Worse, we seem to have lost our bullshit detectors or perhaps they have gone on the blink while we fret and worry about the long list of things in our lives that don’t matter.

This article was first published in The Australian on 18 January 2019.