I know I have touched a raw nerve – in this age of deregulation, decentralization and market driven policies, how can it happen that a progressive, well educated, privately placed management professional has such archaic ideas. Agreed, we do not need a license raj – the image of an O&M executive standing in line to get the ZooZoo ad okayed is preposterous to say the least. And surely I am not talking of moral regulator; having never considered myself a votary of the moral brigade, I have not yet reached that stage of depravity wherein I secretly enjoy the “immoral” ads while publicly creating a ruckus. But what I am looking at here is more the kind of self regulation – a voluntary body of industry professionals who oversee the quality of ads in general. But let me not jump the gun and here is beginning the story in the right way – from the beginning.
This is the age of science – any claim made by anyone, even a school kid, has to be backed by “scientific evidence”. Thus every scientific study has a list of tables, findings and bibliography that is longer than the substance of the article. Even a grade 1 student is being asked to submit his/her references at the end of homework. On the other hand you have, in one distressingly painful ad, a set of guys with some sort of goggles, claiming to see bacteria and dust in a house without a particular brand of AC and none in the other (which, of course, uses that particular AC brand)! I donot know what is the source of greater hilarity – that one can see germs on using goggles or that AC kills bacteria and virus.
The tribe of pseudo-scientists doesn’t stop there. One particular brand of health drink has promised us that kids drinking that particular brand grew 5 inches taller – come on now guys, how were you able to isolate factors such as genetic makeup, ethnicity and gender. And you have a motley collection of soaps whose claims vary from “killing germs a 100 percent better” to “ensuring an ever youthful skin” – all without any hint or mention of study conducted, parameters controlled, degree of confidence etc. One of my favorite ad had tried to invoke the religious beliefs of the audience by claiming it gives a complete physical and spiritual bath as it used the water of Ganges as one of its ingredients; this really had me flummoxed and I had to go back to my 11th class chemistry book and verify that water is not used in the saponification process. Another of the recent ads (again from the soap stable – it is really stupefying, the number of debatable ads this category produces) claimed that the no student will miss school due to ill health if they use a particular brand of soap for bathing five, I repeat five, times a day. Well, if you have bath five times a day, I wonder if there’ll be any time left to attend school.
One of my friends, in the course of conversation on this topic, burst out saying,” Come on now. Tell me how many times have you bought something trusting the veracity of its ad campaign? Ads are just that – ads. They are meant to be a welcome relief between dreary serials, dumb gameshows and despondent movies and newshours.” But this exactly is my point – when companies spend tonnes of money and admen, hours of time on these ads, then ought it not be reasonable to expect that the ads do more than provide entertainment to the viewer, provide the viewer not only the incentive but also assurance to buy the product? Agreed, stating detailed statistics makes ads lifeless, more so when hardly anyone understands the statistics stated (try talking about rejection of null hypothesis in a chi square test at a confidence level of 99% in an ad). Nevertheless, there ought to be a measure of confidence in the viewers’ mind that, given that any ad has appeared in the public medium after going through a vetting process, there is a high probability that the claims stated in the ad are true. This is where a powerful regulatory body, like the one that exists in Australia, plays a crucial role. It is to ensure the public trusts the admen and their trust is not belied. At the very least it is better than the proposal to make the celebrities responsible for the ads they appear in – poor things, they do not have sufficient time for the ad shoot; forget verifying the honesty of the claim made during the shoot
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