product endoresment ad or political ad?

senators are on tv now, not just in the news but (gasp!) in tv ads for consumer products and services.

i have thoughts equivalent to a dozen blogs on this topic, but for now, here is one article worth reading.


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Truth in advertising
By Conrado de Quiros
Philippine Daily InquirerFirst
Posted 00:15:00 06/03/2008

Some of the explanations the senators who appear in ads offer to justify it are pretty hilarious. There’s a whole bunch of them: Panfilo Lacson (Facial Care), Richard Gordon (Safeguard), Pia Cayetano (Downy Fabric Softener), Francis Pangilinan (Lucky Me Instant Noodles), Francis Escudero (Circulan) and Loren Legarda (Lucida DS, a skin-whitening agent). Last week, Miriam Defensor-Santiago asked the Commission on Elections to look into premature campaigning by candidates in the guise of commercial ads.

For Lacson, the principle is simple: product endorsement, yes; self-promotion, no. He says, not without vitriolic humor: “It is within our rights to endorse a product. Maybe there are some who do not want other senators to make endorsements because no one would get them.”

Gordon says he’s been an advocate of health for as long as he can remember, having been with the Red Cross for 30 years and worked once as branch manager of Procter & Gamble, which produces Safeguard. “The intent and core message of the Safeguard campaign is to teach the general public the benefits of proper hand-washing and its importance in preventing the spread of communicable disease.”

And Pia Cayetano: “I personally lent my name to a good cause, which is saving water.”
Well, to begin with, I myself can imagine American Standard and Kleenex wanting Miriam and Juan Ponce Enrile to endorse their products, given their talent for flushing things down the drain and wiping the object of the famous expletive off somebody’s ass, not necessarily respectively. While at this, Gordon should really not keep calling attention to the benefits of proper hand-washing lest the public construe it in quite another way and see only the benefits he has gotten from improperly washing his hands in public. These are the kinds of bola that make you realize why Philippine legislation is the way it is.

Do these senators’ ads represent premature campaigning? Probably, though the lines here are infinitely more blurred than in Bayani Fernando’s case. The senators are at least not using taxpayers’ money for these ads, and they are promoting products rather than themselves, for which they are getting paid. Fernando’s posters and billboards simply have no right to be there. They are illegal where the senators’ ads are merely unethical. They are punishable by jail where the senators’ ads are only punishable by scorn.

That doesn’t mean those ads ought to be tolerated. I grant the senators are at least not advertising cigarettes and alcohol, which encourage vice, or cars or luxury items, which rub the noses of the poor in the mud in these dire times. Though while at this, I myself take exception to “skin-whitening” products, as atrocious a concept as you can find, suggesting as it does that darkness of skin is a blemish or impairment that needs remedying. And I grant making ads to augment income is better than stealing, which is what most public officials do. It is better than stealing—but it is worse than not making the ads at all.

At the very least what’s wrong with it is that it throws the weight of a public official’s position and role as authority figure behind a particular product. It’s thoroughly dishonest to say that one is merely lending one’s name to the cause of saving water or personal hygiene. In fact, one is proposing the superiority of one product over another. Having been once a manager at Procter & Gamble is not a justification for endorsing Safeguard, it is an added reason for not doing so. You are no longer manager of a private company, you are a senator of the land. Senators are—despite the principle being more honored in the breach than in the observance—supposed to be fair and impartial.

But far more than that, it debases the position. It is not unlike a priest or bishop coming out to plug for Mompo as the wine of choice of clergy during Consecration. And justify that afterward by saying one is merely encouraging the faithful to attend Mass, not least by dangling the prospect of partaking of the salutary libation during Communion in return for alms money. Senators are the secular equivalent of bishops. They have jobs that require total—and exclusive—commitment to constituent and flock. If some senators find their pay too paltry to live decently on they have to sideline as ad endorsers, if not as clowns and jugglers (that would be redundant for some), they can always leave the field to people like Crispin Beltran who are perfectly content to serve the people while living in one-bedroom bungalows and having a total net worth of P50,000.

Of course these are debased times, standards have plunged to record lows. People no longer have to prove they are paragons of virtue before they can occupy public office, they need only prove there is no evidence to jail them—even if they have to wipe the fingerprints off the smoking gun in plain view of the public. They do not have to prove they are Caesar’s wife to step into Malacañang, they can be Pidal’s wife for all they care. But if that is the case, then the point is not to debase the country some more, the point is to stop it.

The practice of senators and other public officials selling facial care and skin-whitening lotions may not be illegal, but it is unethical. I personally wouldn’t mind a legislator proposing a law banning it altogether. The danger is patent; it subverts the Senate’s credibility, which is so essential to its work, not least in ferreting out corruption in government. It encourages the public to associate its truth with so-called “truth in advertising,” the kind that says that wearing a certain brand of deodorant or pair of briefs makes you, like Shaft, a sex machine to all the chicks.

That is one truth that won’t set you free.

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view/20080603-140351/Truth-in-advertising