John Singleton, “The days of miracles: have they passed?,”
Advertising & Newspaper News, July 23, 1971, p. 4.

Three statements of fact:

  1. An Australian government M.P. has implored the nation to go down on its knees and pray for the survival, if not revival, of our sick and getting sicker wool industry.
  2. The oil industry will be next to go.
  3. The advertising industry, as it stands today, is in little better shape.

I think it is important that we realise this about the advertising industry because today there are unmistakeable signs that we are mistaking what the unmistakeable signs of consumerism really mean.

Most people within and without this business are taking the easy way out.

They are hopping on the surface of the iceberg (the communication) and hope that by doing battle with this tiny tip they will correct the whole.

But the tip, like the tumour, is only the sign. The cancer is within and is far more dangerous.

What is really happening is this: Industry is mis-defining its role.

The wool industry saw itself as an invulnerable, inpenetrable, eternal-life product. A natural fibre with no competition.

I have been through it enough and have been involved with sufficient correspondence with the wool industry to know that today, when it is all but too late, wool is realising that it is in fact in another business all together.

It is starting to mix with man-made fibres with all the enthusiasm of an Afrikaner at a didgeridoo party. But it is starting, nevertheless.

Members of Parliament who run corner groceries in country towns are imploring us to pray for further miracles, like the ones that have saved the oil industry so often in the past.

The oil industry has finally succumbed to the fact that no one wants their product. Retail price maintenance has been killed and the petrol companies are now doing their dough on wasteful, symptomatic cents-off, free-this, free-that, trading stamp stuff as well as the similarly wasteful communication of non-benefits to non-audiences.

Remember it is only miracles that have kept the oil business alive this long. And it will take further miracles if the oil industry isn’t to share the sad fate of the wool industry before this decade is out.

It is interesting, as Harvard’s Theodore Levitt points out [in his 1960 “Marketing Myopia” Harvard Business Review article (PDF)], for each of us to realise that oil was first created as a patent medicine cure-call.

The fad passed.

Oil was sick. Maybe people prayed. Maybe God listened. Because then we had that marvel of modern marvels the oil lamp. People could read at night.

And then Edison came along and blew the whole ploy: electric light.

The oil industry was once again sick and maybe people prayed again. And maybe God heard again. Because someone (not the oil industry) invented the internal combustion engine.

Maybe the devil also heard and invented war in the skies and, with it, aviation fuel. And once again the oil industry was saved. By miracles.

Today the oil companies don’t appear to have grown any wiser. Although the days of miracles have maybe passed.

The oil companies still live by the Galbraith theory of “if you make enough of it, there has to be a way to con someone into buying it”.

For five minutes more. Maybe five years. Maybe 10 years. Certainly no longer.

The wool industry sat back and diddled the tax man and came to the Easter Show in riding boots stuffed with twenty quid notes and heads stuffed with 20 cent thoughts.

Today the oil industry thinks the same great way.

Find more oil. Dig under water. Under reefs. Under everything.

Find more oil. One day every garage in every underdeveloped country will have a car and the future will be huge and ours forever more.

But somewhere, someone else is sitting down inventing a fuel cell which created energy direct from chemicals. Or effective automotive electric storage batteries. Or solar energy conversion units.

Because the oil industry like the wool industry has traditionally misdefined its industry; its role.

Wool was not in the wool industry.

What wool industry?

Neither is oil in the oil industry.

Wool. Oil. Typical of almost every product. All the same. Produce more. Build more. Make more.

Advertise. Claim false differences. Sing songs. Destroy the countryside with billboards. Fill the TV full of half truths.

It doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t really need all the concern and all the rules and all the regulations and all the self-appointed judges. Because the consumer ignores all this crap in any case. The consumer judges on real physical or emotional merit.

The consumer closed the corner grocer even though he was her friend.

The consumer closed the dry cleaning shop to buy the no-iron shirt.

The consumer closed the picture theatre to watch TV.

The consumer destroyed the horse to pollute the countryside.

The consumer sank the ship to catch the plane.

And the very same consumer will not pray for wool. Or oil. Or advertising.

Because the consumer knows what she wants and the advertising industry had better begin to realise that the consumer wants advertising no more than she wants petrol or the corner grocer or wool.

Our ultimate consumer (the housewife) doesn’t want advertising to tell her lies about the difference between two products that are exactly the same. She wants the gospel, the good news, about a new product that satisfies a real want.

So might I suggest this: the next time you hear some gloryseeker stand and harangue the nasty goings ons of the advertising industry, that you stand and ask one question:

What advertising industry?