On December 24, Tiffany Hsu wrote a story in The New York Times titled “A Century After Phony Flu Ads, Companies Hype Dubious Covid Cures” that reported on fraudulent Covid-19-cure advertising.
Hsu writes:
With a pandemic raging, a spate of ads promised dubious remedies in the form of lozenges, tonics, unguents, blood-builders and an antiseptic shield to be used while kissing.
That was in 1918, during the influenza outbreak that eventually claimed an estimated 50 million lives, including 675,000 in the United States.
More than a century later, not much has changed. Ads promoting unproven miracle cures — including intravenous drips, ozone therapy and immunity-boosting music — have targeted people trying to avoid the coronavirus pandemic.
But there is a major difference between the 1918 quackery and the current spate of false advertising. As Hsu writes:
In recent years, a surge of digital advertising has led to more space for ads on more platforms, and the ability to switch them out within seconds. But as print publications, broadcast television and other traditional media outlets tightened their advertising protocols, online advertisers began relying on automated auctions rather than human gatekeepers for placement.
The key difference is the Internet — digital ads bought in auctions on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter where algorithms make decisions on ad claims and are, thus, “untouched by human hands” or unseen by human, discerning eyes
When I was at CBS in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ralph Daniels was the head of the broadcast standards group. Every ad that ran on the CBS Television Network and the CBS TV and radio stations had to be OKayed by the standards group, which at one time had up to 50 people working in it. The standards group looked at competitive claims of being “better” than competitors and for any false claims in advertising. The goal was to protect consumers against false and misleading advertising.
I also remember when I was General Manager of NBC-owned WMAQ-AM in Chicago (now WSCR), that we had a continuity person who applied NBC’s standards to any commercials that ran on the station. Our continuity person turned down a commercial from a well-known, major publisher for a mystery novel. When I asked why, the continuity person said “the commercial was too scary.” It had a young woman alone in a room hearing footsteps in a hall outside the room slowly getting louder and louder as the unknown stalker got nearer and nearer.
This decision seemed a little extreme at the time, but I knew better than to argue with the NBC broadcast standards and legal departments, whose goal was to bend over backwards to make sure the massive audiences to all of NBC’s broadcast properties were not deceived, offended or too frightened.
When the algorithms of Google, You Tube, Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms took over from humans to make decisions about appropriateness of ads, and when auctions took over from salespeople accepting and scheduling ads, advertising deception and mendacity exploded.
When 20-year-old Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his dorm room in 2004, he didn’t like advertising. But as the social network grew, he realized that to support Facebook’s growth, he had to accept ads. Therefore he eventually followed Google’s lead and set up an algorithm-controlled auction system to sell and place ads.
Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, Zuckerberg watched ad-sanitized TV and listened to FCC-regulated radio where he didn’t hear George Carlin’s seven dirty words. I’m guessing he never heard false, misleading advertising, so he probably naively thought it didn’t exist. He didn’t know what he didn’t know.
Even as late as 2016, he thought that it was “crazy” that a foreign country would try to influence a U.S. election with misleading ads on Facebook. Of course he thought that. He’d never seen or heard dishonest ads because ABC, CBS or NBC or their stations didn’t run them. He didn’t know what he didn’t know.
Also, in 1996 Congress passed the Communication Decency Act that in Section 230 reads: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” In other words, online intermediaries that host or republish speech in the form of user-generated content are protected against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what others say and do.
Of course the unintended consequence of Section 230, which was meant to protect free speech, has been to open the floodgates of lies, misinformation and quackery, and has led, in part, to the increase in polarization and to the train-wreck of he-who-cannot-be named.
The noble profession of advertising and the gallant media that passed advertising on to trusting consumers has been tarnished by oversaturated ad scheduling, lying and outrageous quackery.
I want Ralph Daniels back. I want someone with standards of decency, truth and facts who will tastefully curate the ads I see. I want the news anchor I watch to be the most trusted person in America. I want to watch sports and never see an automotive commercial.
Why the hell are Volkswagen, Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai, GM, Ford, Honda, Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot advertising when Tesla, which has a market value more than all of those companies combined, doesn’t advertise at all? . The biggest automotive ad spender in 2019 was General Motors, which spent almost $3 billion. Tesla spent $0. Does this mean that the more car companies advertise, the higher Tesla’s market value goes up?
It may be that 2020 was the craziest year in American history: An insane, incompetent, incoherent president, who the Senate wouldn’t convict of obvious crimes; a shattering pandemic; Black-lives-matter protests that set off social- and racial-justice movements; and advertising as worthless wallpaper.
I’ve been writing this past fall about the need for the return of decency to our politics and national conversation. I now realize that the call for decency must also go out to two intertwined industries that I have devoted my life to — advertising and media.
Can’t we just be nice to each other. Can’t we have more commercials like Nike’s “You Can’t Stop Us” or this DocMorris one.
