When tobacco advertising was banned more than a decade ago, many media owners and advertisers firmly believed that would be the end of it and rolled over and played dead on the issue comforted by the fact that cellophane advertising was just beginning to boom and would easily fill the void.
At the time I warned that more ad bans would follow simply because its was politically safe to do so. Right now, liquor advertising is about to be banned - perhaps just starting with partial bans but there is no doubt in my mind that eventually all liquor advertising and promotion will be banned outright.
The Minister of Health has also announced his intention to impose bans on fast foods. So, where will it stop? Simple answer? It won't stop unless it becomes politically dangerous to impose bans.
Many years of being involved in radio talk shows, public debates and sitting in on parliamentary hearings have convinced me that neither politicians nor the public have any idea of the important role advertising plays in the economy.
They are not aware of the hundreds if not thousands of case histories proving that when advertising disappears the inevitable result is an increase in product prices not to mention myriad other implications of messing with this important cog in free-market machinations.
For almost 20 nears now I have been trying without success to persuade the advertising and media industries to start promoting the importance of advertising. To change consumer perceptions about advertising. But, in spite of committees having been put together to do just this, nothing has happened. Which is really mystifying because it is a relatively simple exercise involving ad agencies developing campaigns which most mass media would gladly run for free using unsold inventory.
I can only assume that in spite of the advertising industry's own representative body, the ACA, working extremely hard to lobby against advertising bans, it appears that individual ad agencies are so self absorbed they simply don't have time to think about doing anything for the greater good. They have been talking about doing something for decades.
It is no secret that the advertising industry is battling right now. Survival is the order of the day and perhaps it is this that is blinding the industry from what is so desperately needed.
In my opinion, convincing the public of the importance and relevance of advertising should be the number one priority for the industry right now because after alcohol ads are banned and roughly R2 billion disappears from the advertising pie, junk food ad bans will follow as sure as night follows day, resulting in another R1,5 billion in existing ad agency billing going down the tubes. And it won't stop there.
Banning advertising allows government to show that it is doing something positive to prevent substance abuse, obesity and the like, even though they know full well that banning advertising does not make any difference whatsoever to curbing abuse.
Quite frankly, the advertising and media industries can stand on their heads right now protesting about the fact that banning ads won't help. It won't change government's mind because government knows all the arguments; government knows that banning ads won't really make any difference.
But, government also knows that banning ads is a safe thing to do.
And it follows that the only thing that will make government think twice about banning ads is if the general public of the country understands how important advertising is to their pockets.
Right now, the public of this country believes that advertising is just another form of trivial pursuit and has no other benefit other than putting a handful of white guys in Porsches.
In a radio talk show some time back, when food prices were rising, caller after caller suggested that major supermarkets should use their multi-million Rand advertising budgets to subsidise food prices. Not one of those callers was interested in hearing about the fact that if supermarkets stopped advertising, food prices would go up dramatically and not down. Not one caller was interested in hearing about the fact that supermarkets didn't just spend millions for fun but used their advertising budgets as an important businees tool.
That public perception of advertising remains dominant today and it is that perception that is the ad industry's biggest threat.
