A friend of mine recently sent me this post by Seth Godin to get my thoughts from a professional slimeball communicator’s point of view. The post reflects on the “sugar-coated corporate speak” employed by a direct marketing team in order to spin its web-based information gathering as a consumer benefit.

Seth’s brief plea for authenticity had an unexpected impact on me – It reminded me of my father.

My father worked in the advertising industry throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s – yes, he was one of the original ‘Mad Men,’ of that era – in a humble way, hanging on by his fingernails to various production, layout and traffic management roles. He saw the behavior of the times, and the very earliest advice I ever remember hearing from him was, “Don’t go into advertising.” Dad wasn’t a perfect man, but he valued honesty.

Advertising practitioners’ image as purveyors of raw deception and manipulation has been around for a very long time, reinforced

The future 'Mad Man' Ted Zwier and his wife Palmyra at a company function shortly after he started work in advertising, late 1961.

by mass entertainment like the aforementioned television show. Plus very real bad manners by real practitioners in advertising, direct marketing and public relations.

A quote I found online from the TV show – never seen more than a couple minutes of it myself, just know it by (ha) its advertising:

Beatnik: “You’re in advertising… How do you sleep at night?”
Don Draper: “On a bed made of money.”

Dad slept well, but not on a bed of money. We lived modestly, and looking at the work he left behind from his stint at  J. Walter Thompson, Abelson Frankel and other companies, I don’t see the big spin. (Though thanks to his A-F years, I did get to see some of the very first Happy Meal boxes when I was a kid before they were released, which was pretty cool).

Companies who practice this kind of ’sugar coating’ are stuck in the ‘Mad Men’ era. For some reason, they believe in that old school swanky razzle-dazzle designed to wrap you in a fuzzy warm glow of corporate magnanimity. I don’t think everyone bought it in the 1960’s, but more did so then than now. To borrow from Stephen King’s description of the past in his Dark Tower series, “the world has moved on.” We craft the brand together in the open-source workshop enabled by instant communication called the World Wide Web. Authenticity isn’t a captivating new way to engage customers, it’s a survival skill. With billions of eyes looking, if you BS you will eventually be found out.

So that’s what I think of Seth’s post. Authenticity scales, as Mr. Godin states. And I think my dad would be happy with that. Sooner or later, success in advertising, marketing, and branding will depend on plain talk. Maybe not yet, but someday soon.

And when it does, maybe fathers won’t advise their kids to stay out of that career.