Storyboard, page 18
“If something’s a lie, it’s a lie,” Harvey Bodge said. “But if your academic convictions lead you to believe otherwise, I won’t quarrel with you. Only you mustn’t take two pages of The Radical to tell our readers that you’ve nothing to tell them.”
“We may find many examples of the complexity of this question in the advertising of proprietary medicines. Let us take as one instance any of the many specifics put out for the use of rheumatism-sufferers, since rheumatism is a disease of which the manifestations, it is now thought, may be psycho-somatic among many sufferers. X, the advertiser does not say in so many words that his medicine will cure rheumatism, because he is not permitted to do so, but his advertising implies cure. He does not present his medicine as giving no more than symptomatic relief for a limited period, for if he did, he believes, the public would not buy it; instead, the advertising presents symptomatic relief as if that were the same as cure. X, the advertiser, therefore, has implied a lie, and knows it. But Y, the sufferer, believes X, and since what Y has been needing is an excuse for self-love, for the narcissistic pleasure of taking medicine, regular application or ingestion of X’s medicine cures him for all practical purposes. Was the lie a lie for Y? If Z, who suffers from headaches brought about by stress, reads and believes an advertisement for a new analgesic which claims to relieve headaches more quickly than ever before, and implies that such relief will be almost instantaneous, then does it matter to Z that the difference in speed may, even under laboratory conditions, be only minimal, and the claim ‘more quickly than ever before’ specious? If Z believes, then the symbolic act of taking the analgesic is already effective in dissipating much of the tension under which he suffers, so that the blood vessels in his brain become less distended, and the relief does indeed come almost instantaneously. Is the implied claim, therefore, a lie for Z?”
‘Is rheumatism psycho-somatic? I can’t believe that. Everybody over a certain age gets rheumatism when the weather’s damp. I get it myself. You’re not accusing me of self-love, eh? Everything’s psycho-somatic nowadays. They go too far,” said Harvey Bodge.
“Perhaps the people most immediately damaged by advertisements may be those who write them, since their daily business is to suggest what they must often know not to be true. Yet is a barrister so damaged? Advertisers will often suggest that their profession is similar to that of a barrister, who will not either lie himself nor induce witnesses to lie in favour of his client (again, a professional code forbids such a practice), yet who is not called upon to state the case for his opponents, and may go a long way to suggest an innocence which is, at the least, in dispute. Most advertisers, it would appear, are not in fact morally damaged by their profession, since they do not feel guilt in engaging in it, and, as modern psychologists believe, it is the guilt and not the sin itself which damages the psyche. Only very occasionally, and then usually on the specific issue of the morality of a particular campaign rather than on the general issues of the morality of advertising itself, will such a person suffer a crisis of conscience.
“What is, indeed, more likely to damage the personalities of those who actually ‘create’ advertising (that is, the writers and artists) is the persistent waste of their efforts. A truly sensitive person who has used, for the purpose of creating advertising, talents which might otherwise have been employed in teaching or the arts, and who has suffered day by day the changes, the disappointments, the postponements, the compromises such as no artist in any previous age has had to make with a patron, and who realizes at the end that all this ‘expense of spirit and … waste of shame’ has gone only to produce a thirty-second filmlet dedicated to the sale of margarine, or has perhaps never reached the public at all (since not all advertising campaigns are accepted by the manufacturers for whom they are devised, and it is often customary to devise two campaigns by different writers and artists to the same end, so that one of them is bound to be rejected), then indeed such a person may feel an acute sense of personal waste, and the guilt which must accompany such a waste. On the other hand, it may be said that nobody is forced to engage in advertising, and many sensitive people do, in fact, leave the profession to teach or to practise the arts. We may blame ourselves, not the advertisers, that teachers and artists are among the least rewarded members of our community, so that the decision of such persons to leave may often be taken with difficulty, and some married men with children may not take it at all.”
“There’s a sentence in that paragraph, towards the end there, Ralph, that’s long beyond all bearing. Faulkner may be able to get away with that sort of thing, but we don’t believe in it here. It’s not the language of fact. Mind you, you’re right. Teachers are bloody underpaid; no doubt of it. Millions for the H-bomb, and nothing for education. We’ve always said that, and it can’t be said too often.”
“Let us return, however, to the concept of the ‘necessary’ lie, a concept familiar to students of literature in the works of Ibsen, Pirandello and O’Neill, and indeed T. S. Eliot himself has said, ‘Humankind cannot bear too much reality’. If we accept the comfortable values of a materialist society as they are presented to us by advertising, we may in the short run be a happier people, and being happy, being presented only with attainable objectives, may produce more of the material objects on which our society and others like it depend. I do not propose here to contrast this state of affairs with one in which material values are opposed, and transcended by ‘spiritual’ values, since for me ‘spiritual’ is not a meaningful word, but I may, I think, suggest that, even in terms of human life as we know it, a comfortable society is a society in danger; the concept of the interdependence of men upon one another is practical; yet it is more than material, and it may be thought essential to the survival of mankind. Furthermore, if men are given only as much truth as makes them happy, it is likely that, as time goes on, they will want less and less of it, and adversity may find them without resources, since in adversity truth is something which we cannot always avoid, and comfort something which we must often do without. A selfish materialist society may also be a soft society, and these are not the societies which survive.”
“Opinion,” Harvey Bodge said fretfully. “It’s all opinion, Ralph.”
“We have seen that the media of mass communication depend on advertising for their existence. What is less frequently stressed is that advertising depends on the media of mass communication, and would disappear without them. Even those media much in demand by advertisers because they guarantee large audiences, while they may avoid such penny-catching devices as special supplements to attract special advertisers, are nevertheless afraid to take any positive action that might offend advertisers—we have seen a film distributor refuse for Saturday morning showings to children a film sponsored by the Government and warning that addiction to cigarettes may end in lung cancer. Yet media-owners, if only they would combine, could perform a service to the public by making general on a very wide scale the sort of information already made available by such public services as the Consumer Advisory Bureau, of whose existence the mass of the public is not consciously aware, and whose modest subscriptions many people might find too expensive. Media-owners might confidently do this without risk of reprisal, but in the current competitive situation it is unlikely that they will, and Government action in this direction might be more effective than the taxes on advertising which are often mentioned, but which might, in the long run, only succeed in raising prices, or in hastening still further the process by which the smaller firms are disappearing from the market.”
“Might be something in that.”
“… On the question of motivation research and what is called ‘depth’ advertising, we must of course agree that, from the manufacturers’ point of view, there is very little point in advertising their goods except in the terms on which consumers buy such goods. If a conventional researcher were to ask S, a woman leaving a confectionery shop, for whom she has bought the halfpound box of chocolates she carries under her arm, she might very well be disinclined to answer, ‘For myself’, even if she had in fact done so, because it is often thought to be greedy and self-indulgent to buy sweets for oneself, particularly if one should be a woman, for whom, it is conventional to believe, chocolates are more usually bought by a man. If she were to answer, ‘For myself’, then, she would be confessing to greed and to sexual failure, and she is more likely to lie. Similarly the sufferer from rheumatism, Y, in the example I have already quoted, may have as his his ‘real’ reason for buying the proprietary remedy, not that he wanted symptomatic relief from rheumatism, but that he wanted something to rub on himself or for somebody to rub on him, and anything would do provided it gave a valid excuse for the rubbing.”
“You do go on about rheumatism, Ralph. I can’t believe there’s anything in it.”
“Most consumer goods of mass consumption are bought habitually; food, toilet and household articles are constantly being used up and need replacement. Choice of such goods is made at least in part because advertisers have surrounded them with pleasant associations; loyalty to any one brand in an area where differences between brands are minimal is most likely to be stimulated by the signals ‘pleasure’ or ‘approval’ set off by the sight of a packet or label with which those sensations are associated in the complicated electronic computor which is the human brain. This holds true, not only for habitual purchases, but for what are called ‘impulse’ purchases, of which perhaps the most frequent are confectionery and cosmetics. Other goods are bought, not simply for the use which consumers may get from them, but as symbols of status within the community. An example here is the gold-nibbed fountain pen; when anyone can buy a ballpoint pen for ninepence, the possession of an expensive fountain pen marks one out as a person of some consequence, or at least some affluence. In all these purchases, the decision to buy will not be made only, or even mainly, at the level of rational choice. We must accept that the advertisers will wish to approach us at an irrational or subconscious level, and there are few Agencies nowadays which are without the services of a psychologist.
“We may say, therefore, that for excellent commercial reasons advertisers combine to strike at the fiction which is the basis of democratic society, for democracy is conducted on the principle that men’s decisions are rationally arrived at. It may be objected that this is true of important decisions and that the decision to buy one brand of washing powder rather than another is not important. In general terms that may be true, but in the individual terms of a single housewife (the same single housewife whose vote helps to decide which party shall be returned to power at an election), it is important that she should buy the product likely to wash her clothes most efficiently, and when we discover that she may be strongly influenced in her choice by the colour of the packet, without knowing that this is what influences her, we may reasonably feel perturbed.
“I cannot see how ‘depth’ advertising can be in any way forbidden; the practical difficulties of the enforcement of a ban are too great. Nor do I suggest that it is only advertisers who exploit the irrational motives of human beings. Men have, after all, looked for a father-figure long before Messrs. Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn helped to ‘sell’ General Eisenhower to the voters of the United States. It seems to be one of the prices we pay for our increased knowledge of the processes of the human mind that it gives us power, not only to control mental illness, but to ‘manipulate’ human preferences. The limits of this manipulation are not yet known, even to the manipulators, and manipulation brings its problems even to them, since all human society is dynamic. An obvious extension of our earlier example is that when knowledge about the desirable colour for a packet of detergent becomes common, then most packets will be of that colour, and it is a packet of a different colour which stands out on the shelf of a self-service store.
“What remains as something which must concern us, if not the advertisers, is that it should be accepted by the leaders of a democracy that an irrational appeal will usually beat a rational appeal at the polls, and that any set of men—they themselves or the advertisers—should deliberately and without consent given, set out to win power over the minds of other men by means of which those others are not conscious. To return to our earlier question, ‘What is truth?’ we must reply that the conduct of civilized life depends on the general acceptance of certain fictions, of which the fiction of man as a rational, political animal is one of the most important. If a fiction is lived in for long enough, it becomes at least partly fact, but if it be not lived at all, it is seen as only fiction, and there is nothing behind it but anarchy.”
“I did get a bit carried away there,” Ralph said. “It’s not really scholarly. I could cut that.”
Harvey Bodge said, “Ralph, I’m going to be frank with you; I’m going to be fair. I want you to cut the lot. No! Wait! No, I don’t want you to cut it. I want you to keep it. I want you to publish it, because there’s some important stuff there; no doubt of it. Reading it over with you beside me, I’ve become convinced. It isn’t right for us. That may still be true. But it is right for a book, Ralph. A really good book.”
“Do you think so?”
“I’m sure of it. What’s more, it’s the kind of thing we’d like to help you do. We’d make time. We’re not exactly slave-drivers here, as you know.”
“But my thesis….”
“Of course. There’s that too. You must finish that.”
“Do you really think it would make a book?”
“Expanded, yes. What’s more, we might get it commissioned. I’ll ring up Gollancz in the morning.”
“I have become rather interested in it all since I started. There’s a lot of stuff I didn’t have space to use in this article.”
“I knew it. Here and there, you know, it was very compressed. Good—but compressed. I’d say ‘dehydrated’, if that didn’t sound pejorative.”
“I had to compress, if I was going to——”
“You’ve compressed some of the goodness out of it, Ralph. Some of the juice. Put it back in. Expand. Let it grow. We’ll help, if you’ll let us.” He made a note on his memo pad, and murmured, “Ring … Gollancz … morning,” just loud enough for Ralph to hear. “Anybody who’s interested will probably want to see a chapter, but you won’t mind that.”
“There isn’t a good book on advertising, as a matter of fact. Some good popular stuff, most of it American. But not a scholarly book.”
“Just one thing,” Harvey Bodge said. “If we’re going to save most of what you want to say for a book, it does seem a pity to waste the space we’ve been keeping for you in the paper. Of course I could fill it a thousand times over, I suppose, but I’d been looking forward to doing a full-length piece of yours. This paragraph here now, the example you give of conspicuous——”
“The Foundation Soap thing? It’s quite genuine. I had it from——”
“If you could just expand that a bit. Fifteen hundred words would do. Just write up the facts and figures, and a bit more of the background. We could use it now, and you could print it again later as an Appendix or something. It doesn’t do any harm, you know, to have some sort of a platform like The Radical so that people will already be used to thinking of you as an authority. It’s a lot of nonsense really, I don’t deny, but it gives confidence, and the reviewers are more inclined to take you seriously.”
“Yes, of course. I don’t mind at all,” Ralph said, pleased at the unexpected turn the interview had taken. “It won’t take any time. I’ll write it up today, and it can go straight in.”
*
“Well, I expect you want to hear about the meeting,” Tony Barstow said to Sophia and to Hugh. They did not reply.
“It was quite successful really,” Tony said. “Considering, you know, that Keith——”
“Yes.”
“—not being there, and that just left me to——”
“Yes.”
“They were tremendously upset about it, as a matter of fact. They all were, up there. They were really cut up. They said they wanted me to tell everyone how sorry they were to hear——”
“You’ve told us, then.”
“No, really! They were. I mean, you know, something like that, it could happen to—I mean, they’re not monsters, you know; they were really tremendously upset.”
“We do know, Tony,” Hugh said. “Sophia didn’t mean to be snappish, but we do all feel sorry enough about it ourselves, without needing Hoppness’ sympathy at second-hand. We just don’t feel like talking about it very much.”
“I suppose you’ve heard it’s definite about the little boy?”
“We heard he died in hospital.”
“Yesterday morning. Secondary shock,” Tony said with relish.
“It’s not news any more, Tony. All the Agency knows. Did Hoppness say anything about the advertising? That’s why we’re having this meeting, after all.”
“Yes, they did. First time I’d ever run a Hoppness meeting. They don’t really care for it if there’s only one of us, but P.A. couldn’t manage it, and under the circumstances, we thought they wouldn’t mind so much if——”
“Yes.”
“Went off rather well actually. They were very congratulatory about it; you know how they are. Doesn’t really mean anything, I suppose.”
“And the advertising?”
“They suggested one or two amendments. They say we’re not quite home yet, but they think we’ve made good progress. Have you got a copy of the television script? If we could have that in front of us——”
“Sophia?”
Sophia took a copy from the file. “We didn’t get to the press stuff, as a matter of fact,” Tony said. “But they thought that once we got the television right, the press would follow.”
