A License to lie?

I had to go for this evening session today where some of the leading figures in advertising along with a sudha were presenting some activation campaigns. One of the ideas which were show cased was the reebonn t shirt campaign where the public were informed that three popular DJs for radio stations were abducted by white vans. This created a huge uproar and people were quite worried. Infact the tamil DJ who was supposed to be abducted for three days had to come back early because the pressure was too much. I really felt sorry when a tamil listener had actually called and offered a reward of one million rupees for any news of the DJ (This stinks of a set up)

Now I have been to many presentations here and abroad where activation ideas have been portrayed as the new miracle of communication. But what I find quite uncomfortable is that most of them are based on a lie. Infact if at first if people knew that it was a truth it would not be popular in the first place.

Us in advertising have been tarnished as sophisticated liars anyway and I believe by doing this we are actually telling the world yes it is true and digging our grave deeper and deeper. Already there are jokes linking linking prostitution and advertising and I really dont want my children to be ashamed to say that there dad is in advertising. Yes we are in the business of grabbing eye balls but it does not give us the right to do anything purely to achieve this.

In fact I was glad to see most of the case studies which were presented at this function concentrated on ideas which did not hide to the people that it was not a commercial venture. And if they were good I raise my hat to them. One which comes to mind of a great activation idea is the lead india campaign which was done for the times of india which I thought was excellent. Well I am looking forward to the day when i can do something like this for one of my clients.