Posted on: February 2nd, 2010 by Jeremy Jackson Sytner

My wintry Monday nights are made a little warmer thanks to sixty minutes of the popular comic caper, Hustle, on BBC 1 at 9pm.

WARNING Dangerous analogy approaching!

Last night the penny dropped. Hustling and marketing, especially by real experts, share many characteristics.

The TV series follows a group of con artists who specialise in ‘long cons’ – extended deceptions which require greater commitment, but which return a higher reward than simple confidence tricks. In our world the ‘long con’ is a campaign, an ongoing series of messages that take time to build up and yet deliver better results.

Then there’s the mark. (Or the consumer as we like to call them.) In Hustle the team get to know their mark inside out. Their habits, their likes and dislikes. Where they live, what they eat, etc. That’s their intelligence.

They find out what ‘con’ will lure in the mark. Note: they don’t have a great idea for a con then force it on the mark, they design a con around them.

Successful marketing campaigns are built with the target in mind. They make sure the consumer is in the market for the communication rather than firing off random messages into the ether in the vague hope they reach home.

And finally the Hustle team carefully prepare every detail to make sure it all goes to plan. We use creativity: powerful photography, attractive colours and beautifully crafted copy to ensure all our efforts don’t go unnoticed. Impact is everything.

And there the analogy should end.

In all my years in this business I’ve never felt that I’ve hustled any consumer. Yes there’s an art to what we do, but con artists we are not. The argument that advertising exploits typical human qualities such as greed, vanity, and naïveté can be countered by the confidence tricksters own adage: ‘You can’t cheat an honest man.’