A Dismal Failure

A recent Harris poll showed that 25% of Americans believe that the energy crisis was contrived by the oil companies. They are demonstrably wrong; but how can you fool 25% of the people even part of the time?

Explanations are rarely simple, but it would seem that much of the blame should go to the type of advertising on which the oil companies have squandered millions in the past. Advertising used to give information. Good advertising still does.

But in the fifties, Madison Avenue began to hire Ph.D's in psychology who thought they could do better. The apostles of "advertising in depth" and "hitting the prospect below his level of awareness." The boys who dream up meaningless lyrics like "Salem softness brings freshness to your taste;" the boys who go in for half-truths and three-quarter lies like "Of all leading gums, Trident is sugar free" (where the word only is missing before Trident, and with good reason); the boys who do their damnedest to persuade you that you have body odor, bad breath, iron-poor blood, constipation, athlete's foot and rectal itch; the boys to whom you pay a gullibility tax if you don't know that the only over-the-counter pain reliever is aspirin, no matter what the name of the pill it is put into.

The FTC does not stop these halftruths and three-quarter lies; it merely puts the stamp of respectability on them. It protects the countless millions who yearn to dip a crystal chandelier in pancake batter or to shave the abrasive off sandpaper with a razor.

It was to these psychology pundits that the oil companies entrusted their advertising. But the in-depth hawkers did not tell the public what every oil executive and engineer knew that with energy controlled at an artificially low price, exploration, research and investments were fading and disaster was approaching. Instead, they joined the ecology fad in their trade of image building by three-quarter lies and lyrical humbug. But their image-building hocus-pokus proved a dismal failure. The image they built was "The bigger the advertisement, the bigger the lie."

Now that the oil companies are telling it like it is, 25% of the people are still applying what Madison Avenue has taught them over the years.

Nevertheless, there is a silver lining. In the last month or two, the oil companies' public relations departments have at last discovered a great new advertising gimmick: the truth.