Looking beyond the shroud of myths

You know the saying that there's one born every minute? They were talking about me. The sucker advertisers dream about, who rushes out to the stores the minute a new product is advertised.

The new toothpaste will make my teeth whiter, that green soap will make my skin glow like pearls and shine like gold. Never mind that the toothpaste tastes like mouldy yogurt and the soap smells like pond slime.

Which means it's only natural that I would fall for a glossy, green book jacket with a shiny red car on it. I opened John Philips Jones' book expecting a newer version of Confessions of an Advertising Man.

David Ogilvy's classic was peppered with sparkling wit, quirky anecdotes and many, many colour photographs. With Fables, Fashions, and Facts About Advertising: A study of 28 enduring myths, I was stiffed.

No anecdotes in inviting italics, no gossipy asides of how a campaign was devised and why it worked or didn't work, and no "" not one "" photograph.

Three hundred and ten pages of unending text....

Of course, there's no denying the text is good. It had better be. Jones is a tenured full professor at the Newhouse School of Public Communication, Syracuse University. He has had close to 30 years' experience in the advertising agency world on both sides of the Atlantic "" he's worked on campaigns for brands such as Lux, Pepsi-Cola, Quaker Oats, Gillette and Nestle. He's written five books on advertising, one of which "" What's in a Name? Advertising and the Concept of Brands "" is in its second edition.

But the advertising genius has moved aside to make room for the teacher. Fables... is a work of scholarship (if advertising can be associated with a high-brow word like "scholarship").

Students of management and communications courses will be in highlighter heaven with this book: sentences that beg to be underlined and made part of an answer, theories illustrated and junked, and concepts such as STAS (short-term advertising strength) and bisociative fusion (don't even ask) explained. All that're missing are the footnotes, endnotes, tables and diagrams.

Fables... is in its essence, a dispassionate and relatively-objective appraisal of the world of advertising. Every profession has its own jargon. Sometimes it's used to hasten communications between members of the profession and sometimes it's used as an exclusion mechanism and to create an aura of mystery around the often-ordinary, mundane tasks the profession entails.

Advertising is no different, and some of its idiom"" phrases such as slice of life, unique selling proposition and life-cycle theory, for instance "" has crept into our vocabulary as well. But there's more where that came from "" Hierarchy of Effects, Adstock and Half-Life, Day-After-Recall testing, advertising cut-through are some of the better ones.

Jones' book attempts to demystify some of this "" he's even added a glossary, in case further clarification is required.

The 20 chapters in Fables... are divided into seven parts, each dealing with different aspects of the advertising business, its relationship with consumers and business. Each chapter is intent on debunking myths "" some of them well-entrenched enough to be considered gospel. Jones picks them up one by one, takes them apart, and then trashes them.

Part One deals with advertising's relationship to business generally and to the consumer. The myths here are the classic, lofty statements of intent and motive: consumers are our lifeblood, our entire reason for being; the company achieves its profits through creating and maintaining customer satisfaction; and, advertising can persuade customers to change their attitudes, beliefs, or behaviour.

Balderdash, is the author's opinion. Companies spend most of their time looking over their shoulders, worrying more about whether their rivals are catching up than whether people are actually buying their brands. And forget about changing consumer behaviour: less than 40 per cent of advertising effectively carries out the job of stimulating consumer demand.

Much if not most advertising is defensive, meant to protect a manufacturer's existing business. "As a general rule," declares Jones, "advertising is a force for continuity and reinforcement, not change and volatility."

The myths in Parts Two and Three relate to target audiences, creative work plans and promotional budgets. Fables... dismisses targeting brands and their variations to meet the needs of specific consumer groups as a utopian notion. All that a campaign can reasonably hope to achieve is match media selection to brand users, that too very loosely.

After all, many users of an advertised brand are not visible and, therefore, the first priority should be to cover as wide an audience as possible.

And forget any thoughts of the cumulative effect of advertising (the theory that says just one ad will have little or no effect, there's an advertising threshold that has to be crossed before consumers rush out to buy). A campaign that does not generate immediate sales is totally wasted; there's no point in investing more money or effort on it.

The next two parts of the book deal with the importance of market research.

Jones discusses some of the types of research used to develop and evaluate advertising, including pre-testing and tracking studies. He also spends a little time discussing the relevance of direct response. But given the author's belief that constant testing is the lifeblood of advertising, perhaps Jones could have devoted more space to these issues, and "" more importantly "" described in greater detail some of the newer concepts and techniques of consumer insights and given us more evidence that it works.

Jones is an expert in his field, and an academic to boot. That shows in his writing. Fables... will probably find a place on the bookshelves of students and those whose livelihood depends on the vagaries of the advertising world, one way or the other. Lay readers, though, will find it heavy going. Like me, they'll miss the pretty pictures.

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Fables, Fashions, and Facts About Advertising:
A Study of 28 Enduring Myths

John Philip Jones
Sage Publications
Pages: 310
Price: $37.95