Category Archives: Observations

Conclusions drawn from market research based on personal experience.

Texting: The Death of Conversation?

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Courtesy of Rick Janacek

Will phone conversations or even face-to-face conversations become obsolete? The telephone enabled people to talk to each other without seeing each other.  Now texting and instant messaging enable people to talk to each other without hearing each other. Why do people need to talk when they can just text?

I first realized that live conversation could be endangered when I tried to contact my cousin. We try to talk on the telephone every few weeks. However, trying to reach her is always difficult. She rarely answers her phone and often takes a week or more to respond to voice mails. However, I receive responses within an hour if I text her.

GirlsTexting

I recently tried an experiment. I called her cell phone. As usual, she did not answer. So, I texted her and – within in one minute – she responded. We spent the next hour texting back and forth. Not one to two sentences, but four to five paragraphs of text each time. It took much longer to type than talk!

Research points out that my cousin is not alone. A Pew Internet Research Center survey conducted in 2012 found that texting is the first communication choice for teens. 63% of those surveyed say they exchange text messages every day with people in their lives, and the median number of texts sent on a typical day by teens rose to 60 in 2011. But it’s not just teenagers; adults are also texting at a rapid pace. The media research firm, Nielsen Co., conducted an analysis of cellphone bills for the Wall Street Journal in 2010 and found that people from ages 45 to 54 sent and received more than 300 text messages a month – ten a day!

My Take

Texting is a very intrusive medium that grabs people’s attention. It also makes it possible for people to send messages in meetings and classrooms without disturbing the proceedings.  It’s “background communication,” i.e., something you can do while you’re occupied with more important things. However:

  • It distracts the sender and often leaves the receiver befuddled.
  • The absence of sight and sound strip much of the emotional content from communication. It’s hard to tell whether a person is joking, cynical, angry, confused or serious. So I lose the nuances of seeing someone’s expression or hearing their inflection.
  • The texter may be juggling five other “conversations” simultaneously. That makes me feel less important.  A proxy experience has replaced personal contact.

Texts have all the charm of a telegraph. Stop.

But texting does have a place. Communicating successfully requires the ability to master each medium and know when and how to use them to convey your message. As a linguist at Fordham University stated in a recent article in the Huffington Post, texting “is an art that can be as valuable as good writing.” How you use that skill determines whether you will be an effective communicator or just someone lost inside your own smartphone.

Courtesy of Rick Janacek

When Smartphones Undermine Essential Business Skills

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Adults have been complaining about the decline of arithmetic skills since students began relying on pocket calculators in the 1970s. When personal computers became widely adopted in the 1980s, they complained that keyboards contributed to the loss of handwriting skills. Then in the 1990s, when spell- and grammar-checkers become popular, people complained about the demise of spelling and proofreading skills.

FamilyCell

Smartphones contain all of the tools above plus many others. Since 2000, smartphones have become so ubiquitous, even among young children, that they are affecting the way we conduct business.

The Big Questions

Despite their undeniable benefits, do smartphones sometimes undermine essential business skills? If so, how?

The Dumb Side of Smartphones

I recently asked a group of business owners and academics this question and got an earful. Below is a small sample of their answers.

  • A librarian told me students are so addicted to Internet browsers and search engines that they are not learning how to use libraries. She worries that this blocks them from using knowledge accumulated before the digital age and from using current information that may not be online.
  • A restaurant owner complained that her cooks were having trouble reading orders placed by young waiters and waitresses who had better texting than writing skills.
  • A retailer complained that his clerks were so dependent on the calculators on smartphones that they could not make accurate change unless the cash register told them what to give back.
  • A pharmacist complained that his younger employees could no longer visualize quantities associated with prescriptions because they could no longer do simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division in their heads.
  • A store manager complained that over-reliance on calculators (which express quantities solely in terms of numbers) blinded young people to other ways of expressing numeric values. He overheard a customer ask one of his employees for a dozen eggs. The employee said, “We don’t have a dozen. We only sell cartons of 6 or 12.”
  • A delivery-service owner told me about an employee who relied on his cell phone’s turn-by-turn navigation. When the phone’s battery went dead, the employee wound up on the wrong side of town even though he had a key map.
  • A physician was late filing urgent pathology reports because her transcriptionist couldn’t access her medical spell-checker during a system changeover.
  • An owner of a service company complained that clients rarely answered phone calls anymore. They replied to questions with texts while they were in meetings. Problem? They rarely read past the first line of an email to get the full gist.
  • Many owners complained about multitasking-induced errors, i.e., that employees were distracted by texts and emails when they should have been attending to business.
  • Many owners worried about the loss of productivity because people were spending too much time on social networks during work hours.
  • An owner of a company that relied on research felt the convenience of search engines caused many people to confuse thorough, valid analysis with quick, easy answers.
  • Another retailer worried that many young cashiers don’t even look at customers anymore. “They simply stare at their screens and push a button that dispenses change.” He worried that the “personal touch” was being replaced with emotionless transactions that left customers cold, inviting them to go somewhere else.

Despite these problems, we need to recognize and applaud the wonderful things that smartphones enable us to do. Imagine how dull life would be if it weren’t for texting while accounting.

Impact of TV Commercials on Preschooler Food Preferences

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The Journal of the American Dietetic Association published a study from the Stanford Center for Research in Disease Prevention in January 2001 titled: The 30-second effect: an experiment revealing the impact of television commercials on food preferences of preschoolers.

DL Borzekowski and TN Robinson, the study’s authors, sought to determine whether televised food commercials influence preschool children’s food preferences.

Study Design

They divided 46 2- to 6-year-old preschool children into two groups. One saw a videotape of a popular cartoon with a commercial embedded in it. The control group saw the cartoon, but without the commercial. The children, from a Head Start program in northern California, were then asked to identify their preferences from pairs of similar products, one of which had been advertised in the embedded commercials.

Findings and Implications

They found that children exposed to commercials were significantly more likely to choose the advertised items than children who were not. They concluded that even brief exposures to televised food commercials can influence food preferences within this age group.

Further, the authors advised adults to limit  preschooler’s exposure to television advertisements. They also raised a public policy issue – given the epidemic of childhood obesity – about advertising to young children.

My Take

From personal experience, both as a parent and advertising-industry professional, I believe that this age group lacks the cognitive capabilities to differentiate commercials from programming. Thus, they are exceptionally vulnerable at a time when they are forming preferences and habits that could influence the trajectory of their lives.

Hit the pause button for a moment of ethical reflection.

Kids like “fun.” (Don’t we all?) Advertisers know this and so they pack commercials targeted at kids with flashy animation, bright colors, happy music and fantasy characters. These are the tools of the trade. Advertising targeted at adults uses the same tools for the same reasons.

VeggieHeartIf the products and services being advertised are not harmful, I believe that there is nothing inherently wrong with this. We should also remember that television is a competitive marketplace of ideas. Nothing prevents anyone from using the same tools to encourage consumption of healthy foods like Popeye cartoons once did.

Late in life, I gained a significant amount of weight from eating too much unhealthy food. After nutritional counseling, I began eating virtually nothing but lean meats, vegetables and fruits. I lost eighty pounds, nine inches from my waistline, and feel infinitely better now.

However, a curious thing happened in the process. Much of the food advertising I see on TV now repulses me. What used to make me drool – gooey cheese in pizza commercials, for instance – now makes my stomach turn back-flips. Seriously, it’s such an unpleasant feeling that I must look away from the TV. Someone needs to research this phenomenon to see if a heart healthy diet is the best defense against the seductive pull of advertising for less healthy foods – among children and adults. There could be something happening on a cellular level here. When I was fat and tried to diet, the first two weeks were always the hardest. Every time I saw one of those gooey pizza commercials, it triggered cravings. Now, the opposite happens.

Anncr VO:  “And now we return to our regularly scheduled programming.”

How Context Impacts Interpretation

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WARNING: This image is NOT what most people assume it is. It is an example of how even the “literal” can “lie.” The context in which something appears can turn meaning around 180 degrees.

FatherDaugther

Copyright © 2013 Rehak Creative Services, Inc.

In the 1970s, I spent much of my spare time with a Nikon F2 wandering through a Chicago neighborhood called Uptown. It was a pretty rough neighborhood at the time – a cauldron of poor Hispanics, African-Americans, Whites who had migrated up from the South and (reportedly) the nation’s single largest concentration of American Indians. Gangs and poverty ruled the neighborhood., Bars, flop houses and halfway homes dotted the streets.

The Chicago Tribune published many of my photos, but refused to publish this one. I took it on a cold morning when I ducked inside a store to change rolls of film. As I closed the  camera, I turned and saw this pair staring at me. I immediately dropped to my knee and clicked off five frames with my motor drive as the Black man withdrew the cigarette from his mouth.

Eager to learn more about these two and to obtain model releases, I engaged them in conversation and found that my photo was NOT what it appeared to be. The man had adopted the girl after marrying her mother. Several days later, I brought prints from my negatives to the family as a gift. I met the mother and learned that she had been a single mom who moved to the city from West Virginia to find work. Instead, she found herself living on the streets, cold and hungry. The Black man had taken her and her daughter in, provided them with food and shelter, and eventually married the mother. It seemed to be a very loving, interracial family.

“What’s going on here?”

When the Tribune editors saw the image, their jaws dropped. “What’s going on here?” they asked. I told them the story, but they refused to publish the image even after they knew the story behind it. They feared “it would start a race war.”

For more than 35 years, the image remained unpublished until today. One of my clients, an African-American, saw it a few years ago and almost became physically ill from what the image implied. I told her the story behind it and we remained good friends, but the encounter taught me the editors had been right.

Sometimes even an unaltered documentary image can create a false impression. Because of the social context in which we live, most people see this as pimp and child prostitute, not as loving father and adopted daughter. What was your first impression? Did you leap to the wrong conclusion? Most people do. They see it within a cultural context that is filled with racial distrust. They see the hat. They see the gleam in the man’s eye, the smile on his lips, the leer on the young girl’s face, and they assume the worst.

I learned a powerful lesson from this image. Words and images taken out of context can misrepresent the true meaning of something innocent. They can inflame the reader, fuel prejudice, and ultimately harm society. I publish this example, not to do any of those things, but in the hope that it will teach others how images can mislead.

Sometimes, the reader’s past causes him/her to misinterpret the meaning. Sometimes, people simply jump to the wrong conclusion because of personal experience, prejudice or media conditioning. And sometimes, “authors” deliberately mislead readers by withholding information that would allow them to interpret things properly. When that happens, there’s no way readers can get to the truth.

Impact of TV Violence on Sleep

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In the weeks following 9/11, I saw the World Trade Towers fall dozens, if not hundreds, of times in televised replays. The effect on my sleep was immediate. I slept restlessly, had nightmares, woke frequently, and felt anxiety. I had several friends/clients in the Towers that day. While the nightmares faded over time, the other effects did not. For the better part of a decade, I woke up at least once virtually every night.

Somehow a pattern had formed. I saw a sleep doctor. He told me to stop watching TV before bedtime, that TV stimulated the brain when it needed to relax. But I wondered whether there was something more going on – whether the violence of those images was somehow still disturbing my sleep and whether others were similarly affected.

A 2011 New York Times article by Anemona Hartocollis, 10 Years and a Diagnosis Later, 9/11 Demons Haunt Thousands, confirmed my suspicions. The article discussed the impact of the event on people who had experienced it firsthand. The article chronicled a list of serious maladies ranging from chronic sleep disturbances and lung cancer to post-traumatic stress disorder. But could exposure to the event on television also cause sleep disorders?

A 2004 study called Television Images and Probable Posttraumatic Stress Disorder After September 11 by Jennifer Ahern, MPH; Sandro Galea, MD; Heidi Resnick, PhD; and David Vlahov, PhD, in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease showed that people who viewed more television images of the attacks in the seven days after 9/11 had a higher probability of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The authors wrote, “Television may merit consideration as a potential exposure to a traumatic event.”

Another study published in 2007 in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders (Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms Following Media Exposure to Tragic Events: Impact of 9/11 on Children at Risk for Anxiety Disorders) found the amount of time children spent viewing 9/11 coverage on television predicted an increased risk of PTSD symptoms. The authors (Michael Otto, Aude Henin, Dina Hirshfeld-Becker, Mark Pollack, Joseph Biederman, and Jerold Rosenbaum of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School) conclude, “Media viewing of tragic events is sufficient to produce PTSD symptoms in vulnerable populations such as children.”

Outside of the context of a tragic event like 9/11, I began to wonder whether the general level of violence one sees on TV can affect sleep. Most studies have focused on how the medium itself stimulate the brain. But I found this study published In 2011 in The Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics by Michelle M. Garrison, Kimberly Liekweg and Dimitri A. Christakis titled Media Use and Child Sleep: The Impact of Content, Timing, and Environment. The authors determined that media content and viewing time correlate significantly with children’s sleep quality.

FamilyTV

The authors had 612 parents keep media diaries showing what, when, where and with whom their children watched TV for a week. They also correlated the diaries with a sleep questionnaire and found:

“Children with a bedroom television consumed more media and were more likely to have a sleep problem. In regression models, each additional hour of evening media use was associated with a significant increase in the sleep problem score (0.743 [95% confidence interval: 0.373–1.114]), as was daytime use with violent content (0.398 [95% confidence interval:0.121– 0.676]). There was a trend toward greater impact of daytime violent use in the context of a bedroom television (P  .098) and in low-income children (P  .07).”

The authors concluded that violent content and evening media use were associated with increased sleep problems. However, they observed no such effects with nonviolent daytime media use. To foster better sleep patterns, they advise parents to control their children’s watching of programs with violent content and to reduce evening media use.

My Take

These studies show sleep disturbances can be related to televised violence. They also raise some corollary questions, “What are the long term health consequences of constant exposure to images of violence? Does the rise in the use of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety drugs correlate at all to increased viewing of violence through media?” A report issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2011, by Laura A. Pratt, Ph.D.; Debra J. Brody, M.P.H.; and Qiuping Gu, M.D., Ph.D., found that “From 1988–1994 through 2005–2008, the rate of antidepressant use in the United States among all ages increased nearly 400%.” To be clear, the report notes that the authors did not study specific causes for the increase, i.e., with media useage. But I can’t help but wonder what, if any, correlation there is. Numerous studies now show that people spend more time multitasking with media than sleeping.

How a Mouse Click Can Affect Future Employability

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My parents drummed into me the importance of “Buyer beware.” Today’s parents need to teach kids a variation on that phrase, “Browser beware.”

One of my younger employees once told me that he preferred digital media to mass media such as television because he didn’t have to suffer through commercials not targeted to him. However, the technology used to target digital ads can harm people who may not be aware of what’s going on (and he certainly didn’t fall into that group).

In 2011, The Journal of the American Association of Pediatrics published a study called Clinical Report—The Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents, and Families. The report by Gwenn Schurgin O’Keeffe, Kathleen Clarke-Pearson and the Council on Communications and Media cataloged both the negative and positive influences that social media can have. The report makes a powerful case for media literacy education.

The authors define social media as any Web site that allows social interaction
These include social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter; gaming sites and virtual worlds such as Second Life; video sites such as YouTube; and blogs.

JobInterviewThe authors point out that many social sites gather information on the person using a site and use that information to give advertisers the ability to target “behavioral” ads directly to an individual’s profile. They also discuss how this information can come back to haunt kids later in life:

“When Internet users visit various Web sites, they can leave behind evidence of which sites they have visited. This collective, ongoing record of one’s Web activity is called the “digital footprint.” One of the biggest threats to young people on social media sites is to their digital footprint and future reputations. Preadolescents and adolescents who lack an awareness of privacy issues often post inappropriate messages, pictures, and videos without understanding that “what goes online stays online.” As a result, future jobs and college acceptance may be put into jeopardy by inexperienced and rash clicks of the mouse.”

Browser beware!

The Information Ghetto and The Mortgage Meltdown

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In 1969, Elvis Presley recorded a haunting hit, “In the Ghetto” (with lyrics by Mac Davis). It spoke of the cycle of poverty. In the song, a boy, born in a Chicago ghetto lives a bleak and doomed life. He is killed, ironically, just as another child is born to suffer the same fate.

Today, many people live in information ghettos created by illiteracy, a kind of intellectual poverty. This often leads to a life of crime. Did you know, for instance, that the Texas Department of Corrections determines how many jail cells it will need ten years from now by assessing fourth grade reading scores? (Download Dismantling The Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline, by the American Leadership Forum Class XXV and The Children’s Defense Fund, 2009, p4; edited and designed by Rehak Creative Services).

As I was writing yesterday’s post about media illiteracy, suddenly another thought hit me like Charlie Chaplin’s piano falling out of the sky. “How many people can’t read?” If you can’t read, you can’t function in the Information Age.

So I googled “percent of Houstonians who are illiterate” and found this.

“Now more than ever literacy remains an issue for the Houston community. One in three adult Houstonians is functionally illiterate (from the National Adult Literacy Survey 2003).” Quoted at the Neuhaus Education Center in Bellaire, Texas.

Functionally illiterate people must rely on media such as television, radio, personal experience, conversations with others and images to get information. They cannot understand the richly detailed volumes of printed information in newspapers, books, libraries and on the Internet. It’s much more difficult for them to seek out information to learn new skills, become more productive, solve new problems, help other people, and fend off those trying to take advantage of them. They cannot evaluate the truth or falsity of information from as many points of view as you or I can. (See Triangulating on Truth in the Personal Essay section of this blog.)

StopSign“Functional illiteracy” is like the term “walking wounded.” It implies a small degree of sufficiency, but certainly not proficiency. It means being able to function at a low level, but not prosper at a high level. For instance, people may recognize the meaning of a stop sign, but not the intricacies of an adjustable rate mortgage. Thus, they would be vulnerable to predatory lending practices. The one-in-three estimate above helps explain, in part, the depth of the recent global financial crisis.

A brilliant documentary I viewed recently called The Flaw (Beak Street Films, 2011, directed by David Sington) contains interviews with homeowners around the country who got under water on their mortgages because:

  • They didn’t fully understand the implications of adjustable rate mortgages.
  • Media coverage focused on returns, not risk, fueling an unsustainable run-up in  prices that led to a housing bubble.
  • People assumed they could get out of the market before the bubble burst but failed to recognize early warnings.

In retrospect, it seems foolish that people didn’t see the risk. Heck, almost everyone believed the hype, not just consumers.

I would argue that the term “functionally illiterate” should apply to everyone who cannot understand signals needed to do their jobs properly or protect their interests.

Functional illiteracy within a financial niche contributed to many peoples’ failure to send up, see, or comprehend the significance of red flags. Underfunded buyers continued being sucked into the vortex of the American dream-turned-nightmare. That’s functional illiteracy on a thermonuclear, alter-the-course-of-global-evolution, let’s-all-drink-the-Kool-Aid scale. Sing it, Elvis:

“As her young man dies,
On a cold and gray Chicago mornin’,
Another little baby child is born
In the ghetto
And his mama cries”

Cell Phones Affect Kids’ Sleep: Need for Digital Curfews

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A personal anecdote: I am writing this at 3:00 a.m. after being woken up by a text message on my wife’s cell phone (which she fell asleep with) at 1:38 a.m. The message was from our son who lives two time zones west of Houston. No emergency. He just wanted to tell my wife that he received something she emailed.

I tried to go back to sleep, but couldn’t. So I started wondering if other people had this same problem, i.e., being awakened by electronic gadgets. To the google search bar! The Center on Media and Child Health lists it as a hot topic.

In Perspectives on Parenting, Karen Jacobson, MA, LCPC, LMFT and Lauren Bondy, MSW, suggest setting a digital curfew.

“The playground for tweens and teens today is electronic,” they say. “kids today are roaming, playing, forming relationships, testing limits, making mistakes, exploring, experimenting, and forming their identities and values in online digital spaces.”

Studies [1][2][3] show that sleep is interrupted when teens receive texts at night. Likewise, homework is interrupted and children become distracted when they receive notifications of a new chat messages, texts, or emails. To avoid a daily battle, the authors suggest that parents make a time when all media are off limits into part of the routine. Other recommendations the authors make include:

  • Involving kids in establishing a media plan for their entire day, and agree on weekday and weekend hours.
  • Allowing social media time only after homework is done or during homework breaks.
  • Asking kids, “What’s the best place to charge your cell phone and keep it from distracting you?”

 ParentTeenCellPhoneCropped

Cell phones are rapidly becoming an integral part of kids’ lives. According to research by C&R Research, 22 percent of young children own a cell phone (ages 6-9), 60 percent of tweens (ages 10-14), and 84 percent of teens (ages 15-18. And cell phone companies are now marketing to younger children with colorful kid-friendly phones and easy-to-use features. According to market research firm the Yankee Group, 54 percent of 8 to12 year olds will have cell phones within the next three years.

These studies and observations suggest that growing and uncontrolled cell phone use among children can have a detrimental impact on their sleep which, in turn, can make them tired the next day and affect their ability to learn in school.

_____________________________

1. Irregular bedtime and nocturnal cellular phone usage as risk factors for being involved in bullying: A cross-sectional survey of Japanese adolescents by Tochigi, Mamoru;Nishida, Atsushi;Shimodera, Shinji;Oshima, Norihito;Inoue, Ken;Okazaki, Yuji;Sasaki, Tsukasa, 2012

2. Adolescent use of mobile phones for calling and for sending text messages after lights out: Results from a prospective cohort study with a one-year follow-up by van den Bulck, Jan, 2007

3. Text messaging as a cause of sleep interruption in adolescents, evidence from a cross-sectional study by van den Bulck, Jan, 2003

via CMCH.tv.

 

Ramifications of Internet Anonymity

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One of the signature characteristics of the Internet is anonymity. The widespread use of screen names and the difficulty of verifying the identities behind them makes the Internet a playground for frauds, cheats, and predators.

Of course, there are plenty of honest people on the Internet, too. The Internet has opened up new markets, created global awareness on a scale never seen in history, and boosted the productivity of businesses worldwide.

My point is that anonymous communications from the dark side of humanity taint the credibility of the medium and poison the waters for the rest of us. They undermine people who use the Internet for good and legitimate purposes. There don’t seem to be many ways to stop the hoaxsters.

In 2006, a 13-year-old girl named Megan Meier committed suicide after a case of cyber-bullying on a popular social networking site. Allegedly, the mother of a rival girl at Megan’s school created an account on the site for a fictitious boy named Josh. Her intent allegedly was to get Megan to reveal details about herself that could later be used to humiliate Megan. The ensuing cyber-bullying had tragic consequences. Megan hung herself. Numerous suicides related to cyber-bulling have been reported since.

Internet anonymity does not always contribute to such tragic consequences. Some cases are simply highly embarrassing.

This month, Notre Dame football player Manti Te’o, who led the Fighting Irish to the BCS championship game this year and finished second for the Heisman Trophy, said in a statement that he fell in love with a girl online last year who turned out not to be real. Te’o said during the season that his girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, died of leukemia in September on the same day Te’o’s grandmother died, triggering an outpouring of support for Te’o at Notre Dame and in the media. All the details are still not clear, but the story is making national headlines.

Elaborate and highly publicized hoaxes such as these undermine the credibility of the medium. I’ve often likened the Internet of today to the Wild West. Pretty much anything goes.

This is a shame. At a time when people trust advertising less and the credibility of traditional news sources has trended down for more than a decade, who can you trust?

Marketers have begun to rely on online reviews as references, but many of those can’t be trusted either. My company has been approached by others to get us to create fictitious product reviews favoring one company and slamming its competitors. Even though the business would have been lucrative and easy, we turned it down.

How many times have those online reviews sucked me in? Last week, I upgraded the security system at my office to one that supposedly allowed me to monitor my cameras over the Internet. The system had glowing 5-star reviews online, yet when I loaded the app on my iPhone and iPad, it was very buggy. It works only about half the time for reasons I cannot understand.

Kinda makes one wonder about the integrity of that online review process!

 

Counterfeiting the Currency of Advertising

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This is a corollary to yesterday’s post about research which found that three out of four people believe claims found in advertising are exaggerated.

Words and images are the currency of advertising. The U.S. Government won’t let people counterfeit its currency. But advertising industry professionals seem to have no problem counterfeiting theirs.

When industry professionals exaggerate, make false claims, or misrepresent the capabilities of a product or service, they don’t serve their clients’ best interests or their own.

False advertising may get people to purchase a product or service once. But the inevitable disappointment they feel can ruin the client’s reputation. The purchasers not only feel disappointed in the performance of the product or service, they feel they have been lied to. Trust is lost with the relationship.

False claims and impressions also counterfeit the currency of the industry. They undermine the industry’s credibility and the return that honest advertisers hope to gain from their investment in advertising.

Governments won’t let people counterfeit their currencies. Why do ad industry trade groups not raise a bigger stink about people who devalue their currency?