Propaganda examples in advertising

R. J. Reynolds ran "More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette" from 1946, citing a survey the company's own agency had conducted at medical conventions where Camels had been handed out free. The campaign borrowed the standing of physicians for a product that physicians were, within a decade, publicly warning against.

The Tobacco Industry Research Committee announced in 1954 that it would be guided by a Scientific Advisory Board of "distinguished scientists," and the industry cited the board's existence for four decades as proof that the science was being taken seriously. The board's standing was the message; its funding source and the questions it was steered away from were not.

The Federal Trade Commission sent warning letters to more than ninety celebrities and influencers in 2017 for endorsing products on social media without disclosing that they were paid, and settled its first case against individual influencers the same year. The "expert" here is a person with an audience; the device is the same: paid opinion presented as independent.

The Quaker Oats Company registered a man in Quaker dress as its trademark in 1877, borrowing the sect's reputation for honesty and plain dealing for a cereal. The Religious Society of Friends objected for decades and petitioned Congress in 1915 to stop the use; the figure is still on the box.

"Four out of five dentists surveyed recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum," the Trident claim of the 1960s, is a model of the semi-attached figure: the survey concerned sugarless gum in general, not the brand; the population was dentists who were asked about patients who already chewed; and the fifth dentist presumably recommended not chewing. The number was real and the conclusion drawn from it was the advertiser's.

Procter & Gamble advertised Ivory soap as "99 and 44/100 percent pure" from 1882, a figure derived from a chemist's analysis of impurities and chosen, the company's own history suggests, because the fraction sounded more scientific than "pure." The slogan became one of the longest-running in American advertising, and the number was the reason.

The UK Advertising Standards Authority ruled against Colgate's claim that "more than 80% of dentists recommend Colgate." The survey behind it had let dentists name several brands, so a rival could be recommended by a similar share. The figure was accurate; the impression, that most dentists preferred Colgate over alternatives, was produced by what the advertisement did not say.

"Helps prevent cavities," "up to 40% more," "may reduce the appearance of wrinkles," "new improved formula": these are the forms advertisers use because regulators can act on a claim but not on a hedge. Carl Wrighter's Sunday-supplement bestseller on the subject, I Can Sell You Anything, gave the general public its list in 1972.

"A Diamond Is Forever" was written by Frances Gerety of N. W. Ayer for De Beers in 1947 and has run ever since. It makes no claim about diamonds, which are neither rare nor a store of value at retail; it attaches the stone to permanence and lets the buyer supply the rest. The slogan did more to create the diamond engagement ring than any fact about the product.

"Wholesome," "natural," "pure," and "authentic" recur in food and cosmetics advertising because they attract approval and commit the advertiser to nothing testable. Regulators in several countries have had to define "natural" precisely because the word had come to mean whatever the reader hoped.

"Light" and "low tar" cigarettes were defined by a machine-smoking test that the industry knew smokers did not replicate, since they covered the filter's ventilation holes and drew harder. The words kept their ordinary meaning in advertising and their technical meaning in the lab. In 2009 the U.S. Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act banned the descriptors, and the industry renamed the packs by color.

Layoffs became "downsizing," then "rightsizing," then "workforce optimization." Price rises became "adjustments." Waste dumps became "sanitary landfills." Lutz's Doublespeak cataloged the corporate genre in 1989, and the National Council of Teachers of English has given an annual Doublespeak Award since 1974 to the year's worst example.

Leo Burnett's agency reinvented a filter cigarette sold to women as the smoke of a cowboy: lean, weathered, alone, and silent. The Marlboro Man ran for half a century and made the brand the world's largest; several of the men who posed as him died of smoking-related disease, which was not in the picture.

The Advertising Standards Authority banned two L'Oréal advertisements, for Lancôme with Julia Roberts and Maybelline with Christy Turlington, after finding that the retouching of the models' skin was so extensive that the pictures could not show what the products did. The company did not supply the unretouched originals.

Oliviero Toscani's campaigns for the clothing company set a dying AIDS patient, a newborn with its cord uncut, and a soldier's bloodied uniform beside the United Colors logo, with no copy. The adjacency gave the brand the gravity of the images; the company sold sweaters, and the campaigns were banned in several countries for saying nothing while claiming everything.

"America's favorite," "the world's best-selling," and "the choice of millions" have been standard advertising claims for a century because they require no statement about the product. Cialdini's research on social proof explains why they work: in uncertainty, the behavior of others is the shortcut most people take.

Lambert Pharmacal's Listerine campaigns of the 1920s invented a social affliction, "halitosis," and built advertisements around the woman who was "often a bridesmaid but never a bride" because of it. The disease was a medical-sounding name for bad breath; the fear was social ruin; the remedy was the bottle. Sales rose from about $100,000 to more than $4 million a year within seven years.

BP rebranded as "Beyond Petroleum" in 2000, with a green-and-yellow sunflower logo and a reported $200 million campaign, while its investment in renewables remained a small fraction of its capital spending on oil and gas. The slogan was retired after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill, by which point it had become the shorthand for the device.