Truth in Advertising
We've all had it up to our ears and beyond: all of the half-truths, exaggerations, misrepresentations, lies, and distortions on television. And that's just the news! Then there are the ads, that make the good old fashioned lie almost virtuous, by comparison. Which of course leads to those so-called 'public announcements' that are political ads. Which are every bit as truthful as say, Hitler announcing his new humanitarian child care program at Auschwitz. Still, there is nothing new about all this, and these practices have been around for a long time. Most of us probably are too young to have read it, but back in 1960 there was a bestseller by a Madison Avenue guru named David Ogilvy called Confessions of an Advertising Man , in which, even then, the founding partner of the premier New York and London ad agency Ogilvy and Mather and inventor of modern advertising complained that “political advertising ought to be stopped. It's the only really dishonest kind of adver