Do You Lie for a Living?

Andrew Goodman of Traffick writes in a post called Do you lie for a living?:

I’m just flipping through Joseph Jaffe’s excellent Life After the 30-Second Spot (the PDF version—I hate to wait). When he still worked at an ad agency, Jaffe’s 10-year-old cousin asked him about the long disclaimers and small print at the end of print ads and TV ads. The kid then asked Jaffe why he’d work in an industry that requires him to lie for a living.

Which reminded me of a recent trip.

Big splashy promo by EasyJet in a UK airport, where they’d set up a booth across from the departure area. Pretty aggressive marketing—taking out promo space in the same airport you fly out of. Nice work. But the message itself got a chuckle from me.

UNLIMITED CARRY-ON BAGGAGE (Huge Asterisk)

* - Within reason. Subject to available space.

If the size of the asterisk in your marketing “communications” is literally comical, you’ve accomplished nothing but show people that ads are lies, no?

Which makes me think there exists an opportunity for an airline or travel agency. Two scenarios come to mind.

(1) People are exhausted by bait-and-switch pricing for travel products. The advertised rate is $289, with a dreaded asterix. If you read the fine print wedded to the asterix, you discover the rate is one-way and subject to a litany of fees, some charged by the airline, some charged by the airport, some tacked on by transportation regulation bodies. Price out the full trip and it looks like over $400 for that one-way ticket.

So is anyone brave enough to advertise the price someone is actually going to pay? Surely that’s a good opportunity for differentiation, even if the no-haggle, no-surcharge price only gets selectively advertised, doesn’t it seem worth the risk? In an industry with so little to differentiate between offerings, other than price, honesty seems to me a good virtue to cultivate.

(2) Use the asterix as the jumping off point for a key message, delivered in a new way. If your airline has more daily departures than anyone else, then try,

Daily Departures Now Boarding *
* Daily? Practically hourly! At least for the hours that count. We get you to where you need to be, faster. We fly more often to major destinations. We could be boarding a flight right now. Are you coming?

Consumers practice connected consumption now. They know the lies of advertising, and if they know, they tell people. Soon everyone knows. Then that knowledge becomes ingrained, and with it, a passive annoyance. Whole businesses can be built or expanded on this type of insight and breakthrough. The hypothetical campaign I describe could even be publicly announced as Putting Your Money Where Our Mouths Are. Visual: ticket counter employee with startled expression in their eyes, hundred dollar bill covering their mouth.