The Pitch: Lifting advertising above puffery requires both insight and truth

About the best thing that has ever come out of McCann Erickson is their strapline. I have always believed "Truth well told" is the purest, simplest way to describe what the advertising profession produces.

While other advertising agencies have toyed with different lines, none of them has gotten close to this explanation - unfortunately, the agency itself has really only lived up to the first half of the phrase - and sometimes not even that.

I was reminded of the power of the expression after seeing two television commercials that share similar executions.

Sony PlayStation's "Mountain" and a sports shoe spot by adidas both involve people climbing on top of each other.

The PlayStation spot involves thousands of people fighting to get to the top of the human mountain. The mountain, of course, symbolises the real competition to be the best PlayStation player in the world, or in your country, neighbourhood, school or family. So there is a strong truth at work here.

The creatives have taken the competitive nature of the game and everyone's desire to be the best and used this insight to create a brilliant piece of communication.

The adidas commercial also has people climbing over each other. But this time they are all perched on top of a single man. He walks along the street in his new adidas shoes as more and more people climb on his shoulders. Of course, none of this matters to him because, he's wearing adidas.

Now we all get the point this commercial is making. With a new pair of adidas you can carry the whole world on your shoulders without a care in the world. But there is no truth to this, just plain old puffery, and while the commercial is entertaining it lacks the depth, and therefore the emotional connection, of the PlayStation spot.

PlayStation doesn't try hard to be cool, it just tells the truth in an extraordinary way, whereas adidas, in this execution anyway, just comes across as cute. It is a lesser brand because of that.

It seems so many agencies and clients these days are willing to abandon the truism on which their brands have been built in order to make them more contemporary or give them "attitude". In the end they're often left with nothing except confused customers.

* Gordon Clarke, formerly a creative director at advertising firm Young & Rubicam, is now a director of independent creative consultancy Booster.