Some things trump money

This sounds like a truism not worth mentioning. But of course things like, say, family, health, inner peace, perhaps even a search for truth are more important than money.

And even the crassest of materialists may hold something so dear that he’d put it before riches. Yet for some institutions money is their raison d’être, and they don’t even bother to pretend otherwise.

You don’t expect, for example, a local branch of your bank to exhibit the slogan “Neither a lender nor a borrower be”. But then Polonius offered that advice to Laertes, not Shylock. And St Paul’s statement that “the love of money is the root of all evil” isn’t likely to be inscribed on NatWest’s mission statement either.

Advertising is another institution solely dedicated to commercial gain. When I ran creative departments at various agencies, I kept telling my younger charges that we weren’t paid to keep the sales message secret.

If you do nothing else, I’d say, just state the reason to buy your product. If you can do so in a catchy and interesting way, so much the better. But don’t sacrifice the selling proposition for the sake of being cute.

Had I quoted St Paul’s comment to my unhappy clients, they wouldn’t have remained my clients. Their own jobs hinged on profits, and hence so did mine.

However, like every advertising creative in history, I hated research. I kept telling my clients that after decades in the business I didn’t need a focus group of old women to tell me if my ads were any good. That was an argument I never once managed to win.

Clients wanted to cover the lower part of their anatomy with more than just trousers. If a campaign researched well but then bombed, they had a ready excuse. There would have been none had they trusted my instincts and they proved unreliable.

So they pumped untold millions into first researching their choice of target audience, then the message the audience would find persuasive, then the best ways of communicating that message.

Each stage cost more money than they had left in the budget actually to produce the campaign, but they didn’t mind. When I screamed that advertising wasn’t an exact science, they’d reply that it bloody well should be – and would be on their watch.

Choosing the right target audience was vital of course. If you advertise, say, Big Macs to an A+ group, you might as well pile up a few million quid and have yourself a nice bonfire. Conversely, trying to sell £100,000 cars in the commercial breaks during a darts competition would be tantamount to tossing money into the bin.

Hence, if an ad was to show ecstatic customers whose lives acquired a whole new meaning due to their choice of toothpaste, one could be sure that the demographic breakdown of the models reflected hundreds of thousands spent on research. Race was one characteristic investigated to death.

If research showed that 75 per cent of the target audience were, say, white B+ and the rest black or Indian, then three out of the four happy faces shown were unmistakably Anglo. Yet it wasn’t always straightforward.

Back in New York I once worked on a hygienic product whose buyers were predominantly black women. Yet research showed that a white model would work better because the target audience would see that choice as aspirational. In the end, we backlit the model so severely that her race was indeterminate.

That, however, was an exception. Typically, I was able to cast a quick look at a TV commercial and give you the exact demographic breakdown of the target audience, as determined by marketing research.

Notice that I used the past tense: I can no longer boast that ability. Advertisers don’t seem to base their choice of target audience on strictly commercial or otherwise rational factors. They’ve abandoned their crass materialism, at least when it comes to advertising.

That’s why about 60 per cent of the models shown in TV commercial and print ads are black – irrespective of the advertised brand. Now, blacks make up 3.7 per cent of the UK population, and I for one find it hard to believe that their purchasing power is so Herculean that they make up 60 per cent of every market.

They don’t. Therefore advertisers forgo vulgar commercial concerns for the sake of higher, which is to say woke, values. After all, I can’t imagine that white audiences find black models aspirational, and racism has nothing to do with that. It’s just that by and large blacks tend to belong to an economically lower demographic group.

The upshot of this is that these days woke ideology trumps even filthy lucre: St Paul’s first reaction would be to rejoice. However, his jubilation would quickly give way to gloom when he realised how low mankind has sunk.

P.S. Celia Walden, poor Piers Morgan’s wife, has written a perceptive article on woke ideology applied retrospectively to giants of the past, including the man who put those wise words into Polonius’s mouth.

Yet she undid all her good work by using the word, or rather non-word, ‘flammable’. This locution doesn’t exist in literate speech. The correct word is ‘inflammable’, based on the verb ‘to inflame’, not on the noun ‘flame’.

That non-word, along with many others, originated in the US decades ago, when it was deemed that the largely illiterate population would mistake the ‘in’ in ‘inflammable’ for a negative prefix and decide that no danger of conflagration existed. Then someone would strike a match next to a barrel of petrol and – kaboom!

Instead of improving the level of English teaching at schools, the powers that be decided instead to mangle the language yet again. And, while good American traits find few takers in Britain, American perversions are gobbled up with alacrity, especially by our own illiterate population.

Yet one would still expect that a graduate of Westminster School and Cambridge writing for the upmarket Daily Telegraph, not a vox populi rag like The Sun, wouldn’t stoop to prole usage. Wrong expectation, wrong time.

Back in my advertising days I tried to fight a rearguard action for good usage, usually losing the argument to either my colleagues or clients. And don’t get me going on the pronunciation of ‘lived’, as in ‘short-lived’. This word derives not from the verb ‘to live’ but from the noun ‘life’. Thus it should rhyme with ‘jived’, but this is another argument I’ve never won.