I've been doing a bit of research on public health-awareness advertising campaigns, and thought I'd share some highs and lows. First, the good: I came across this gallery of compelling, clever anti-smoking ads and installations:
The whitepaper on Civil Branding compares the role of brands in today's society with those of church and state in the past. Brands now "engage [in] wider conversations about how we should think about ourselves as a society." They play a primary role in informing what we find important, and help us tune our perspectives on it. God help me, I think this is right. But the conclusion - that it is the duty of marketers to help brands advertise with value-based messages, to promote good values - is dead wrong.
When marketers suggest that companies undertake vague, value-based advertising campaigns that are contradicted by their unethical business practices, they are promoting a culture where values are handed down by institutions lacking the moral authority to do so. When companies use advertising to promote values that they don't instantiate, they drain the meaning out of those values.
Making value-based promises requires moral authority. If you're a marketer, and you help a company promote a value it doesn't instantiate, you're cheapening that value. You're making a world in which that value means less.
Nick recently wrote a post about the Civil Branding website and whitepaper. Here's his distillation of the whitepaper's argument:
Branding is a form of mass-communication. For better or worse, choosing brands is how we express which ideas we think are important. Therefore, marketers should encourage companies to adopt and promote progressive values in order to build a better society.
His argument against so-called civil branding is old hat for BlogLESS readers: Brands in fact shouldn't make vague, value-based promises in their advertising because in the best case they can't possibly keep them. He also noted that in many cases, these promises contradict a company's actions.
Putting a finer point on the latter case, Nick brought up a ludicrous set of recent advertisements for Citibank, who now promote their company using the notion "that there is more to life than the pursuit of money." Nick notes that Citibank hardly has the moral authority to make such claims: "That's a great sentiment, but it's hard to take seriously from a company that skims money from it’s customers’ accounts and takes unacceptable risks with their funds - all for the sake of making as much money as possible." I made a similar point in November to a PR person from oil multinational BP whose recent branding upgrade situates them "beyond petroleum."
The individual who wrote the Civil Branding whitepaper responded to Nick's concerns in the comments, suggesting that by merely putting forth "progressive messages," companies are taking on an ethically "constructive" role in society.
This idea is not only credulous, it's dangerous.
