chapter two

BUTTONED DOWN: HIGH MODERNISM ON MADISON AVENUE

The Old Man looked amused. “Only a singer you say, Mr. Norman. Well, I want you to know that the Beautee Soap Company thinks singers are mighty important. And I’ll tell you why, Mr. Norman”

He opened the drawer of the table and triumphantly held aloft a bar of Beautee Soap.

“Because singers can sell soap, Mr. Norman. Right, Kimberly?”

“RIGHT,” said Kimberly.

“That is, if they’re the right kind of singers, eh, Kimberly?”

“Right on the barrelhead,” Kim said.

And then Vic noticed still another thing. The Old Man had consistently called him Mr. Norman, and Kim he had consistently addressed as Kimberly.

Was that good or bad? Good for which one? Bad for which one?

—FREDERIC WAKEMAN, THE HUCKSTERS, 1946

Advertising agencies, according to the media images common in the 1990s, are exceedingly hip places. Advertising people are deeply immersed in the tastes, the music, and the slang of young people, obsessed with the rapid movement of youth culture. And, being an industry that burns out creative talents in an extraordinarily short time, it is a world populated largely by actual young people.

But in the 1940s (when outside media first became interested in the advertising business), 1950s, and 1960s, popular American ideas of the advertising industry were very different. Madison Avenue was “Ulcer Gulch,” the preserve of the famous “Man in the Gray Flannel Suit”; it was the archetypal destination for look-alike commuters from Westchester; it was slow-moving, WASPy, and serious; it was populated by other-directed organization men. It was a shrine of “Theory X” conformity, the seat of all that was wrong with American culture. Admen1 were hopeless yes-men, dedicated to affirming their clients’ every whim. They suffered from an excess of three-martini lunches at “21.” An agency’s most important employee was the high-powered account man, a figure like that played by Rock Hudson in the 1961 movie Lover Come Back, whose job was simply to entertain clients with stiff drinks and a smooth line—advertisements themselves (the stuff that idealistic Doris Day thanklessly produced) were secondary. Industry observers warned that the business was floundering in tedium. The culture-products churned out were monotonous, repetitive, and dull, defined strictly by well-established precedents: advertising present mimicked advertising that had been acceptable in the past. The making of striking and effective ads had given way to the all-stifling fear of rocking the boat, presenting a client with something unfamiliar or risque. Losing a client was the worst possible result of a campaign; the sales of his products were another matter.

Frederic Wakeman’s 1946 novel The Hucksters established the image of the advertising industry that would become so powerful in the 1950s and 1960s. Following the brief career of Victor Norman, who returns from World War II and takes over the high-paying but thankless account of a difficult client for a large agency, the book anticipated many of the issues that would turn the industry on its head in the 1960s. Vic, as he is called, is a Hemingwayesque figure: quiet, masculine (he even bears the Hemingway code hero’s two male names), and extremely competent at what he does—radio production. He is also irredeemably cynical about the advertising business: he is disgusted by mass culture, by the behavior of live studio audiences, and by the tiresomely repetitive and sophomoric campaign he himself has devised (“Love That Soap!”), even as he recognizes its usefulness in building sales. At one point he mocks an executive board’s unwillingness to use vulgar approaches in terms that anticipate contemporary contempt for the elitism of high culture:

“You guys talk like a medical society,” Vic next said. “All this professional crap about highclass business versus lowclass business. Christ, we ought to face it. We’re hustlers. We don’t steal, probably because it’s bad for business, but we sure as hell do everything else for our clients. And I say if a radio show helps us get business who are we to stick up our noses?”

Vic’s point is not that high culture is indistinguishable from low but that all such distinctions are irrelevant in the cultural marketplace. To further emphasize the utter meaningless of conventional standards in the world he inhabits, Vic speaks sarcastically throughout the novel of “sincerity,” buys a “sincere” tie, and asks for “sincere” opinions.

Traditional aesthetics matter for naught in the relativist world of Madison Avenue: the subjective whims of the client are what rule here, and the adman who defies them—as does The Hucksters’ hard-boiled hero—is destroyed. Victor Norman is a “rugged individualist” (as his boss calls him), an “inner-directed” person in a world of “cringing sycophants.” He will not abide by corporate custom, arriving late to work and for meetings, and does not recognize the authority of the dollar. At one point he even throws a handful of money, Yippie-like, out an office window, astonishing an audience of underlings and nonchalantly repeating a favorite remark, “It’s only money.” But in despotic soap magnate Evan Llewelyn Evans, a figure patterned after the famous president of American Tobacco, George Washington Hill (the man responsible for Lucky Strike ads), Vic encounters the ultimate corporate threat to his independence. The conflict between the two men becomes the focus of the book: a Theory X tyrant of the first water, Evans has long since transformed everyone around him into hapless yes-men, and only Vic dares to defy him. During meetings, Evans announces his assessment of campaigns and the various radio shows he sponsors (his judgment is usually poor), shouts “Check!,” and everyone present echoes him, “like a whipcrack.” No one will stand up to him for a good idea or attempt to dissuade him from a bad one. Even the agency president is reduced to calling home or office every two hours, regardless of what he is doing, so that he may be ever-available to receive his client’s blustering wrath. The book’s denouement directly foreshadows the warnings of the management literature of the 1960s. When Evans finally breaks Vic’s resistance, finally succeeds in implanting “the Fear” and in forcing him to shout “Right!” to his platitudes about “Organization,” Vic realizes he must leave advertising or surrender his individuality.2

Troubled and inner-directed, Wakeman’s hero carries all of the signifiers of the “creative genius” that would soon be a commonplace type on Madison Avenue, although in 1946 the word “creative” had not yet entered the business vocabulary. Victor Norman violates taboos; he invents slogans and campaigns spontaneously; and he is “mad,” as one paramour calls him, prone to occasional bursts of enigmatic eccentricity. There was no place for such a figure in the advertising world of the 1940s and 1950s. On Madison Avenue, as in the popular sociology of the day, the organization reigned triumphant; the creative nonconformist either learned his (subordinate) place or failed. Real-life admen disliked The Hucksters for obvious reasons: Wakeman’s vision of big agency practices was regarded, in the best of Cold War spirits, as a denunciation of advertising in general. They also derided the process by which Victor Norman invents the “Love That Soap” campaign—sheer spontaneous inspiration—as wildly unrealistic: all admen knew that advertising campaigns were careful, scientific programs, arising from years of research and precedent and polling.³ Twenty years later, though, the cynical, client-defying, rule-breaking Victor Norman reappeared throughout New York as a new generation of creative admen (recounting their antics in memoirs that read like much racier versions of The Hucksters) who conquered the industry and confronted the clients that had so humbled Wakeman’s hero.

In Wakeman’s eyes, the large agency system was dysfunctional, even dehumanizing. But the advertising literature of the fifties, like the books analyzed by William Whyte in Organization Man, cast the organization as a site of self-actualization, its challenges as a normal and even healthy aspect of daily life. Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is a quintessential text of Organization society, with its title and commuter settings quickly becoming synonyms for conformity. But for all the praise it has received, the book conspicuously lacks the critical perspective of The Hucksters. Its hero, PR man Tom Rath, seems rooted so firmly in suburbia that he can imagine no alternative to the corporation and the commute. Tom’s co-workers at the United Broadcasting Corporation are annoying and sycophantic organization men, Tom’s salary is insufficient, but there is certainly no other way for things to be done. Disgusted they may be, but Wilson’s characters don’t question and don’t worry about what the Organization is doing to their souls; they muddle heroically through and are rewarded, in updated Alger style, for their perseverance. To be sure, there are some sticky patrimonial entanglements left over from the existentialist days of the war; but Tom quickly solves these with the help of an understanding lawyer. He and his family may have serious financial problems, but they will continue to live a happy suburban existence; better still, Tom will win the ear of a hard but just boss, get a raise, and inherit a large estate. Wilson’s hero is fundamentally contented with the order of the 1950s: he and his wife solve their financial problems by becoming suburban developers and even Tom’s job at U. B. C. is concerned with further delimiting the boundaries of normality—he writes speeches that help the company president to construct himself as a leader of the crusade against “mental illness.” The novel actually concludes with Tom Rath quoting Browning approvingly: “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.”4

science, reason, order

In his authoritative 1994 history of American advertising, Fables of Abundance, Jackson Lears argues that the symbolism of advertising derives from two largely antithetical cultural poles: the riotous, irrational carnivalesque and the “managerial values” of “personal efficiency” and “pseudoscientism.” During the twentieth century, he notes, while an aesthetic of “bureaucratic rationality” was applied in ads to “the iconography of the body,” the “managerial” side of the business, buttressed by the theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor and his followers and speaking always in the language of science, slowly subsumed the carnivalesque. But the carnivalesque was never fully extirpated, Lears points out: it “kept resurfacing in the workaday life of the agencies,” especially in the frenzied doings of agency art directors and copywriters. Creativity, the mysterious processes by which the ads were actually made, always posed problems for the “managerial ideology,” even amounting for some to “an antidote to smooth professionalism and an alternative to bureaucratic notions of expertise.” By the time Lears takes his leave of Madison Avenue—in the 1950s—the battle lines were clearly drawn: the “Theory X” values of science, efficiency, and management were at their zenith, and those of creativity and carnival noticeably in eclipse.5

But by the end of that decade, the limitations of the Taylorist style of advertising had become apparent to most in the industry: the ads of the period lacked drama and meaning. Their idealized vision of consuming life had little to do with the actual experience of American consumers. They were trite, repetitive, and literally unbelievable. And during the 1960s they would be swept away along with the bureaucratic agency structures that had created them in a “creative revolution” that celebrated the mystical carnivalesque properties of creativity and that actually embraced the critique of mass society that the ads of the fifties had done so much to inspire. As in the menswear industry, the slow-moving and hierarchical organizations of Madison Avenue would yield to a more flexible new capitalism that imagined consuming not in terms of conformity and orderly progress but in those of the glorious chaos of hip.

In the fifties, the central principle of the advertising industry was “science”: ads were to be created according to established and proven principles, after thorough research on public attitudes had been conducted. Advertising men were professionals, and the effectiveness of their works could be proven scientifically, with batteries of studies and laboratory tests. One of the most popular advertising books of the decade was Scientific Advertising, a tract that had been written by the famous Lord & Thomas copywriter Claude Hopkins in 1923 and reissued to great acclaim (and with an introduction by David Ogilvy) in the fifties. The book opens with this astounding statement of order and absolute business certainty:

The time has come when advertising has in some hands reached the status of a science. It is based on fixed principles and is reasonably exact. The causes and effects have been analyzed until they are well understood. The correct methods of procedure have been proved and established. We know what is most effective, and we act on basic laws.6

Curiously, most of Hopkins’s actual “methods of procedure”—his principles of mail order and psychology, his techniques for laying out print ads—were long obsolete in the decade of television and motivational research. It was his general biases that fired the imagination of Organization Man, his insistence on understanding advertising as an application of unchanging, scientifically verifiable principles, his caustic portrayal of the hapless romantic art director and whimsical copywriter. Another work that caught the temper of the times was the 1955 anthology edited by Edward L. Bernays, The Engineering of Consent. Like Hopkins’s tract, it was a fantasy of order and public manipulation. In these modern times, public relations “activities are planned and executed by trained practitioners in accordance with scientific principles, based on the findings of social scientists,” Bernays wrote in the book’s introduction. “Their dispassionate approach and methods may be likened to those of the engineering professions which stem from the physical sciences.”⁷ Public relations and advertising were, like all other great works of civilization, merely an application of science to the problems of humanity.

Others found the implications of scientific advertising deeply alarming. Vance Packard’s 1957 book, The Hidden Persuaders, ignited a national outrage over ad agencies’s sinister use of scientific techniques. The first and one of the most thoughtful efforts to understand consumer society as a gigantic fraud, a conspiracy to manipulate the public and sell people items they did not need, The Hidden Persuaders followed the doings of a legion of “Co-operative scientists” who provided advertising with “awesome tools,” scary-sounding strategies like “Motivational Research” with which they “are systematically feeling out our hidden weaknesses and frailties in the hope that they can more efficiently influence our behavior.” The ultimate danger of advertising’s dalliance with science, Packard hinted, was something considerably worse than the national spirit of conformity then being analyzed by writers like William Whyte and David Riesman: “The Packaged Soul.”⁸ Most irritating of all to Packard’s democratic sensibilities, though, was the unbelievably highhanded treatment of the public that accompanied the advertising industry’s scientism. Repeatedly quoting the marketers’ and social scientists’ unbelievably candid expressions of contempt for the intelligence of the masses, Packard drove home a deeply disturbing point: They think we’re dopes!

Typically they see us as bundles of daydreams, misty hidden yearnings, guilt complexes, irrational emotional blockages. We are image lovers given to impulsive and compulsive acts. We annoy them with our seemingly senseless quirks, but we please them with our growing docility in responding to their manipulation of symbols that stir us to action. They have found the supporting evidence for this view persuasive enough to encourage them to turn to depth channels on a large scale in their efforts to influence our behavior.

It would be difficult to overstate the influence of Packard’s book. A bestseller, the book inspired a still-thriving faith in high-tech advertising trickery and, more important, it crystallized future criticism of Madison Avenue around an understanding of the industry peculiar to the way it was organized in the 1950s. The problem with advertising, The Hidden Persuaders taught, was that it was overly manipulative, that it opposed and even subverted “man in his long struggle to become a rational and self-guiding being,” that it sought to transform us into a nation of robot consumers like “Pavlov’s conditioned dog” or laboratory animals with electrodes implanted in their brains. Today, of course, many of the wickedly subconscious campaigns which alarmed Packard sound innocent or comical (the Maidenform bra ads are particularly amusing), and the advertising of the fifties which he found so perfidious is recalled, if it’s recalled at all, as the whimsy of an impossibly naive society. But the most curious consequence of the book’s success was its impact on advertising itself: during the sixties, Madison Avenue itself would adopt a version of Packard’s critique and cast products as solutions to the problems of mass society he had done so much to publicize.9

Even so, at the time of its publication, The Hidden Persuaders incited in the advertising industry only measured, reasonable-sounding defenses. The most important rebuttal to Packard was journalist Martin Mayer’s 1958 book, Madison Avenue, U.S.A., perhaps the classic statement of the ad world’s postwar sense of scientifically sanctioned corporate normalcy. Here the advertising industry is a rational, smoothly functioning machine typified by the vast J. Walter Thompson company, then the nation’s largest ad firm. Mayer takes pains to minimize the use of psychological techniques by admen, but otherwise the industry’s infatuation with what it believes to be “science” is quite clear. Creativity, for example, with its implications of the intuitive, the nonrational, and the eccentric, had no place in Mayer’s vision of advertising reason and is almost entirely ignored. Hopkins had criticized creative workers for their impracticality; Mayer points to them as a source of unfounded unrest, having “persuaded the public to share their concern about the alleged crassness and unscrupulousness of the advertising industry.” In Madison Avenue, U.S.A., logocentrism and Theory X reign supreme: art directors are universally subordinate to copywriters in the advertising world, Mayer notes, and in very few cases are either allowed to meet directly with a client.10

In the place of creativity, which would obsess advertising writers of the 1960s and after, Mayer emphasizes process: the organization of agencies, the execution of a given idea, media placement, and, above all, research—the collection of statistics, polling, studies to determine how well certain appeals have worked. Rules guide each step. The head of J. Walter Thompson, Mayer notes, is producing “a series of monographs, thirty-four in all, submitting the techniques of the trade to rigorous logical analysis.” The Kenyon & Eckhardt agency “has a thick book of such prescriptions for advertisements (known inside the office as ‘the Bible’), and ads will not even go out for testing if they break K & E’s established rules.”¹¹ Mayer also details the habits of admen themselves elaborately, which are remarkable both for the way they bear out the “gray-flannel” stereotype and for their divergence from later patterns. Admen, Mayer informs the reader, are a group about which it is safe to generalize. They ordinarily work extremely hard, live in Westchester suburbs, and commute to Grand Central, which is a short walk from their offices on Madison Avenue. They do indeed drink martinis, especially during client lunches at “21.” And, although they no longer wear gray flannel now that that fabric has developed an unflattering reputation, “the advertising man’s habitual avoidance of clothing that might seem flamboyant denies him the role of a leader of fashion.” This judgment in particular would be wildly incorrect only ten years later. But in Madison Avenue, U.S.A. there are no suggestions of the kind of panic or intimidation or skullduggery which Wakeman suggested were commonplace in the industry, nor are there any hints of the chaos that would reign supreme in just a few years.¹² Madison Avenue, U.S.A., as elsewhere in the American 1950s, was a place of order, stability, and reason; a necessary and normal component of the civilization of consensus.

Mayer’s attention to the J. Walter Thompson Company indicates the esteem with which that largest of agencies was held in the period before the Creative Revolution. And if its operations were typical of the Organization age, so were its attitudes toward the creative individual and his role in the making of advertising. In 1947, Fortune magazine printed a study of J. Walter Thompson that was apparently one of the first in the popular press to discuss the creation of ads. The article’s chief point of emphasis was the priority of corporate procedure and scientific study over individual creativity at Thompson. Company president Stanley Resor, it maintained,

has an abiding mistrust of the word “brilliant” or of any individual or process that can be so described. So Thompson men are not approvedly brilliant. Thompson copy does not consciously sparkle. Neither Thompson layouts nor the artwork that goes into them draw low whistles of admiration from competitive connoisseurs. . . . Thompson wants to sell its clients’ products, not make splashes with individual ads.

The key word for this company’s operations, Fortune noted, was “thoroughness,” the compiling of study upon study, the diligent sifting of data, the “market research” and “field interviews” and “Product Research studies” Thompson was always undertaking. “We think endlessly about the total problems of our clients,” one Thompson employee said. “We think so damn long and so damn hard that the final business of writing the copy and making the layout becomes, in one sense, almost subsidiary.”13

If J. Walter Thompson is the corporate symbol for the advertising paradigm of the 1940s and 1950s, Rosser Reeves, chairman of the Ted Bates agency, was its greatest theorist and archetypal practitioner. He directed the first-ever television ads for a presidential candidate (those for Eisenhower in 1952), he wrote the most widely read advertising treatise of the era, and he was the individual most responsible for the stereotypical advertising style of the day, the so-called hard sell, whose “main idea,” as David Halberstam has put it, “was to hit people over the head with the product as bluntly as possible.”¹⁴ Reeves’s 1960 statement of principles, Reality in Advertising, is a remarkable mixture of pseudoscience and barely concealed contempt for public intelligence. The Ted Bates Company, Reeves announces, had discovered a “scientific” means of quantifying the effectiveness of a given advertising campaign and had happened upon the fundamental formula for concocting a successful sales message. The secret, according to Reeves, was not “deep Freudian techniques” but good old repetition, continuity (never abandoning a successful campaign), and adherence to a single simple message that the viewer could easily absorb. In a revealing metaphor, Reeves asserted that there was “no more room in the box” of the public mind. Competition between adversaries was fierce for consumers’ attention, and any success for one brand necessarily meant decline for its competitors. Once an advertiser had penetrated that “box,” there was only one reliable method of convincing the consumer to buy: offer him or her a “unique selling proposition” (USP), a quality by which the product in question was demonstrably different from all others. In many cases, of course, competing brands were so similar that this demonstrable difference had to be a feature common to all, but which none had bothered to claim.15 As an example, Reeves directed Martin Mayer to one of his company’s favorite inventions, the claim of Colgate toothpaste that it

“cleans your breath while it cleans your teeth.” Now, every dentifrice cleans your breath while it cleans your teeth—but nobody had ever put a breath claim on a toothpaste before. That USP is eighteen years old now. Using it, Colgate has had as much as fifty per cent of the whole toothpaste market.¹⁶

These methods, Reeves insists, represent the first application of rational experimentation and observation to advertising. The Ted Bates Company, he proudly notes, has devised a “Copy Lab,” which essays various approaches with a group of typical consumers and produces clean, bar-graph illustrations of exactly how effectively each sales text has communicated. Charts showing how well various ads are remembered, which USP’s delivered what percentage of sales, and what percentage of the public remember a given ad are scattered throughout Reality in Advertising.

Reeves’s rules made for assertive, insistent advertisements that, like Reeves’s theories, tended to refer to the sanction of “science.” Years later, Advertising Age summarized the cliche-heavy Reeves style by recalling

ads for such accounts as Anacin (“Fast! Fast! Fast relief!); Palmolive soap (“You can have a lovelier complexion in 14 days with Palmolive soap, doctors prove!”); and Viceroy cigarettes (“Only Viceroy gives you 20,000 filter traps in every filter tip to filter—filter—filter your smoke while the rich—rich flavor comes through.”)

Bates ads often referred to laboratory studies and doctors’ endorsements as a way of establishing a USP.¹⁷ Bates television commercials from the 1950s occasionally used graphs with no notation along the X or Y axes; forceful demonstrations like the notorious animated hammer inside a head for Anacin; and profusions of scientific-sounding product advantages: the “five extra laundratives” found in Fab detergent; Preparation H’s “biodyne, the wonder substance”; Colgate toothpaste’s “Gardol,” which promised to clean the consumer in three distinct ways; the “Seven-way stretch” of Playtex girdles; and, of course, Wonder Bread, which “helps build strong bodies twelve ways.” One Bates commercial for Colgate Rapid Shave must constitute some kind of high watermark of Lears’s “managerial values”: a man is shown shaving in the desert, duly monitored by an assortment of official-looking men in lab coats, apparently measuring the product’s effectiveness in this most arid and noncarnivalesque environment. Reeves’s admaking theory remained unchanged into the mid-1960s. He told Advertising Age in 1965 that a copywriter must “subordinate his own creative impulses to this overall objective: Does this advertisement move an idea from the inside of my head to the inside of the public’s head? The most people at the lowest possible cost.”18

Commercials produced according to the Reeves system all seem to combine a reverence for learning with an assumption that viewers know nothing about the content of that learning. Reeves’s book heaped scorn on the assertions of Vance Packard, but largely because Packard had mistaken the species of science to which advertising was beholden (Reeves wanted “duplicable” results from his science, not psychological speculation): Otherwise, Reeves might well have been a model for Packard’s manipulative adman who regards his audience as laboratory animals. Reeves’s repetitive, attacking style clearly assumed a hypothetical consumer who was little better than a fool. Martin Mayer’s book even has Reeves repeating a favorite anecdote in which the attention of a stubborn mule is drawn with a blow on the head from a sledgehammer.¹⁹

David Ogilvy was a close runner-up to Rosser Reeves as the decade’s leading proponent of managerial rationality in advertising. Reeves was a copywriter, but Ogilvy entered the business after working on polling at the Gallup Company, giving him an aura of scientific expertise to which he refers frequently in his various memoirs and articles. His visual and symbolic style also was very different from Reeves’s. The campaigns his firm, Ogilvy & Mather, devised in the 1950s for Hathaway shirts and Schweppes soda are textbook examples of the power of brand-image advertising, and they swept him and his fledgling agency to rapid prominence. But despite the creative talent that was required to invent as peculiar an icon as the eyepatch-wearing Hathaway man, the advertising theories Ogilvy proposed were even more constricting and invasive than those of his competitors at Ted Bates. The title of every chapter of Ogilvy’s 1963 Confessions of an Advertising Man begins with the words “How To . . .”, and each is packed with long lists of guidelines for every step of the advertising process. It is in fact a book of rules, including: a “list of thirty-nine rules for making good layouts”; “ten criteria” for new accounts; and “eleven commandments which you must obey if you work at my agency.” Ogilvy’s lists sometimes descend into astonishing detail, from the ten hints for writing headlines and nine for writing body copy in chapter 6, to the fourteen more on how to arrange the words on the page that he offers in chapter 7.20

Nor were these mere bits of friendly advice. In one 1959 art director’s publication, Ogilvy actually judged advertisements by his minute standards, deducting points from the works submitted for each infringement of a list of twenty criteria and concluding that the ads praised by other art directors were in fact substandard. Among his criteria were these:

If the layout looks more like an advertisement than an editorial page, deduct 7 points. . . .

If a drawing is used instead of a photograph, deduct 6 points. . . .

If the body copy is set in reverse, or on a tint, deduct 4 points. . . .

If the illustration is defaced in any way, e.g., by having the headline run into it, deduct 2 points. . . .

If the body copy is set in a sans serif face, deduct 2 points.²¹

Thanks to such rules, Ogilvy’s own ads from that era are easily recognizable: a large but simple photograph on the upper two-thirds of the page, a headline beneath, and three columns of sedate (serif) type on white below, absolutely packed with facts.²²

Ogilvy explained his passion for rule-making and his abhorrence of disorder by asserting, like Rosser Reeves, that the mysteries of advertising success had been penetrated by science. The artistic talents of creative workers was nice when kept in its place, but Ogilvy had been trained as a pollster, and he referred frequently to his knowledge of statistics to buttress his opinions. When judging the 1959 advertising layouts, for example, he notes that his fellow jurors were “art directors, equipped to judge the esthetics of advertisements—from a subjective point of view.” But Ogilvy himself was a man of science. And while his rigid requirements for ad illustrations and layout may have been antithetical to the teachings of art schools, he argued—as had both Reeves and Claude Hopkins—that their frivolous ways had no place in the deadly-serious business of advertising:

Most of the art schools which train unsuspecting students for careers in advertising still subscribe to the mystique of the Bauhaus. They hold that the success of an advertisement depends on such things as “balance,” “movement,” and “design.” But can they prove it?

My research suggests that these aesthetic intangibles do not increase sales, and I cannot conceal my hostility to the old school of art directors who take such preachments seriously.23

The copywriters and art directors who so irritated David Ogilvy were often considered problem employees on Madison Avenue in the 1950s. Attuned to the old advertising carnivalesque, the irrational talents of the creatives naturally conflicted with the managerial orderliness of the day. As Jackson Lears points out, the battle between the two visions extended back to the beginnings of the profession. But in the 1950s and the 1960s, when the creatives would momentarily gain the upper hand, the conflict was intense. Ogilvy complained about “art-directoritis, the disease which reduces advertising campaigns to impotence.”²⁴ Rosser Reeves was even more unyielding in his efforts to press down upon the fancy of the artistically inclined the rationality of the marketplace. “No longer can the copywriter, like Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott, view life through his own magic mirror,” Reeves insisted. “He must make his imagination function under the strict discipline of attaining a commercial goal.”²⁵ Both men denounced the annual contests in which art directors and copywriters chose their favorite ads.²⁶ The only place for artists on Madison Avenue in the 1950s, they felt, was under the responsible direction of a scientific manager of the Theory X persuasion.

“nonconformists, dissenters, and rebels”

To flip through any copy of Life or Look from the fifties, though, is to understand almost instantly that the ads produced by the industry that Reeves and Ogilvy dominated were perhaps the worst, given their social and cultural context, that Madison Avenue has ever created. To this day, nothing more effectively summons the ills of the technocratic and overorganized society better than the advertising it produced during the 1950s. Here one will look in vain for anything that deviates even slightly from the Cold War orthodoxy of prosperity, progress, and consumer satisfaction. From its radiant tots, rosy-cheeked and grasping for frozen dinners, to its jolly workers, visibly joyous over the technological advances that their benevolent boss has made possible, the advertising of the period was fatuous in the extreme and transparently so to much of the audience it aimed to persuade. The accuracy of Michael Schudson’s famous comparison of advertising to Soviet socialist realism is driven home forcefully by 1950s advertisers’ frequent use of Cold War terminology and descriptions borrowed from the jet-age military: here a car is posed next to a fighter plane; there a chemical company uses renderings of military hardware to solicit public goodwill.27 Never has advertising been so unwilling to acknowledge the myriad petty frustrations, the anger, the fear that make up so much of daily existence, consuming and otherwise. Never has it insisted so dogmatically on such an abstractly glowing vision of American life. And never has it been so vulnerable to mockery.

In no industry was the 1950s critique of mass society and its business corollary, the dead-end of Taylorism, more applicable than in advertising. “Organization Men” staffed the orderly offices of the great agencies, and in an industry that once redounded with colorful personalities, there seemed to be little place for individualists or dissenters. Standard 1950s images—of commuters in fedoras crowding suburban platforms, ranks of conservatively dressed executives entering office buildings through revolving doors—all seemed particularly descriptive of the men who worked in advertising. John Furr of J. Walter Thompson’s Chicago office recalls the postwar “management era” in familiar terms:

The management of the office were all in their late fifties, maybe early sixties. It did not look, smell, or feel like an advertising agency. It was like a country club. And all the management went home at 4:30 in the afternoon, they all lived in Lake Forest, most of them had divorced their first wives and married their secretaries, and they drank on the bar car.²⁸

If capitalism as a whole was slowed by the initiative- and individual-suppressing climate of managerial rationality, the advertising business, where imaginative thinking had traditionally been even more critical than elsewhere, was particularly affected.

For William H. Whyte, Jr., later the author of The Organization Man, the advertising industry’s problems—in particular its fondness for cliche and its reliance upon formulaic and unpersuasive speech—were direct results of the overorganizational malaise afflicting the rest of the business world. Two things in particular, Whyte argued in a 1952 article in Fortune, were responsible for making advertising so bad: the idea of “the Mass Audience,” a “great anonymous dope” to whom cliches were believed to appeal; and the familiar problem of “groupthought.” Advertising agencies, like so many other large enterprises, Whyte argued, had become places in which layer upon layer of bureaucracy and the preservation of “group harmony” effectively stifled the business of communicating convincingly. “It’s not that we don’t know better,” one copywriter told him.

We do. But when the chips are down, if we’re the layout man or the copywriter, we don’t dream of going by our own convictions. What we’re after is an ad that will appeal to all the top people. It’s a sort of guessing game—and you win by playing the right clichés. You write for other advertising people, not the public. You write ads that look like ads.

Although he strongly hinted that, in their rush to deliver safe and non-disruptive copy, advertising agencies were not serving their clients well, Whyte concluded on a hopeful note. The continuing triumph of “group-thought,” he asserted, will ultimately open such an enormous and profitable opportunity to those willing to be truly creative that, according to the logic of the market, some agency must come forward that is willing to defy them all. “Thanks to the language of advertising, the potential shock value of ordinary English usage has probably never been greater,” he wrote. “Manufacturers who will use it will have an advertising dollar of more heft, those who compose the ads infinitely more satisfaction from the task; the consumers will find ads they will read; and last but not least, MORE goods will be sold!”29 Whyte was describing, nearly ten years in advance, the creative revolution that would turn the placid world of Madison Avenue, U.S.A., on its ear.

The primary cultural function of advertising is, as Fortune magazine put it in 1947, “the creation of new and daring, but fulfillable, consumer demands; demands that would not occur if advertising did not deliberately incite them.”³⁰ But for all of its studies and surveys, its rules and white lab coats, the advertising of the 1950s was ill-attuned to the carnivalesque spirit that undergirds American consumerism. Order and stability also meant stagnation and stasis, the direct opposites of the “new and daring” that have long animated American affluence. Rosser Reeves, the great champion of research, even carried the decade’s hostility to the unreason of aesthetics so far that he denounced “difference” itself.³¹ Over the next decade, advertising would abandon its self-imposed restrictions and leap headlong into rebellion; transform itself from a showplace of managerial certainty to an ongoing corporate celebration of carnivalesque difference.

Strangely enough, David Ogilvy was one of the first to recognize what was wrong with the science-bound advertising world of the 1950s. “The creative process requires more than reason,” he noted.

Most original thinking isn’t even verbal. It requires “a groping experimentation with ideas, governed by intuitive hunches and inspired by the unconscious.” The majority of business men are incapable of original thinking, because they are unable to escape from the tyranny of reason. Their imaginations are blocked.

Clearly the hyper-rational management theory descended from Taylor-ism had served the advertising business poorly. “The sad truth is that despite the sophisticated apparatus of the modern agency, advertising isn’t getting the results it used to get in the crude days of Lasker and Hopkins,” Ogilvy wrote. “Our business needs massive transfusions of talent. And talent, I believe, is most likely to be found among nonconformists, dissenters, and rebels.”32