"Everybody Lies"

I was sitting in a Millward Brown meeting the other week. Watching their dull charts flash by I started thinking of the motto of House - "everybody lies".

Millward Brown (no relation) is a research company. They look backwards not forwards. Bill Bernbach said, don't trust the research, it won't give you an idea.

I wouldn't even trust research to report the current situation. Because numbers can lie. People won't admit that driving by a poster made them part with $50,000 for a car. And yet it's true. We buy posters for automobiles & people go & buy metal.

Research won't tell you that. It will tell you to buy a print campaign for information & radio to reach people in traffic. Never trust research, nobody knows anything & everyone lies.

And watching "House" taught me another thing; our job is even simpler than I thought it was. With medical diagnostics there are so many possible options. A fever can suggest many things. But when our brands are sick we only have 6 potential prescriptions - TV, Press, Posters, Radio, Cinema & Digital.

There are many medical dramas on TV & very few about advertising. This is because advertising is a simple profession with no complex outcomes.

After many disasters they finally came up with a successful TV drama about advertising - Mad Men, which is more about the men than the mad. There will never be a great TV show about Media Men... because our job is too simple. There is no drama in that.

BBC documentary on the history of Advertising

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