What Constitutes ‘Honest Advertising’?

Summary: “Why, all advertising is exaggerated. Nobody really believes it.” Unfortunately a plurality of people would agree with that Coca-Cola attorney in the first decade of the twentieth century. To think he was using that phrase as a defense of advertising! Yikes! Because of knuckleheads like him, advertising has received a bad reputation. Even as advertising reached its Golden Age and through today, it is looked at as deceitful, manipulative, and downright untruthful. Being in the advertising industry, we hate to see such nonsense. It is always the class clown who ruins recess for the rest of us.