131: An Advertising Lesson from a Vegas Pothead

I recently attended the National Auctioneers Association’s Designation Academy in Las Vegas. During the day, I absorbed compelling content in the updated Auction Technology Specialist course. At night, I ate dinner and explored The Strip with my auction marketing friends.

Having never been to Vegas, my curiosity and the plethora of visual stimuli combined to test my sensory bandwidth. Whether on the sidewalk or the Stratosphere, in a helicopter or the High Roller, tourists are inundated with the effects of a marketing arms race in Sin City. Everything is bright, if not flickering in some mesmerizing pattern. Everything is huge, especially in comparison to your home environs. Shiny describes almost everything you absorb (as does expensive).

That said, one of the most indelible sights of my three-day visit was a cardboard sign, held by a shaggy man seated on a footbridge above Las Vegas Boulevard. In black Sharpie ink it read, “Need money for weed.”

One of the auctioneers walking with me quipped over his shoulder, “Truth in advertising!” We laughed, but there was something refreshing about that sign.

While a surprising majority of Las Vegas advertising cuts to the chase, this brown remnant of a box proved even more succinct. The candor of the beggar’s appeal contrasted the spirit of Vegas that encourages alibis and pseudonyms, costumes and caricatures.

Cardboard panhandler signs aren’t anything unique—except in the land of opulent window shopping, Photoshopped show posters, advertising-wrapped taxi cabs, 10-story-tall building wraps, and LED screens that curve around hotels and scale towers. You’d be hard pressed to find a greater contrast in visual presentation.

That might explain the pothead’s strategy. It wouldn’t take a social scientist to test authenticity as an attractive, effective marketing strategy in a desert town known for its fountains. It’s difficult to outshine the rest of the City of Lights. So, why try?

The sign made me think about auction promotion.

So much of my auction industry loves brash fonts, gaudy designs, and crowded layouts. Readability gets suffocated by unnecessary text, competing elements, and a lack of logical reading progression. Earlier that day, an auctioneer showed me a copy of one of his recent postcards. On one panel alone, there were six—six—starbursts of varying sizes.

I regularly receive advertising copy from clients that reads, “Something for everyone,” “Unlimited development potential,” or “Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!” The first two could never be true, and the third requires you to live decades to prove it. It’s all used car salesman hype—no offense to the used car salesmen with whom I play basketball before breakfast three days a week. It’s over selling. It’s over promising. You could make the case it’s deceptive.

I’m not trying to make the case that auctioneers should use repurposed cardboard to promote their auctions and their businesses. It’s just that we would all benefit from more succinct, more candid, and more restrained advertising media.

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Taking It Personally

Vulnerability seems counterintuitive in the era of social media and Photoshop, special effects and liposuction. Authenticity has always been attractive but not instinctive. Candor, while not always easy—especially with tact—comes with a lot less maintenance than exaggeration. The confidence and contentment it takes to let the Joneses win can feel as unobtainable as a clear picture of the Loch Ness Monster.

It’s difficult to put the phone down and with it the camera, filters, and “Post” button. It’s so hard to say, “I don’t know,” ”I’m content,” and “I don’t have time in my schedule for that.”

The Bible addresses this from several angels across multiple passages, but the verse I’ve been mulling lately to guide me in the pursuit of a simplified existence is I Thessalonians 4:11. The first century writer, Paul of Tarsus, wrote, “Aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you.”

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Stock image purchased from iStockPhoto.com

Why You and I Don’t Trust Advertising

I heard a Haggar pants commercial on ESPN Radio multiple times in a short period of time. Near the end of the 30-second spot, the sultry-voiced female character tells the slovenly male character that if he buys a pair of Haggar pants, he would have a better chance of having sex with her.

Advertisers sell with sex every day, and they have been doing that since before you and I were born. What grabbed me, though, was that this was more than a hint or an implied association. Haggar’s lawyers probably kept the temptress from promising sexual favors for upgrading to their khakis, but the incentive carrot sounded pretty direct.

New pants don’t guarantee sex. If they did, Haggar would have a larger cash reserve than does Google or Apple. In the vast majority of American romantic relationships, the chance that new khakis could raise your number of a sexual encounters is probably negligible.

Haggar isn’t the only advertiser to oversell the benefits of their product.  Culture at large fully expects hyperbole from advertising. On Super Bowl Sunday, we even celebrate the far-fetched scenarios by which everyday items are portrayed.

Deep down, though, we all distrust advertising to varying degrees.  We wonder what the ad isn’t telling us, what it’s exaggerating, and why so much fine print is often needed. The advertising profession is seen as convincing people they (1) need something they don’t or (2) want more than they need.  At my religious college, one of my professors even told me that the school of communications discouraged people of faith to work in ad agencies (a perspective with which I disagree).

Sadly, the auction industry oversells and over promises a lot just like everyone else.  Regularly, I’m asked to advertise “Unlimited development potential” in areas with zoning laws and building codes. I get asked to draw attention to “Something for everyone,” when there’s nothing in the auction that they or I would buy. “Great investment property!” often means “Somebody could do something with this, if they were willing to hold onto it for a while and dump a bunch of money in it.” Urgency is pushed with phrases like, “Once in a lifetime opportunity”—which might take decades to prove.  I’ve been asked not to disclose information about square footage or the quantity of bathrooms—to give the sales person a chance by phone or at an open house to schmooze the sales pitch away from the facts.

If the auction industry wants to be taken as seriously as other marketing industries, we need to set the standard for authentic advertising.  Advertisers who authentically represent their product and brand tend to earn our trust.  Why wouldn’t that be the same for our auction audiences?

Don’t take it from me. Ask the guy who bought a pair of khakis and still hasn’t gotten even a date from his Haggar gal.
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The Western church culture oversells Christianity. I’m not just talking about prosperity gospel and the popularity of Osteen positivity.

Surrendering your life to Jesus is expensive.  Candidly, living for eternity instead of the moment often makes the present more uncomfortable—sometimes even painful.  Jesus isn’t some magic elixir that cures your problems, helps you accomplish your New Year’s resolutions, and makes everyone love you.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. Jesus himself lived a life where people took from him more than they gave to him, where they questioned everything he did—where he knew excruciating relational and physical pain would swallow the hours before his death and where he would have holes in his hands even in his resurrected body.

That’s why he could authentically tell us, “Take up your cross and follow me.

[footer] Stock photo purchased from iStockPhoto.com. Screen capture from Haggar TV commercial found here.[/footer]