Text 19

1. Advertising has been among England’s biggest growth industries since the war, in terms of the ratio of money earnings to demonstrable achievement. Why all this fantastic expenditure?

2. Perhaps the answer is that advertising saves the manufactures from having to think about the customer. At the stage of designing and developing a product, there is quite enough to think about without worrying over whether anybody will want to buy it. The designer is busy enough without adding customer-appeal to all his other problems of man-hours and machine ¹tolerance and stress factors. So they just go ahead and make the thing and leave it to advertiser to find eleven ways of making it appeal to purchasers after they have finished it, by pretending that it confers status, or attracts love, or signifies manliness. If the advertising agency can do this authoritatively enough, the manufacturer is ²in clover. Other manufacturers find advertising saves them changing their product. And manufacturers hate change. The ideal product is one which goes on unchanged forever. If, therefore, for one reason or another, some alteration seems called for – how much better to change the image, the packet or the ³pitch made by the product, rather than go to all the inconvenience of changing the product itself.

3. The advertising man has to combine qualities of three most authoritative professions: Church, Bar and Medicine. The great skill required of our priests, most highly developed in missionaries but present, indeed mandatory, in all, is the skill of getting people to believe in and to contribute money to something which can never be logically proved. At the bar, an essential ability is that of presenting the most persuasive case you can to a jury of ordinary people, with emotional appeals masquerading as logical exposition; a case you do not necessarily have to believe in yourself, just one you have studiously avoided discovering to be false. As for Medicine, any doctor will confirm that a large part of his job is not clinical treatment but faith healing. His apparently scientific approach enables his patients to believe that he knows exactly what is wrong with them and exactly what they need to put them right, just as advertising does – “Run down? You need …”. “No one will dance with you? A dab of – will make you popular”.

4. Advertising men use statistics rather like a drunk uses a lamp-post – for support rather than illumination. They will dress anyone up in a white coat to appear like an unimpeachable authority or, failing that, they will even be happy with the announcement, as used by 90% of the actors who play doctors on television.

From: David Frost/ Anthony Jay. The English.

Preparing the Text

A. Studying the language

1. “called for” (2): find a synonym.

2. What is “the Bar” (3)?

3. “presenting the most persuasive case” (3): give a paraphrase.

4. “emotional appeals masquerading as logical exposition” (3): explain.

5. What is the Russian equivalent of “faith healing” (3)?

6. “unimpeachable” (4): find a synonym.

7. Explain the meaning of “failing that” (4).

B. Studying the contents

1. “advertising saves the manufactures from having to think about the customer” (2):

a). To which kind of products do you think could this statement apply?

b). To which products does this statement not apply?

2. “the inconvenience of changing the product itself” (2): Which are these inconveniences from the advertiser’s point of view?

3. “What kind of emotional appeal do advertisers find it profitable to play upon”? (texts17, 18): Sum up the different emotional appeals mentioned in connection with “Church, Bar and Medicine” (3).

4. Which types of products are generally recommended to us by “unimpeachable authorities” (4)? Compare especially TV advertising spots.

5. Compare texts 17 and 19. Try to work out the different points of view as to the role of advertising.

6. Where in the text does it become obvious that the author’s attitude towards advertising is an ironical one?