You know how the Advertising Association is always banging on about the
freedom of commercial speech (yawn) and (yeah, yeah) the right to
advertise?
Well, you could say it has been royally hoist with its own petard.
Its head of public affairs, the highly vocal Jonathan Bullock, has been
invited to give a talk to a trade association of 42 funeral companies.
His topic is: ‘How to increase market share through advertising.’
Ever the professional (who said boring?), Bullock is now claiming the
invite from the National Selected Morticians organisation as a
particularly pertinent victory for the industry.
‘More people are obviously not going to drop dead as a result of
advertising, so this is the ultimate justification of our argument that
advertising is about increasing market share rather than expanding the
market,’ he urges, without the slightest hint of irony.