John Singleton, “Mr. Ralph Nader,”
Advertising News, August 20, 1971, p. 4.

It is reported that Ralph Nader, America’s consumer muckraker, crusader and zealot, is considering a trip to Australia.

The reason for the trip is unspecified and the trip itself is unconfirmed, but it is as well that we look at Nader and his purpose so that we better understand the energy, the genius and the effectiveness of the man.

First it should be pointed out that Nader has only rarely shown any signs of the dictatorial censor-everything attitudes that our own local consumer bigots are so keen to promulgate.

Rather he has taken the side of the consumer and taken the responsibility to inform the consumer of the other side of the story.

This responsibility should rightly be that of the government, but unfortunately, it is doubtful if such a besmirched and ridiculed body could gain credence for any findings, on any motive above self-grandiosement.

Smoking may give you balls. It may also give you cancer. You choose.

The car may look lovely. It may also kill you.

Ultimately the consumer will always judge the product and the company; and ultimately evil reaps its own lack of reward. But in the meantime, it is the Christianity of Ralph Nader that causes people to think about the promises so easily given and so easily broken by companies and products throughout the world.

It is Nader who makes us think about the pollution of the water and the skies by a few. When those same waterways and skies are owned by us all.

Again it falls into Nader’s lap because the governmental bodies have neither the concern nor the love, the intelligence, nor the respect to do this job which they in fact should be doing. But will never be able to do. So first let us not confuse Nader with the people who believe that not referring to brand X will save the world.

Let us not confuse Nader with the people who believe that advertising should be censored, even though at the same time censorship on all other matter should be unceremoniously dumped.

Certainly I believe that at times Nader has let his zeal influence his good sense and many of his campaigns have failed because of this.

But let us look at one important example where a Nader could have felt a moral responsibility to inform the consumer of the other side of the story. And let us see what the real result might have been. If any. The cause in point: mutual funds.

I believe that the other side of the story could well have been told in the midst of all the get-rich-quick claims, eg., you get nothing for nothing. And the bigger the rewards, the bigger the risk. Think about it. Then make up your own mind.

In New York there is an attorney who specialises in lawsuits on behalf of mutual fund shareholders. His name is Mordecai Rosenfield. One of his papers on the matter makes the dangers clear.

In 1965, for example, Americans spent more than $4.25 billion on mutual shares. And most investors haven’t got a clue what the thing is all about. Except when you get rich quick and do nothing getting there.

The mutual premise is simple. You invest your bread. It gets lumped in with a lot of other people’s bread, and get invested across the board in stocks of all sort of companies. Good, bad, and indifferent. The idea is full of merit, and it can work very well. It can also fail very badly.

Mutual funds grow in two ways. One way is if the stocks bought by the fund go up in price. The other way is if the fund attracts massive new sums of money from new investors. In such cases, the fund can grow even though the investment stock may itself be falling.

So how are great new sums attracted?

The funds are sold by salesman. Not unpredictably, they are paid a commission per sale.

Typically this commission is 8 per cent.

This means that the moment you invest your $100, it is immediately worth only $92.

To even-break even in the first year, the average stock must increase 8 per cent. This doesn’t often happen. And the position is even worse for the people who invest on terms. When you decide to invest $100 per year, the normal commission is $8 per year.

But people drop out, and so salesmen do not get so keen to flog this very lucrative market.

To overcome this, a thing called “front – end – load” is established. This means that in your agreement you “agree” to pay the first five years commission out of your first year’s investment. This means that out of your first $100, only $60 is left from the moment you sign. And that’s a lot of making up to do to even get square.

Now a lot of investment funds work with neither this heavy commission system, nor the “front – end – load”. They make their money from giving investment advice to the fund.

But in the most publicised cases, this form of remuneration is even more doubtful and expensive than the commission and the front-end-load combined.

Normally a fund “hires” an outside investment council and pays them one half of one per cent for advice.

So a fund of $400,000,000 a years pays $2,000,000 a year for advice. And it is not impossible for that outside council to have inside directors and participants in the fund itself. The one half of one per cent sounds insignificant. But it is not.

In fact, it mostly amounts to between 15 and 20 per cent of a fund’s total income. And most often this advice isn’t worth a cent. Averaging no better result than a pin in the paper technique, which anyone could have applied without the commissions, without the front-end-load, and certainly with a far greater sense of participation and enjoyment.

It is all a very bad scene isn’t it?

Someone like Nader, or the government, or someone should do something about it, shouldn’t they?

It is a wicked, wicked, evil, evil world.

But the fact remains, despite all the preceding facts, that most people who invested in mutual funds did in fact make money, despite everything. If it hadn’t been for the funds, they may have left their money in the very ethical, very uncriticised banks where governmental legislation pegs interest rates so that you can actually lose money every year with the full blessing of our elected representatives. Or you could do your dough on the horses, or on the poker machines. And that is O.K.

And that is the whole point. Ultimately the consumer judges in any case. In the meantime we need Ralph Nader and intelligent, trusted people like him to inform the consumer of the other side of the story.

But how far should restrictive legislation really go?

I hate to mention it again, but prohibition just doesn’t work.

You don’t need protection.

I don’t need protection.

All we really want is information.

It is all the other idiots out there who really need protection.

Except they think it is us who need it.

And that is why Ralph Nader sells so well.

*****
John Singleton, “Mr. Ralph zzzzzz,”
Advertising News, July 7, 1972, p. 20.

I have just spent one of the most informative, dull, grey and boring evenings of my life.

I have just heard Ralph Nader speak at a $25 a plate dinner and even the food was lousy.

By now I suppose that everyone knows that this Nader person did a spectacular job in the late 1960’s with his book Unsafe at Any Speed. His book spelt the end of General Motors’ Corvair which was an excellent car in all but one respect: it killed people.

It is probably equally well know that General Motors set out to discredit Nader by seeking to prove that he was in the employ of Ford, a lecher, a drunk, a poofter, a leso or anything else really awful.

General Motors failed and General Nader won a great victory for us all.

A man could, after all, fight City Hall and win. And I think, and hope, that the job Nader did was applauded by every right thinking person in every democratic country in the world.

However, after Tuesday night, I believe I could be forgiven for believing that the people who most capitalised on Nader’s initial success were the socialist disruptives in our society, the theoreticians and academics who know nothing of the processes of the real world.

And after Tuesday night I now personally see Nader as nothing more than a populist of the less than popular causes of nationalisation and socialism.

It should be widely accepted that man, as represented on Tuesday night be Nader, tomorrow by the Government, and the day after by the consumerist group, has every right to protect himself from the selfish pollution and dangerous exploitation of giant, unthinking industry.

But no man or group of men has the right to protect man from his own self-pollution or self-destruction.

Ralph Nader either disagrees with this basic of democracy or sees himself far above mortal man and in a position of supreme judgement.

As three people on the official table appeared to doze off, and at least a quarter of the audience actually did start sawing logs in thought balloons, Nader sallied forth.

In shuffling, uncertain-sounding, note-reading monotone Nader launched poisoned mutterings against General Motors (many times), Ford (once), banks, analgesics, Firestone tyres, emotional advertising, the failure of advertising to fully inform, the number of people who are killed each week on TV, female cosmetics (a little), male cosmetics (a lot) … and spoke in favour only of socialism, nationalisation, the Democratic party (and by inference, the Labor party, who apparently organised the whole thing in the clever bearded disguise of Barry Jones), anti-cancer ads, corrective adveertising, the Federal Trade Commission, and nationalisation (again) and socialism (again).

It all reminded me of a rerun of a marketing seminar at any Australian university in the land.

It is a fact that in the marketing courses at Monash, university students for the past two years have had beliefs exactly parallel to Nader’s: before their course.

The facts are that 93 per cent of students initially define marketing as “screwing the consumer”. After they find out the facts of life about the subject, the definition changes in the same percentage to an understanding that marketing is nothing more than isolating a consumer need, satisfying it with a new product or service, and then communicating this satisfaction (advertising). At a profit.

It is a pity that Mr. Nader’s background includes no practical experience of marketing or he would seem less like a fresh university student and more aware of the responsibilities he is making so freely available for easy exploitation by those whose goals are unspecified but obvious.

For a start when Nader criticises the emergence of the male cosmetic, and the advertising of Coca-Cola, Mr. Nader does not realise that the psychogenic needs of people are at least as important to them as base physical needs.

Mr. Nader obviously has also missed the real world in places other than the marketing area if he doesn’t understand this himself: personally.

Nor does Mr. Nader realise that the consumer does not want to hear the bad things about a product. The consumer wants to hear the good things.

Otherwise, Mr. Nader would not want Wonder Bread to donate 25 per cent of their ad-time to disclaiming previous advertising themes and then wonder why Wonder sales go up, instead of down.

Nor would he want cigarette advertising banned and cautions printed on the packs, because he would realise that such steps do nothing but make smoking more evil and therefore even more appealing to the consumer.

Poor Mr. Nader seeks to protect a consumer that he hasn’t even started to understand. In fact, I left Mr. Nader’s dissertation on Tuesday night convinced that here was an opportunity for supreme good being used as nothing more than a populist tool for theoretical university campus baby talk.

Anyone who heard Nader must leave convinced that the man wants the world to see itself as it really is. And he believes the world should go along with what he wants: an ugly real world with hairy underarms, bad breath and dirty teeth, holed up in a cave and wrapped in a loin cloth.

Mr. Nader, I believe, wants us to believe that our psychogenic needs are unreal and are nothing other than the results of hidden persuasion from clever, evil minds from the Madison Avenues of the Western world.

Bachelor Nader wants us to believe that a screw is a screw and that love is something that we only read about in the ads.

And as I sat watching and trying so hard to listen to this obviously dedicated man saying all the things that he was expected to say, I wondered if he could still remember what he really set out to do in the first place.