The Advertising Standards Authority has banned an ad by Reckitt Benckiser SA promoting Bosch dishwashers by claiming that dishwashers use less water than hand washing.
Why is the ASA singling out Bosch? Advertising on TV is full of wild, inaccurate or deliberately misleading claims.
Take the ad for Three Ships. The ad would have us believe 3 Ships is a venerable home-grown whiskey, dating back to the mid-1800s.
My memory is that it was launched as a cheap alternative to real Scotch, which was starting to become expensive. No way can I believe anyone was distilling anything like whiskey in South Africa back then (as opposed to creating it with pure alcohol, green tea, tincture of prunes, acetic acid, creosote and oak wood sawdust, which is what early suppliers to the rand gold mine workers did, according to Charles van Onselen).
Distell’s website, while subtly suggesting it has a history as old as the Sedgwick Distillery, notes that it was actually launched in 1977.
For the uninitiated all whiskey smells like meths, but my opinion of Three Ships when I tasted it for the first and last time was that it seemed to be made of cane spirit flavoured with caramel.
And then there’s the ad for Black Bottle, which asks what a hostile takeover was like in the 1870s and then shows a scene of sword-fighting on board a sailing ship.
Concluding that a hostile takeover then did not involve lawyers, the payoff is: “Is our whiskey bold, or has the world gone soft?”
Black Bottle, you see, is supposed to have been created in 1879.
Whether it was or not, the ad is historically so inaccurate as to be laughable. The scene of aggressive piracy depicted is of the 1770s, not the 1870s.
The 1870s was the Victorian era; the world was already beginning to look a lot more like the present. In 1879 Edison first demonstrated the electric light bulb.
But what about that endless beauty product ads promising women eternally youthful skin and hair? Forgive me if I don’t mention individual examples. They all meld in my mind into one fat lie.
Or the men’s deodorant ads that suggest that they will make you irresistible to women? Or the motor car ads that suggest … what? I’m not sure. Whatever the copywriters are getting at, it has nothing to do with motoring, though.
By comparison, the claim that hand washing uses more water is more plausible (though not unarguably true). It could be so if a packed dishwasher with very dirty crockery and cutlery is compared to washing a few plates and knives and forks at a time.
“Journalism aspires to truth. Advertising is regulated for truth,” claims Jef I Richards, a communications prof. “I’ll put the accuracy of the average ad up against the average news story any time.”
I know journalism isn’t perfect, and I don’t know if there is anything that qualifies as an average ad, but I do know that the advertising industry could do with a serious bout of self-examination.
This reminds me of the Sasol super 100 advert way back when in SA – when the volksie turned into a 911.
As the story goes…a bloke took the advert literally and turned up at a local pump demanding to know why his VW hadn’t changed into a porsche? And so the story continues: Sasol bought the disgruntled customer a brand new porsche and quickly pulled the advert.
To my surprise theres a book at trade bit.com on how to
put people especially cashiers into a trance and make them hand over the cash. you can go to you tube and take a look at a video by derren brown, the Russian scam and tell me if this is the kind of information that should be published.
Reg, notice the ad at the end of your article? They sure picked a bad time.
what about SABC1, which claims to be the the home of soccer, or MULTICHOICE, which is actually multirepeats
I was a kid when Three Ships hit the market, and I remember my dad’s uncle saying that it rather tastes like Three Canoes.
Advertising is an art that has to appeal to your imagination while giving you a positive perception of a product so that you feel like buying the product. Some advertisers run out of ideas and end up stretching the truth a bit so as to draw your attention and if you fall for the bait you really can’t blame them you only have yourself to blame.
As someone who worked within the ad industry for over 17 years, I can say with conviction that the industry is an absolute racket!
I detest all the screaming, shouting and vulgarity that spews from my TV in the name of one particular industry (guess which).
But I take particular exception to adverts that infer that people who choose not to use a product/range are worth less. I may be way past improvement, but I know I’m worth far more than the ads suggest and I am horrified that so many people who really cannot afford expensive products might think less of themselves.
I wonder just how many people who really cannot afford to be ‘worth it’ are undermined by that advertising?
What’s more, the way they turn cents around, they are probably far more phenomenal than others with more…
As for the dishwasher ad, the suggestion is that we don’t care about global warming if we don’t buy one. I seldom use my entire free water allocation per month; I am extremely careful with water. A dishwasher is certainly NOT in my budget allocation. Why on earth (sic) should I be made to feel that I care less than others?
I remember the original scandal that precipitated this banning. It was some years ago; I am surprised it took the ASA this long to act.
Bosch commissioned a company to perform a study to compare water usage. As everyone knows, you can use any amount of water that you choose to. Apparently the researching company instructed the people who were washing by hand to use as much as they could. One sample in the survey washed four dishes and used more than 100 litres of water.
Subsequent studies indicated that under any normal circumstances, washing by hand used less water than in a dishwasher. A lot less.
The research was seriously flawed, but Bosch used it for the campaign anyway.
This is misleading far beyond pretending to be an “old” whiskey, because the lie is not harmless.
I agree, most ads are just a bunch of bollocks, but there are some which are genius in their sincerity and you wonder why they are only being aired now when clearly the product and the idea of the ad go so well together and have gone so for years.
A few weeks ago, I had an altercation with a rock and the rock won, so I didn’t have a car. A friend was kind enough to lend me his beast of a Lexus IS250 with all the bells and whistles. I drove it for a total of twenty minutes over two days, but every time I got behind that wheel and fired it up a huge smile would come across my face – the car made me truly happy.
BMW are running a campaign about their cars and how they bring you joy. The experience I had was with a Lexus, sure, but I am sure that a black BMW M3 Convertible would make me even happier. I currently drive a Nissan Almera, so you understand…
Reg,
I must admit that I think you are a legend journalist but you are mistaken about the whisky (without and ‘e’ by the way). A mate of mine won a bottle of each of those at the blog awards this year (I see thought leader was a runner up!) and he gave them to me and I have indeed seen the 3 Ships transform from 3 little canoes to 3 smooth Majestic Luxury Liners before my very eyes! And yes I did drink a lot of it at one go
Black Bottle on the other hand is not for the faint hearted and will really put hairs on your chest. Its a real man’s whisky.
Never seen either of the ads, so I’ll trust your judgement on those Reg, but all in all they are Really good whiskies!
This post tells that the men’s deodorant ads that suggest that they will make you irresistible to women.
Last December/January we were vacationing on the Garden Route when our septic tank packed up. We then experimented to see which way we could use less water. We determined that washing with a dish washer used less water than washing using the sink. We actually tried to use as little water as possible when using the sink, because every bit had to be physically carried away and dumped in the garden.
So I have to support Bosch’s claim that a dish washer uses less water than washing dishes by hand.
I must also add that I am not trying to promote Bosch: I have no interest in selling anything, but as a trained scientist I feel one must be honest and tell the facts as they are.
Does anyone else have other facts to support/contradict what we found?