Truth Is Irrelevant

Those who rely on the criteria of false and deceptive speech to confine the constitutional boundaries of commercial communication ²¹⁰ either do not understand the appeal of mass advertising or do not understand its relationship to truth. The reality of the mass advertising marketplace is simply:

TRUTH IS IRRELEVANT.

Trained to scrutinize advertisements for informational and accuracy claims, the public watchdogs (such as the Federal Trade Commission) and their industry counterparts (such as the National Advertising Review Council) have less and less to do in today's imagistic ad world. For example, how would such oversight groups determine the truth or falsity of the following commercial messages?

• Soft drink commercial depicting a rock singer performing in front of, and mingling with, a teenage audience at a drive­in movie theater: "Don't care about movie stars who live in Hollywood. Don't like their attitude; don't think I ever could. Don't want the good taste, I know what tastes good. Why is the best thing always misunderstood? Just give me what the doctor ordered. Just what the doctor ordered. Hey, give me a [brand named soda]." ²¹¹
• Cigarette ad with a man and two women frolicking in a swimming pool: "Alive with pleasure!" ²¹²
• Designer jeans ad with a woman unzipping a man's trousers; opposite page photograph of man raising third finger of right hand in obscene gesture: [Brand name of product]. ²¹³
• Cologne ad supposedly picturing a father holding his young son: "[Brand name] for Men." ²¹⁴

For this and much advertising that is not deliberately and explicitly informational, the dichotomies of truth versus falsity and deceptive versus accurate are purposeless. The hyperbole created by image, personality, and lifestyle advertising cannot be evaluated along the same matrix as empirical claims generally found in product­information advertising. This is what Jules Henry labeled "pecuniary truth," a philosophy contained in three postulates: "Truth is what sells. Truth is what you want people to believe. Truth is that which is not legally false." ²¹⁵

In the regime of pecuniary truth, successful advertising techniques use words and images to push expectations beyond their reasonable orbit so that the consumer may yield uncritically to an ad's persuasive force. For example, does anyone really believe that smoking a particular brand of cigarettes will make him or her alive with pleasure? Does anyone really believe that splashing on a specific cologne will more endear a father to his son? Of course we do not literally believe these messages, but only act as if they could be true. Echoing Henry's argument, Judith Williamson drives home the pointlessness of legal regulation of pecuniary truth: Advertisements are "so uncontrollable, because whatever restrictions are made in terms of their verbal content or 'false claims', there is no way of getting at their use of images and symbols.... [I]t is images and not words which ultimately provide the currency in ads." ²¹⁶

Holmes notwithstanding, mass advertisers and their mass consumers are well aware of yet another reality of commercial communication: There is no test of truth in the marketplace.