"Advertising is speech. It's regulated because it's often effective speech"
About this Quote
Calling advertising "speech" is a deliberate provocation, a move that drags a usually dismissed commercial practice into the high-status realm of civic rights. Jef I. Richards, writing as an academic steeped in marketing law and policy, is not just making a definitional claim. He's reframing the argument regulators, courts, and the public keep trying to avoid: if you believe speech deserves protection precisely because it can persuade, then the category that persuades most reliably should not be treated as a second-class citizen.
The kicker is the second sentence. Advertising, he implies, isn’t regulated because it’s uniquely dirty; it’s regulated because it works. That flips the moral posture of regulation. Instead of casting regulators as guardians against fraud or manipulation (the comfortable story), Richards surfaces the power anxiety underneath: effective persuasion threatens established interests, public health goals, market fairness, even cultural norms. When persuasion actually moves behavior, people demand guardrails, and then retroactively justify them as ethics.
The subtext also needles a common hypocrisy: society celebrates persuasive speech when it comes in the wrapping of politics, activism, or art, but gets squeamish when the same rhetorical machinery sells insurance or beer. Richards doesn’t deny that advertising can mislead; he’s pointing out that the impulse to restrict it often tracks less with truthfulness than with impact.
Context matters: American commercial speech doctrine has long treated ads as protectable-but-less-protectable, a compromise between First Amendment ideals and consumer protection. Richards is pushing readers to notice the tension at the heart of that compromise: effectiveness is the very reason we protect speech, until it persuades in ways we don’t like.
The kicker is the second sentence. Advertising, he implies, isn’t regulated because it’s uniquely dirty; it’s regulated because it works. That flips the moral posture of regulation. Instead of casting regulators as guardians against fraud or manipulation (the comfortable story), Richards surfaces the power anxiety underneath: effective persuasion threatens established interests, public health goals, market fairness, even cultural norms. When persuasion actually moves behavior, people demand guardrails, and then retroactively justify them as ethics.
The subtext also needles a common hypocrisy: society celebrates persuasive speech when it comes in the wrapping of politics, activism, or art, but gets squeamish when the same rhetorical machinery sells insurance or beer. Richards doesn’t deny that advertising can mislead; he’s pointing out that the impulse to restrict it often tracks less with truthfulness than with impact.
Context matters: American commercial speech doctrine has long treated ads as protectable-but-less-protectable, a compromise between First Amendment ideals and consumer protection. Richards is pushing readers to notice the tension at the heart of that compromise: effectiveness is the very reason we protect speech, until it persuades in ways we don’t like.
Quote Details
| Topic | Marketing |
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