Inside Tucson Business: The award for deceptive advertising goes to...

The award for deceptive advertising goes to...

By Tom Collier, Inside Tucson Business
Published on Friday, November 07, 2008

If there is an annual award for Duplicitous Advertising, Arizona’s payday loan industry should win it. In fact, I shall create one. It is richly deserved. And I speak from the perspective of an organization that was created nearly 100 years ago precisely because of concerns about false advertising.

When I first saw the latest iteration of the payday loan industry’s TV commercials urging Arizona’s voters to approve Proposition 200 on the Nov. 4 ballot, my jaw dropped. And it did so precisely at the point where the payday loan industry, in its own advertising, accuses itself of being unethical!

And then they have the chutzpah to beg the voters to bring them to heel and make them stop all these shady business practices! Now, those are political cojones on a scale breathtaking to contemplate!

If they are so completely two-faced and double-dealing in their advertising, it makes you wonder what in the world happens at the service counter in their payday loan stores?

It is a well-known fact among historians that President William Howard Taft’s pen hesitated over the Arizona Statehood Act of 1912, because of the Initiative and Referendum provisions in our state constitution. And now, it has come down to this sorry state of affairs.

When a business or industry doesn’t get its way at the legislature, the next step is to take its case to the voters. The industry hires paid petition circulators to collect the signatures necessary to get the issue on the ballot. Wording of the initiative’s ballot language is left to lawyer wordsmith drudges who are charged with making it so staggeringly dull and boring that no one will bother to read it. Sort of like contract law. But of course, the devil always resides comfortably in the fine print.

Once the ballot proposition is certified, the proponents charter and fund a political committee to get information out to the voters. A lot of times the political committee is given a deceptive name. If the name includes the adjectives “concerned” and “improved,” so much the better. After all, “Concerned Arizonans for Improved Financial Liberty” has a much nicer ring to it than “Payday Lenders For The Preservation Of Plunder.” But clearly, one is a more truthful depiction than the other.

There’s a minor skirmish involved in the wording of the ballot description booklet published prior to each election by the Secretary of State’s office. It contains descriptions supposedly in plain English about what effect your particular ballot initiative would wreak on the Arizona body politic. You want to get as many of those “Mom and Apple Pie” adjectives and adverbs working in your favor as you can.

Now comes the good part. All the wolves rush to their closets to dust off their sheep’s clothing. They start pretending to be what they are not. It’s political reverse psychology, where you can achieve your goal by pretending to be against what you actually want to happen.

So you pretend to be a “reformer.” After all, who would vote against reform, right? Reform is a good word. Touchy feely. Progress. Correction of nastiness. What voter could possibly be against that?

So, ladies and gentlemen, it is with great pleasure, matched by an equal measure of annoyance, that I present the first BBB Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing Advertising Award to Arizona’s payday loan industry — win, lose or draw in this election — for its “Yes on 200” advertising campaign.

Contact Tom Collier, president of the Better Business Bureau of Southern Arizona, at tcollier@tucson.bbb.org or (520) 888-5353 or toll-free outside Tucson as 1-800-696-2827. The website is: www.tucson.bbb.org. The BBB of Southern Arizona serves Pima, Cochise, Santa Cruz, Graham, and Greenlee counties in Arizona and all of the state of Sonora in Mexico. Offices are at 434 S. Williams Blvd., Suite 102, in Tucson and 956 E. Fry Blvd., Suite 111, in Sierra Vista. Collier’s On Guard column appears the first week of each month in Inside Tucson Business.