Use your powers for good
Several years ago, the agency I worked for was hired by a rent-to-own franchisee that shall remain nameless. In our initial meeting with the CEO, we learned that he regularly trained his salespeople to become “financial managers” for their customers, most of whom had extremely low incomes. The sales strategy was to talk them into bringing their bills and paychecks to the store every payday, so the salesperson could “help” them manage their budgets. In truth, it was an upsell strategy that allowed the salespeople to see exactly how much more low-quality, overpriced rent-to-own crap they could strap onto their victims before letting them out of the store.
Here’s how the slimeball CEO explained it to us: “These people are too stupid to manage their own finances. Every two weeks, when they get paid, their paychecks are so small that they have to figure out how to get ten pounds of potatoes out of a five-pound sack. Our job is to get as many of those potatoes as we can, before they have a chance to give them to someone else.”
This was a defining moment for all of us at the agency. Some of us were horrified at the depths to which we were about to sink. Others cheerfully joined the client in his rationale, agreeing that some people aren’t smart enough to manage their own money. Guffaw. Nudge-nudge.
And I suppose it’s true. But it’s one thing to detect a weakness in your fellow human beings and quite another thing to systematically prey upon it.
I’ve turned down rent-to-own clients since then. I’ve turned down ambulance-chasing-attorney clients. I’ve turned down environmentally reprehensible petroleum-industry clients and clients that disguise entrepreneurship as religion.
In every instance, there was another advertising professional waiting in line to take my place.
I frequently hear the agency rationale that, “If we don’t take their money, somebody else will.”
Also true. And maybe there will always be slimeballs waiting in line to help other slimeballs, and the world will never, ever get any better.
Then again, if some of us are willing to take responsibility for the influential media we produce, maybe … gradually … others will follow.
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We get our morals from books. I didn’t get mine from books, but I know that morals do come from books—theoretically at least.
–Mark Twain
