Ad Man, Short For Bad Man?

CNET News.com writer Elinor Mills posted a brief report about the annual conference of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). In it, she quotes Bob Liodice, president and CEO of the ANA complaining about:

"unwarranted criticism advertisers have received for their alleged role in causing obesity and 'other social ills.' What about 'personal responsibility?' he noted. The attempts to 'vilify U.S. marketers' will not be tolerated, he said. Advertising 'is one of the most socially responsible industries in America.'"

"Socially responsible" may be stretching it a bit, but this is a capitalist society, and you cannot blame the advertisers for caving in to the massive amounts of money they get paid to sell whatever their corporate benefactors shove in front of their cameras. It's not the advertisers' job to make the product, it's their job to sell it to us. They would come up with a campaign to sell a knife called "The Juice" with OJ Simpson's smiling face on the box if Bowie gave them enough money.

Sure, there should be some amount of personal responsibility. If you don't know that eating two Big Macs and shitting for an hour isn't good for you, then maybe you should get fat and die early. However, the real blame rests squarely on the heads of the producers of that garbage. If McDonald's "special sauce" wasn't pure chemicals and was instead something healthy, the advertisers could use the same pitch and people wouldn't be so fat.

These companies need to start spending less money on advertising, and more money on the quaility of their products and services.