• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, August 6, 2009

If you are a media buyer you have to just shake your head in disbelief as sellers from different media try to convince you that not only does their ad platform work best, that all of the others really suck.

They come armed with industry association studies that overwhelmingly prove that advertising with that form of media is just swell. And that you'd have to be a numbnuts to buy anyone else's platform. At the end of the day you're pretty convinced that advertising doesn't work anywhere, so what the heck, add 5% to last year's media plan and go to a ball game with those tickets one of the media sellers offered as a bribe, I mean, a gift.

Thank goodness that your faith in advertising is persistently renewed by special interest groups that oppose advertising. For example according to researchers from Yale University, in the journal Health Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association, one study of seven- to 11-year-old children found that 45% of them ate more snack food while watching a cartoon that included food commercials than those children who watched the same cartoon with non-food commercials. If I am a snack food maker, I'm sending pizza and a couple cases of Dos Equis over to my agency's media department right now! Sadly, it is only ONE study that makes those charges and if you know anything about studies you know that the chances of that on being truly predictive are somewhere between slim and none.

Over the years advertising has been slammed for everything from causing a drunk Nevada teen to drive his car into a telephone poll (oddly he wasn't even drinking the beer charged in the complaint) to assuring a nation that smoking was perfectly safe (opps, nobody bats a thousand). But the bottom line is that in spite of the claims and counter claims of media sellers, advertising seems to work just fine as long as you are convinced it is part of a nefarious plan to undermine somebody's health and/or economic well being.

So the next time you want to make the case for the effectiveness of your platform, don't hire some research firm to cook up some numbers in your favor, underwrite a special interest group that claims your ads are so convincing, that they cause lemming to jump into the sea. It's probably tax deductable.