Stars steer past black holes in adworld

By Dita de Boni

Between the lines


The ad/marketing industry in 1999 could perhaps be characterised as an infinite galaxy containing many bright stars dodging a couple of gaseous fireballs.

The sparklies would undoubtedly include some nifty commercials by you-know-who & you-know-who and colleagues, a healthier economy leading to a boost in pre-Christmas adspend, and continuing corporate sponsorship of sports, arts and culture.

Kudos too, to some very clever work capitalising on New Zealand's starring role on the world stage during Apec and the millennium.

Not quite bright and vaguely whiffy: breweries reverting to 1950s tactics to sell beer, ads which use every hot potato in the book to promote talkback radio, and drug companies plugging the wonders of potentially lethal drugs alongside provisos that need the 20/20 vision of a 10-year-old to read.

Advertising using dubious tactics will always exist, but hopefully a new year will bring more sparkles and fewer of the black holes created in 1999 where Government department heads waving chequebooks and ad/marketers collided.

Dinner deals between agencies and politicians, PR firms hired to block Government censure and bureaucratic blow-outs on advertising do little to extinguish the view of government as wasteful and ad/marketers as willing conspirators.

Government bodies spent over $40 million on advertising in 1999, including Winz' gargantuan $2.3 million spend on "rebranding" and Income Support's $2.7 million spent, in part, on exhorting the public to dob in dole bludgers.

There are plenty of people who might even take issue with the Y2K Readiness Commission's $2.5 million publicity campaign featuring New York's Ken the Cockroach.

Admittedly, several Government bodies have justified their expenditure. The Land Transport Safety Authority modelled its $11 million campaign on a proven road-toll reduction programme in Victoria, Australia, and initial hiccups in the Tourism Board account do not obscure the fact that New Zealand will continue to be a brand needing plenty of purse action overseas to yield high returns for money spent.

However, spendthrift behaviour on repositioning and rebranding is inappropriate in cases where services have no competition. Winz' repositioning spend might, for instance, have been more usefully spent on making sure those needing benefits get their entitlements.

Ultimately both agencies and the Government work on behalf of the general public - and need a clear mandate to emerge from those "clients" before presenting them with public-service campaigns.

For the ad/marketing industry to rectify its reputation, ethical practitioners will need to speak out against the collusion between people misrepresenting public need and agencies all too eager to capitalise on faults in the system of Government accountability.