Lies, damn lies and adverts – does it matter?

I’ve just seen the new work for Virgin Trains – 'Arrive Awesome'. As someone who occasionally has the need to take one of their trains up to see some clients in the north of England, something about it nagged with me a little. Then it dawned on me what it was. It’s a porkie pie, isn’t it? I know us advertising folk have occasionally been known to exaggerate things to land a message but I think this might be a bit of a bridge too far. Have the client or agency ever watched the arrival of the 18.45 from Birmingham New Street? Whenever I disembark after a couple of hours of permanently dropped calls, overcrowding and patchy overpriced muffins I’ve been more reminded of that quote: 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free'.

It got me thinking. When I mention I work in advertising in social situations I am regularly confronted with the accusation that our industry tells lies. I’ve always got indignant at the suggestion – citing regulation/regulatory bodies as evidence that it is impossible to lie in an ad. I also tend to say that even if you could get away with lying it’s very inadvisable to try because 'people won’t thank you for lying to them, and they won’t forget either'.

But can we, or do we, get away with little porkies in the ads we make/commission/write?

Have you seen the latest Nescafe Azera work? The one where the guy sticks a spoon of instant in a cup and then his girlfriend/wife/someone else’s wife in bed with him is totally fooled that this is 'Barista-style coffee'? Hmmm. Maybe a ‘barista’ behind the counter of the KFC in South Mimms service station but I’m not really buying it otherwise.

'Um Bongo... Um Bongo... they drink it in the Congo'. Apparently this is a claim that can be verified according to Wikipedia because some fella found an isolated carton for sale in Lubumbashi - but I think it’s a bit sneaky. The ad clearly wasn’t meant to communicate Um Bongo is available in extremely limited distribution in the central Africa if you look hard enough' – it was surely claiming extreme popularity, right?

'The French Adore Le Piat D’or'. Do they? Really? I spend quite a bit of time over there – my wife being French – and I can tell you I’ve never clapped eyes on a bottle. I also suspect if I turned up with a bottle at a special occasion hoping it’d be the piece de resistance I might get a couple of funny looks. I think I might actually get shown 'la porte'.

Dr Oetker’s 'real Italian pizzeria taste' (made in Germany), Fosters Australian credentials (brewed in Manchester) – it seems that little white ones are all over the place in the work we make. And this is without all the ‘eat your way thin’ and beauty claims/science bit nonsense.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. But, does it matter? I’m not so sure. I read a lot of reports these days on those fabled and much chased 'millennials' and they all repeatedly state that authenticity and transparency from brands is now a mandatory. But I think that this self-same audience knows the drill by now. They expect ads to be exaggerations; they’ve come to know that that they have to listen to any claim with a pinch of salt. So I know it might be controversial to say it but I think you can actually lie a little bit (Shock! Horror!) because everyone is in on the game from agency to client to punter.

I’ll be on a Virgin train up North on Friday as it happens. A 6.30am out of Kings Cross. Perhaps I’ll post a selfie next time of how awesome I looked when I arrived.

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