Bolluxtorkium

I bring news of three incredible breakthroughs.

Bolluxtorkium, Madeupium and Sudosyencium.

What do you mean, never heard of them?

Our nation’s best scientific brains – bored of minor challenges like finding a cure for cancer or cheap renewable energy – have been working tirelessly to unearth these modern miracles.

Inspired by nature, these incredible discoveries... make your hair shiny. Really shiny.

So shiny it looks healthy (even though it can't be, since hair is dead).

So shiny you wake up not with bedhead, but looking as if Cheryl Cole’s team of stylists have been attending to your follicles throughout the night.

So shiny that an Amazonian tribe will begin worshipping your ’do as a new god.

It’s amazing what you can pick up from a TV ad for shampoo.

Mainly, that the laboratories of Garnier (Paris) seem to discover new elements on the Periodic Table on a near-weekly basis. They take great delight in describing a mythical new molecule (‘Nutrilium’ for example), while showing you a model with perfect hair that isn’t even hers – she’s got hair extensions.

I’m not sure how it came to be that one sector is allowed to stretch the truth so rapaciously.

In fundraising comms, we take the truth a bit more seriously. Because a charity has to have trust and credibility with its audience. 

There's a caveat, of course (there's always a caveat).

Us scribblers and scampers in the creative department rarely have the ideal raw materials to create the most powerful, compelling work.

So personally, for example, I’m in favour of using composite case studies. (Which means cutting and pasting several real case studies together, to get one really strong story - which also protects the identity of who you're talking about.) I’m in favour of using model photography and recreations where necessary. And I’m in favour of talking about a specific area of work even though the donation is for unrestricted funds.

We point out that some names and details have been changed, but that the feelings are real, and we say that their donation will go wherever the need is greatest.

So, is there a difference? 

Different charities have different views, but I certainly think so. With fundraising comms, you’re simply compensating for a lack of raw materials to illustrate a genuine, truthful need. You’re often talking about distressing events that no-one took a picture of at the time. So you have to recreate it.

Shampoo salesmen don’t have that problem. They can show the effects of their product on someone with real hair any time they like.

But they don’t. Instead they choose to show Cheryl as she carefully enunciates why they pay her millions to have fake hair of a gleaming glossiness no shampoo had a hand in creating.

“Beecuz ahm wurth it, leik. Pet.”