# Truth is good for business

> We sell truth, which limits our client list to companies whose product survives being described accurately. That is the strategy.

URL: https://onetotem.com/blog/truth-is-good-for-business/
Lang: en

Sir John Hegarty, co-founder of TBWA and BBH, argues that marketing and advertising turned truth into a negotiable concept, and that the habit leaked into society at large with grim results. Coming from a trade widely assumed to lie for a living, his claim is that "the most powerful strategy any advertiser can employ is the truth."

He also offers a model for judging any piece of communication: a triangle. Is it memorable? If nobody remembers it, pack up and go home. Is it motivating? Having stopped someone, does it give them something to actually consider? And is it truthful? That corner is the long-term one: you don't build lasting relationships, with people or with brands, by lying. One of the most famous TV campaigns in British history, Ronseal's "It does exactly what it says on the tin", is three decades of that third corner doing all the work. [His full argument is worth reading](https://the-media-leader.com/making-sense-of-it-all-john-hegarty-worries-about-the-spread-of-moral-malaise/).

What this means for us: when we make campaigns we make them from honesty, and that has few shortcuts. It shapes the culture, the effort that goes into copy and creative, and above all the client list. We can only work with clients who have real products and a solid narrative, because we cannot make truthful advertising about a product that does not survive being described accurately. Honesty as positioning, not as decoration.

There is a line worth respecting. Elevating a customer's way of life to build identification is marketing; Nike has done it for decades. Baiting the customer into inferring fantasies the product cannot deliver is the other thing; any teleshopping infomercial will demonstrate. The line is sometimes thin, and part of the job is questioning which side of it a brief sits on: what the client wants versus what the client needs.

Truth is abstract and subjective; honesty is a practice. We choose it partly as ethics, because it dignifies the craft, and partly as strategy, because in a market where reality is negotiable, doing exactly what it says on the tin is differentiation.

_First published in our internal knowledgebase in September 2022. Adapted for the blog._