“Truth in advertising has long been something to ignore or interpret creatively, if not intentionally avoid altogether”.
When Jonathan Salem Baskin and I wrote the opening words to our book Tell the Truth we did so out of a strong sense that the marketing industry was not reacting fast enough to the enormous change in consumer expectations driven by the internet and smart phone access.
We believed that the art of spin was becoming redundant and that the skewed positioning, that brands often resort to, worked fine when the brand’s voice was the only one speaking to consumers. But in the Age of Dialogue, with social media on the ascent, the time for spin was over. We said in closing : “in five years we’ll look back on the art of spin as an anachronism”.
