Sex, lies and advertising

The Advertising Standards Authority has banned an ad by Reckitt Benckiser SA promoting Bosch dishwashers by claiming that dishwashers use less water than hand washing.

Why is the ASA singling out Bosch? Advertising on TV is full of wild, inaccurate or deliberately misleading claims.

Take the ad for Three Ships. The ad would have us believe 3 Ships is a venerable home-grown whiskey, dating back to the mid-1800s.

My memory is that it was launched as a cheap alternative to real Scotch, which was starting to become expensive. No way can I believe anyone was distilling anything like whiskey in South Africa back then (as opposed to creating it with pure alcohol, green tea, tincture of prunes, acetic acid, creosote and oak wood sawdust, which is what early suppliers to the rand gold mine workers did, according to Charles van Onselen).

Distell’s website, while subtly suggesting it has a history as old as the Sedgwick Distillery, notes that it was actually launched in 1977.

For the uninitiated all whiskey smells like meths, but my opinion of Three Ships when I tasted it for the first and last time was that it seemed to be made of cane spirit flavoured with caramel.

And then there’s the ad for Black Bottle, which asks what a hostile takeover was like in the 1870s and then shows a scene of sword-fighting on board a sailing ship.

Concluding that a hostile takeover then did not involve lawyers, the payoff is: “Is our whiskey bold, or has the world gone soft?”

Black Bottle, you see, is supposed to have been created in 1879.

Whether it was or not, the ad is historically so inaccurate as to be laughable. The scene of aggressive piracy depicted is of the 1770s, not the 1870s.

The 1870s was the Victorian era; the world was already beginning to look a lot more like the present. In 1879 Edison first demonstrated the electric light bulb.

But what about that endless beauty product ads promising women eternally youthful skin and hair? Forgive me if I don’t mention individual examples. They all meld in my mind into one fat lie.

Or the men’s deodorant ads that suggest that they will make you irresistible to women? Or the motor car ads that suggest … what? I’m not sure. Whatever the copywriters are getting at, it has nothing to do with motoring, though.

By comparison, the claim that hand washing uses more water is more plausible (though not unarguably true). It could be so if a packed dishwasher with very dirty crockery and cutlery is compared to washing a few plates and knives and forks at a time.

“Journalism aspires to truth. Advertising is regulated for truth,” claims Jef I Richards, a communications prof. “I’ll put the accuracy of the average ad up against the average news story any time.”

I know journalism isn’t perfect, and I don’t know if there is anything that qualifies as an average ad, but I do know that the advertising industry could do with a serious bout of self-examination.