Bad faith.

Sneaking a surreptitious screen peek in the middle of Kol Nidre’s somber start to Yom Kippur, a headline catches his eye: “Advertising is now trusted less than AI.”

Obviously, devout he is not.

It does, however, strike him as darkly appropriate, coming, as it does, at the start of a holiday that’s all about sin and atonement.

“Wait, what?” he thinks. “Isn’t AI supposed to destroy humanity?”

He lowers the phone, trying to avoid disturbing his pew-mates, especially his wife, who would not take kindly to even a sliver of electronic glare in the candle-lit solemnity.

“Ipsos’ Global Trustworthiness Index,” he scans in a guilty glance, “shows that advertising executives are less trusted than AI chatbots. 23% of respondents consider AI trustworthy. Alternatively, advertising executives saw 15% consider them trustworthy, second from the bottom of 22 professions and ahead of only politicians with 13%.”

Would seem that if advertising is damned hard to trust, those running agencies are thrice so.

Not that the industry, itself, is in any great shape, even beyond c-suite denizens. He reads that Gallup’s annual ratings now show advertising and PR combined at a pathetic 26% positivity rate, third from the bottom of 25, only marginally above big pharma and what’s left of the federal government.

As if on cue, one of the battalion of rabbis leading the service arrives at the bimah and starts reciting the Ashmanu, the shorter of two lists of sins requiring confession.  In his mind, he transliterates the human acts of omission and commission into advertising-ese.

“Forgive us for flooding the world with dull and boring. Forgive us for pretending that technology is a substitute for humanity. Forgive us for the sin of stalking people across the internet. Forgive us for the rampant ageism that’s cost us the talents of our best and brightest at exactly the time they are needed most.  Forgive us for turning our backs on both our creativity and our integrity.

“Hell,” he realizes, “you could blow from the 24 short list sins to the 44 on the longer ‘Al Chet’ recitation without coming close to running out of material.  

He reaches the end of the digital scroll, reading the condemning conclusion, “For an industry that spends much of its time telling clients how to build trust, it may be worth remembering how little of it the industry currently holds - the proverbial advertising ‘physicians’ may need to heal thyselves.”

“Yeah,” he nods, “and for an industry that was, is, and always will be about the importance of stories grounded in truth, we’ve become remarkably bad at telling our own.”

He looks up, prompted by a sharp elbow rammed into his ribs. His wife has noticed his subterfuge and is less than amused.

“Would you put that damned thing away,” she hisses. “It’s disrespectful.”

Well, there’s another thing to atone for.

Nothing new in that.