The Newer Scientist
Just Use Science!
"Just Use Science" - the latest catchphrase going around the ad world is behind a revolution in advertising's approach to the factual content of their campaigns. Annika Slinky, of the Bloomsbury firm Slinky, Zellman & Carp, sums it up as a: "...convergence of sciences and advertising. These days you can't simply say "eight out of ten cats" or "will make you thinner (as part of a calorie-controlled diet)" unless you can actually prove it."
Just Use Science was born of consumer frustration with the overblown claims of adverts. The advertising industry is realising it can no longer simply come up with a cool catchphrase and make up the rest to fit the slogan. Indeed, the Just Use Science movement has spawned an eponymous start-up company, aiming to help find common ground between the creative imperative and the truth. JUS's MD, Roger Runcorn, said: "We don't want to let the facts get in the way of a great campaign strategy but, equally, we don't want an advert to be let down by the absence of facts to fit its statements. Our mission is to provide entirely original scientific, peerreviewed research to fit a creative agenda."
Runcorn has already had some successes with his fledgling company. A deodorant manufacturer wanted to make the claim that their spray made you statistically more likely to get laid. Ad creatives were struggling to find evidence that this was really the case, so JUS were called in. Runcorn's solution was to commission a functional MRI study to see which parts of the brain lit up when the person was exposed to the deodorant: "We found that one bit consistently flashed up, and no-one really knew what this part of the brain actually did, so we named it the Specific Hippocampal Anterior Gyrus (SHAG). We had to ensure that this was properly scientific, so we encouraged the hospital's medical imaging department to submit a paper titled: `Popular deodorant spray gives rise to SHAG action.' The campaign has since been a great success, I hear."
JUS's work isn't popular with everyone, however. Bobby Bing, of the BAAS, has been particularly vocal in his criticism. When an ad firm was commissioned to promote a new drug as `entirely side-effect-free', they hired JUS. Runcorn succeeded in getting the University of Sussex to produce a medical study which redefined `loose bowels', `presenile dementia' and `permanent blindness' as all parts of `healthy bodily function'. Bing describes this as: "The ultimate in putting the cart before the bloody horse. This isn't science, it's marketing in a lab coat."
Runcorn does concede that not everything in science can be made to fit a sales agenda, like their attempt to get E = mc2 rewritten for a record company client: "It turned out that we'd have to change the fundamental laws governing matter and energy for it to work, so we had to turn that job down." But he is confident that JUS will succeed: "Once we've got something down in black and white, preferably in a respectable journal, it's official. It's Science. If a company needs to make a claim, and the facts don't yet exist to back it up, we'd encourage them to Just Use Science."
