The truth is out there. Part 2

  By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc.  /  mmiami.com/

“Beware those who want to save the world,
most likely they just want to control it.”

• It certainly makes sense to rely on prestigious, independent organizations to help us out in certain fields.
• It is indeed useful to consult the positions of, say, la Real Academia de la Lengua Española or, in the financial world, Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s or Fitch.
• However, it is dangerous to give these entities any form of policing or enforcement power.
• It would be the first step towards a totalitarian state.
• For some reason, the freedom of speech traditions that apply to the press are more stringent in the advertising field.
• The marketing and advertising territory has historically been subjected to higher scrutiny by authorities.
• In the US of A and beyond.
• In Mexico, for instance, a country with the typical Latin penchant for punctilious legal frameworks oozing grandiloquence, pomposity and wishful thinking rarely applicable to reality, there’s a government entity called COFEPRIS (Comisión Federal para la Protección Contra Riesgos Sanitarios or Federal Commission for the Protection Against Health Risks) in charge of, among many other things, approving advertising messages of alcoholic beverages.
• Some of the rules are quite commonsensical (“don’t promote liquor among minors”)
• Others are borderline paranoid:
• -ads cannot show a human touching, let alone consuming, an alcoholic beverage or any form of packaging or container associated with an alcoholic beverage
• -ads cannot imply, let alone promise, that consuming a certain brand of liquor will make the consumer more successful, charismatic, attractive, elegant or confident.
• -alcohol ads cannot be associated with festivities or traditions.*
• Liquor ad campaigns in Mexican territory must be submitted to COFEPRIS for approval BEFORE they run and, you guessed it, its verdicts have been known to be unpredictable (to say the least).
• The nanny state on steroids breathing down our necks.
• And now for a little self-examination: to what extent have we advertisers brought this level of scrutiny upon ourselves?
• Are we partly to blame?
• Let’s face it: it is usually assumed that advertising is misleading.
• We’ve been known to misrepresent facts every now and then.
• When it comes to trustworthiness, Madison Avenue types are down there with used car salesmen in the reputation ranking.
• Disclaimer: the client made us do it.

*Take a look at article 34 here (it is in Spanish): http://www.salud.gob.mx/unidades/cdi/nom/compi/rlgsmp.html

The truth is out there. Part 1: