Rudman's city: In the ad world two wrongs make a right

By BRIAN RUDMAN

I've always thought the the concept of a body dedicated to preserving "advertising standards" somewhat oxymoronic, particularly when the authority set up to self-regulate the said standards proudly proclaims one of its main objectives is "to ensure advertising is not misleading or deceptive, either by statement or by implication".

After all, isn't the whole point of good advertising to bend the truth, gild the lily, pretend black is but a darker shade of white?

A recent judgment of the Advertising Standards Complaints Board seems to confirm my most jaundiced suspicions that when it comes to fact and fiction, truth and untruth, the world of the hard sell lives by a totally different set of meanings from the rest of us.

Its decision on Complaint 01/256 was made at the September 27 complaints board meeting and arose from an advertisement in this newspaper in support of Auckland mayoral candidate Matt McCarten.

The advertisement pictured his rivals, Christine Fletcher and John Banks, and was headlined "We sold your rail tracks for $1 a year". Additional wording said: "John Banks and Christine Fletcher were in a National Government that gave Tranz Rail a monopoly lease on the railway tracks for just $1 a year. Now Tranz Rail wants $112 million back for it ... "

The advertisement annoyed pro-roads city council candidate Jeff Iversen, who irately complained to the board that Mr McCarten was misleading the voters.

He said Tranz Rail had acquired the assets of New Zealand Rail Ltd for $400 million in 1993 and a lease (he doesn't specify what for) for $1 a year. But that, he argues, was only the beginning. Tranz Rail was also required to pay "a monthly rental established by schedule". The "actual monthly rental is confidential and variable, but as an estimated average, $2.2 million a month is closer than $1 a year".

He concluded that Mr McCarten's statement "that railway rental is $1 a year, is malicious and misleading and intended to sway voters with false information".

Now all of this is pretty vicious stuff and I would have thought a complaints board dedicated to seeking truth from fiction would have done just that. But it didn't.

The only investigation it seems to have done was to write to Mr McCarten asking him to please explain. He in turn regarded the complaint as so fanciful that he responded with a tetchy letter referring to the complainant as "a sad dullard" trying to get some free campaign publicity.

"You should suggest he get a life and pay for it like normal people do ... I've wasted enough time on this silliness."

Again you might have thought that at this stage the complaints board, which has been headed since 1987 by Wellington company director Laurie Cameron, would have realised it was in a political bear pit, stepped back and done a bit of independent research. In the interests of truth and the facts and so on. But again it did not, which was a pity.

A quick call to New Zealand Railways Corporation would have revealed how far-fetched Mr Iversen's complaint was. But Brian Murray, the corporation's general manager, says his organisation received no such call from the advertising industry board.

If it had made such a call, Mr Murray would have told it what he told me - that the annual rent paid on the rail corridors by Tranz Rail was $1 and that was all.

A quick check of the corporation's annual balance sheet would have revealed no evidence of the mystical $2.2 million a month rental Mr Iversen claimed Tranz Rail had to pay.

It would have discovered the corporation's total income for last year was a mere $1.1 million.

A further probe would have revealed that most of that money came from rents from property on land set aside decades ago for a proposed Southdown-Avondale railway.

There is no evidence that the complaints board made any such checks. Instead it decided to side with the unsubstantiated claims of one political campaigner over another. The reason it gives for backing the complainant seems farcical. That's if seeking the truth was the objective.

"In the board's view, the advertiser [McCarten] neither refuted the complainant's claims nor attempted to substantiate the statements used in the advertisement. Therefore in the board's opinion, by omission, ambiguity and exaggerated claim, the advertisement was deemed to be misleading and in breach of the code [of advertising ethics]."

What a cock-eyed system of justice it is that takes silence as a sign of guilt and interprets loud accusations as evidence of truth.

Mr McCarten's advertisement was hardly accurate. The cost of the tracks and access to the rail corridors was all bundled into the 1993 purchase price of $328 million. The $1 annual rental was just a legal device. But by the same token, the complainant's story is even further from the truth.

If the advertising industry wants us to take seriously its claimed commitment to the truth, it will have to do better than this.