Promises into Trust
Today is the wrap-up of a long discussion about trust and promise-making in advertising. Herein, DLB humbly offers its prescription for contemporary advertising's terminal diagnosis.
For my money, we've learned a lot thinking about promising in advertising. We've learned that you while you can't promise something you can't deliver, a lot of companies try to circumvent reality by promising almost nothing, insinuating anything and everything, promising something deeply vague, or adopting an ironic stance toward the whole promising practice in general. From a viewer's perspective, that's a whole lot of of sneakiness, and it leads to an ongoing state of consumer anxiety.
I'd like to talk briefly today about how we as designers, advertisers, and corporations, can address this problem, and why we should want to.
We consumers are jaded. That is part and parcel of living now, in the culture we live in. We've been lied to enough that we aren't willing to accept that. If that's the case, we should note, there's no reason to think that the practices of promising something minimal, irrelevant, vague, or indefinitely deferred can go on forever with our blessing either. On the contrary, the ironic stance we're adopting toward these promises (and their counterpart wild insinuations) seems to evidence that this paradigm is falling apart even more quickly than the last.
