chapter six

THINK YOUNG: YOUTH CULTURE AND CREATIVITY

He sat on his inflatable plastic sofa, his beard curling over his turtleneck sweater, beads and Nehru jacket. Sitar music played over the loud speaker. He and the copywriter in the transparent blouse had just told the client what he could do.

—FRANCHELLIE CADWELL AND HAL DAVIS, 19681

In the early years of the advertising revolution, creativity meant minimalism. After the successes achieved with the simple layouts of Volkswagen and the no-background blankness used by George Lois, minimalism was an obvious choice for speaking to consumers made skeptical by years of stretched autos and glittering appliances. But in the mid-1960s, the look and language of creativity changed dramatically. The shift is plainly visible in the progression of the Annuals of Advertising Art published through the 1960s by the Art Directors’ Club of New York. These volumes were yearbooks of the Creative Revolution, showplaces dominated by DDB, PKL, and their ever-expanding phalanx of followers. Until mid-decade they were also showplaces of clean, corporate minimalism, dominated by sans-serif typefaces and simple, uncluttered layouts. But with the volume covering 1966 (published in 1967), creativity finds a strikingly different graphic voice: the symbol for the 1966 Art Directors’ show is a color photograph of a woman nude and supine for the camera, her body painted from head to toe with elaborate dayglo flowers and rainbows and the words, “46th Annual NY Art Directors’ Show.” Creativity had merged with counterculture.²

Virtually anyone who lived through the 1960s in America remembers advertising’s strange and sudden infatuation with countercultural imagery, its overnight conversion to rock music and scenes of teenagers dancing their strange, indecipherable dances. Models in photographs and on television commercials became younger, gave up their clean-cut appearances for long hair and rebel garb, traded ingratiating smiles for serious stares at the camera. Typefaces and graphic design reflected new hallucinogenic styles as quickly as they could be invented. The fault lines of advertising discourse changed as well, seismically and suddenly. In conference after conference and article after article, admen counseled their colleagues in the fine points of hip slang, the varieties of rock music, the usefulness of psychedelic graphic effects. One day in 1967 Madison Avenue Man shed his gray flannel suit and leaped headlong into youth culture.

For countercultural participants and their admirers, advertising’s change was co-optation, pure and simple, an effort to dilute a meaningful, even menacing uprising and sway a large body of consumers at the same time. But the appeal of hip to Madison Avenue derived as much from its kinship to the new understanding of consumer culture embodied in the Creative Revolution as it did from its demographic appeal. Counterculture, it seemed, was an ideal expression of the new vision of consuming that Theory-Y capitalism, with all its glorious flexibility, instant communication, and rapid obsolescence, was bringing into existence.

groovy

Looking back at the Creative Revolution in 1977, Bill Pitts, copywriter and co-author of the various George Lois books, characterized it as the development and eventual victory of a “counterculture [that] began to find expression on Madison Avenue,” an insurgent movement with the same attitudes and enemies as the youth rebellion that overturned so many tired, conformist values in the 1960s and 1970s, a “new creative generation, a rebellious coterie of art directors and copywriters who understood that verbal and visual expressiveness were indivisible, who bridled under the old rules that consigned them to secondary roles in the admaking process under the dominion of noncreative technocrats.”3 Similarly, creative superstar of the 1990s Jeff Goodby recently hailed the work of Howard Gossage as an affirmation of the lifestyle revolution being conducted “just a couple of big hills away” from his San Francisco firehouse office. “Howard never seemed to judge or even acknowledge” the hippies themselves, Goodby remembers. “Yet looking back, he seems more like them than unlike them, a tiny, laughing, downtown outpost of it all.”⁴ The analogy between creativity and counterculture seems to be a natural one for those who participated in the corporate convulsions of those years. Youth culture became the industry’s dominant fantasy almost overnight, converting not only the public appearance of advertising, but the trade discourse as well.

It was an odd symbiosis. Hip young people famously despised Madison Avenue and the plastic civilization for which it stood, and yet admen could never seem to get enough of their criticism, their music, or the excellent trappings of their liberated ways. A symptomatic document is The Gap, a book penned jointly during the summer of 1967 by a New York adman of the creative variety and his pot-smoking, Columbia-attending nephew. Each makes an effort to enter the world of the other: the adman smokes dope, the college student attends a martini-soaked client lunch at the Four Seasons. What astounds a contemporary reader is the inversion of generational roles that takes place. Ernest Fladell, the adman, is strangely candid and seems genuinely interested in the life of the mysterious young. He compares marijuana, with unmodulated admiration, to the alcohol he usually consumes:

The kids are on an entirely different kick. Sex isn’t the object, nor is the ability to let go. They have both in reasonably good supply. Their groove is to feel more, see, taste, hear, enjoy more. The kids are hedonistic; we’re puritanical.

But Richard Lorber, the hip twenty-year-old, is scornful and condescending and impossibly pretentious, recommending “experiments in expanded consciousness” to strangers and declaring that his uncle can’t really have enjoyed marijuana (which “Many of my friends consider . . . to be an experience of sacred depth”) properly after one try because “Pot is a learning experience and each time one turns on the effect is amazingly cumulative.”5

But the scorn of Richard and his friends was for nought. Admen, especially of the new creative breed, could not come up with enough positive things to say and write about rebellious youth—some of them appearing even before the counterculture first came to the attention of the glossy mass-circulation magazines in 1967. In 1966, DDB published a study of youth whose conclusions anticipated Roszak and Reich by “predict[ing] a new image of and for American youth . . . based on nobility, virtue, romanticism, and high purpose.”⁶ For all of the superlatives, these were actually fairly commonplace sentiments in the advertising trade literature of the time. According to adman and youth specialist Merle Steir in 1967, “The Now People” were perfect consumers for the age of creative rule-smashing, far out in front of their backward-looking elders: “Youth wants to see it and tell it like it is. Then People want to see it like it was.”7 Even Leo Burnett, the Chicago-based celebrator of middle-American values, applauded in 1967 what he called the “Critical Generation’s” skepticism toward established values as potentially “one of the healthiest things that ever happened to the human race.”⁸ By 1969, Advertising Age was capable of publishing an all-out manifesto by creative leader Hanley Norins (who had gone from being a creative advisor to a countercultural enthusiast on the scale of Ralph Gleason) for the “individual revolution . . . for which the young people are the spearhead.” Inviting his audience to marvel with him at the “wiggy words [rock lyrics] that feed your mind,” the wild names of new rock bands, the endless variety of the new fashion in which “everyone [is] vying to be different,” Norins celebrated the youth-led smashing of “the bondage of mass conformity.” Admen should not be concerned with suppressing the youth revolution—which was impossible anyway—but with claiming a position in its vanguard:

The Individual Revolution is in full cry. It’s not only coming. It’s here. So why does anybody resist it at all? Above all, why don’t we advertising men lead the revolution and help to make it a viable, positive one?⁹

It’s not that admen like Norins or Burnett were unaware of the counterculture’s mistrust of advertising or its hostility toward the consumerism of the World War II generation. Indeed, they saw in the counterculture a social embodiment of the mass society critique, complete with healthy skepticism toward Madison Avenue, that had done so much to define the advertising of the Creative Revolution in the first place. The counterculture allowed creative revolutionaries to say, “See, I told you so.” E. B. Weiss, an Advertising Age columnist and a prominent celebrator of youth culture, recognized that “never has a young generation been so critical, and so mature in its criticism of advertising.” Youth was, as he put it, “Junk[ing] the junk culture,” that same junk culture junked in the Vance Packard books and the Volkswagen ads.¹⁰ Even young people’s most negative pronouncements could be transformed into a pitch for the more realistic style of the creative revolution. Referring to a Weatherman communique that accompanied a corporate bombing attack, Leo Bogart of the American Newspaper Publishers’ Association was able to read the “skepticism of advertising messages” that youngsters expressed as just another demand that the straightforward style of creativity replace the jack-hammer puffery of yore.11

The standard explanation for Madison Avenue’s almost embarrassing idealism about the counterculture is the size of the youth demographic in the 1960s. And it is undeniable that virtually all articles and speeches lauding the rebel young contain some reference to the giant youth market and insist that one must grant legitimacy to youth culture in order to speak the language of this mysterious but powerful new consumer. Almost every one of the countless articles or speeches on the subject of the youth culture mentions, in some form, the decade’s favorite statistic: that half of the nation’s population was, or would soon be, under the age of twenty-five; and its corollary, that young people had control of some $13 billion in discretionary spending dollars—$25 billion if the entire age span from thirteen to twenty-two was counted.¹² In addition, young people were widely regarded as economically powerful beyond their immediate means. They had become the decade’s arbiters of taste, and advertising could target adults through appeals to their children. Articles and conferences and workshops offering advice on reaching this lucrative market proliferated wildly. A firm called Youth Concepts, which promised to unlock the mysteries of youth culture for the advertising world, put on a proto-counterculture exhibition for its clients in 1966 which featured a number of apparent demonstrators carrying signs that read, “We spend $12 billion a year” and “48% of the population is under 25.”¹³ And, as the firm’s leader Merle Steir noted, “You can’t communicate to people you are ‘against.’”¹⁴ Admen would have to make an effort to enjoy youth culture if they were to address its fans.

But the argument from demographics can only account for a part of the frenzy for hip that overtook advertising in the mid-1960s. First, it cannot explain why advertising completely ignored young people who did not take part in the counterculture. That admen were aware of this vast market of “silent majority” frat boys and football players is obvious from Leo Burnett’s comments on the “Critical Generation,” which, although it had captured the camera’s attention at Berkeley and elsewhere, was clearly a minority among young people. Advertisers simply weren’t as keen to appropriate the symbols of the crew-cut market segment. Second, the size of the youth market cannot explain why the symbols of rebel culture were applied to all sorts of products, even those aimed at older Americans. Car advertising was a particular anomaly, undergoing a youth-oriented image transformation in the mid-1960s despite contemporary statistics that put youthful car buyers at only 9 percent.15 And, above all, the argument from demographics does not explain admen’s glaring failure to successfully “speak to” the young consumer. Certainly the iconography of youth became the almost hegemonically dominant motif in the advertising of the period, and advertisers did everything they could to incorporate the new attitudes of the young into their works. But in the end, few among the counterculture’s true believers were convinced. Trade journals repeatedly warned admen selling to the young against attempting to speak in youth’s idiosyncratic idiom: older people could never get it quite right and would only end up arousing sneers and suspicion.

The size of the youth market is only a relatively small part of the explanation for Madison Avenue’s curious infatuation with the counterculture. Viewed from a more encompassing perspective, the conversion of ads and the advertising industry as a whole to the look and language of youth culture only makes sense in the context of the Creative Revolution, its new understanding of consumer culture, and of the larger changes underway in capitalism as a whole. Admen equated creativity with counterculture; its language, its suspicion of advertising, its disdain for mass culture all seemed to reinforce the lessons of Bill Bernbach. As it would in the menswear industry, the counterculture provided advertising leaders with a language and a palette of symbols with which to express a new consuming vision that they had been espousing for a number of years already. It was no coincidence that Advertising Age’s most vociferous followers of youth culture were also its most extreme partisans of creativity: in their minds, the lessons of the new revolutionary youth culture were the same as the revolutionary tenets of creativity. “Think young,” the advertising cliche of the day, did not simply mean to remember the youth market. It meant to think creatively, to embrace difference and nonconformity and, ultimately, to think like a consumer. Point number one of twenty that defined “The New Creativity” in 1968 for J. Walter Thompson employees was to adopt “a new tone of voice” that was “attuned to the idiom of today’s affluent, hedonistic, youth-oriented society.”¹⁶ When Newsweek finally ran a cover story on “Advertising’s Creative Explosion” in 1969, it openly equated creativity with Madison Avenue’s new fascination with youth culture. Concentrating on the youthful faces then entering the business, the “bizarre modes of dress” favored by the creative types, and creativity’s hostility toward the “establishment,” the magazine constructed a portrait of the revolution that its readers were sure to recognize from its resemblance to the counterculture.17

And creativity certainly appeared to be countercultural, at least to judge by the look of younger admen in the later 1960s. Like counterculture, creativity seemed to be the province of young people, rebels who were identified with nonconformity and innovative thinking. In the industry as a whole, the stodgy middle-aged Organization Men of the fifties began to be overshadowed and replaced by a vast influx of younger copywriters and art directors in unmistakably with-it garb. Advertising had, of course, always been a profession in which people with bottomless energy, either still idealistic or nondisillusionable, had excelled.¹⁸ But in the sixties, the prevalence of youth became so lopsided that it inspired concerned commentary in the industry press.¹⁹

By 1968, the notion that only rebellious young people could make good copywriters and art directors was so prevalent that E. B. Weiss, whose Ad Age columns oscillated between the decade’s two burning topics of creativity and youth culture, entitled one effort “Is Creative Advertising a Young Business?”—a query which he answered in the affirmative: “I fully agree that the creative advertising function should be, indeed must be, monopolized by young people—not exclusively, but practically so.”²⁰ But the question predated the countercultural explosion of 1967. In 1965, adman Jerry Fields had wondered, “Why are the creative Golden Boys . . . always young men in their twenties and early thirties?” and had asked what older admen could do to compete. He had concluded that the secret was less physical youth and more a matter of attitude:

Our solution to this problem is a very simple one—don’t grow old. Think young. That’s a pretty square and corny statement, but we mean it. We see old men of 35 walking into our office and we see young men of 50 coming in. It all seems to be based on a state of mind—a healthy enthusiastic approach to life in which you never seem to run out of élan vital.²¹

The refrain was a common one: creativity was a matter of young-mindedness, if not outright youthfulness. Even the soft-spoken, 59-year-old Bill Bernbach could be described by E. B. Weiss in 1970 as an “angry young man.”²²

By 1967, the countercultural overtones of creativity were undeniable as a thousand hip lifestyles flowered on Madison Avenue. Longer hair, beads, loud colors, and wide ties replaced the infamous “gray flannel suit.” Art director Stephen Baker noted that in 1967 “beards, whiskers, goatees, Van Dykes, manes became status symbols of the creative breed, symbolizing its schism from the business side of advertising, which is the Establishment.”23 Unusual clothing was sometimes taken by itself as a creativity index. Stephen Fox points out that at some agencies “clients were taken on pointed tours of the creative departments, to see the miniskirts and jeans, to smell the incense and other suspicious odors, as though to prove how daring and au courant the shop was.”²⁴ In 1968, Marketing/Communications published a “Chat with an ad-man head” in which the creativity-enhancing powers of marijuana were thoroughly discussed.²⁵

Hair was an important signifier of creativity. The locks of Tinker group creative superstar Gene Case were noted in the late sixties by one magazine to be long “even by Madison Avenue ‘creative man’ standards.” A profile of Larry Dunst, the 28-year-old president of the very creative Daniel & Charles agency, was incomplete without commentary on his hair, which is duly noted to have “crept down over ears, eyes and neck, but it’s styled”:

“Hair intimidates people, you know. You meet someone and they look you over; they figure this guy’s got balls to let his hair grow that long. I wonder how long I’ll let it grow before I chicken out.” (For the record: A supervisor at Daniel & Charles, Jeff Metzner, has the Madison Avenue record. He shows only a nose-tip and has a pony tail.)²⁶

A cartoon by a copywriter at McCann-Erickson that was printed in Madison Avenue in February, 1967, depicted the “Evolution of the Art Director” from square to hip. At the beginning, he is a simple “Mat Room Boy,” with short hair, wide eyes, and a narrow tie. But as he works his way up the corporate ladder from “Paste-Up Man” to “Senior Art Director,” new features appear: his hair lengthens, he grows a moustache and a beard, he begins to wear boots and loudly patterned clothes. As a “Senior Art Director,” he is shown with glasses, a scowl, and a beard, his middle finger raised in defiance (or in command?). As an Executive Art Director, he is entirely overtaken by his hair and hairy poncho, and his face and body are no longer visible.²⁷

Charlie Moss, copywriter, creative director, and finally president of Wells, Rich, Greene, surely the “hottest” creative agency during the late 1960s, recalls the businesslike way his penchant for unusual clothing was received in those years.

I remember I used to walk around in jeans and these flowery shirts . . . they were from England, there was this woman, and she used to make these wild, flowery shirts that you could see through, kind of gauzy things, that were really extremely fey. . . . One day Mary [Wells] called and said, “We’ve got to go down to Philip Morris right away, we’ve a big board meeting. . . .” I said, “Mary, I can’t go like this, look at me!” And she said, “Don’t be ridiculous, they expect you to dress like that.” And so we went, and nobody even turned their head. I mean I had an afro out to here, and people really just basically accepted it, because I was, quote, creative, and it was allowed.28

Admen in the 1960s loved rock ’n’ roll, or at least claimed they did. Throughout the literature of the period, one finds dozens of references to the music of the counterculture dropped by agency executives as though to demonstrate their cognizance of the hip underground. One magazine profile of the various brash young creative leaders written at the height of the revolution opens with assertions of the hipness of the “new rulers”: “They dig rock and understand how it touches and turns-on a whole subculture.” Jerry Della Femina “always keeps the record player going, loud and lusty rock music, in the office and at home.” Larry Dunst is alleged to be “a fearless sort; sat near the stage at a Jimi Hendrix-Buddy Miles Express concert in Madison Square Garden.”²⁹ Others claimed to be so intensely hip that they had been “into” the new music even before the rest of the world appreciated it. Andrew Kershaw, the president of Ogilvy & Mather, told Madison Avenue in January of 1970 that he had been “a Beatles fan . . . since before the time they became famous.” Consequently, he suffered “no generation gap in my own family. . . .” Years later, Alex Kroll, chairman of Young & Rubicam, made almost exactly the same claim—premature Beatles fan; generation-gap immunity—for Hanley Norins, his firm’s outspoken partisan of counterculture and creativity.³⁰ So rapidly did the rage for youth culture conquer Madison Avenue that it seems to have taken a number of “establishment” figures by surprise. One famous story that made the rounds in the sixties had the head of a large, institutional agency, now at a disadvantage and under pressure to produce “creative” work, calling a pep rally for its employees. There, the agency chairman gave a rousing speech encouraging his employees to broaden themselves creatively by attending the theater, going to movies, and listening to rock music like that of Bobby Dylan, mispronouncing the star’s name (“Dile-in”) egregiously.³¹

One of stranger victories of the Creative Revolution was the conversion to the countercultural style of none other than Dr. Ernest Dichter of the Institute for Motivational Research, the sinister “depth-probing” villain of The Hidden Persuaders. In the sixties, it seems, Dichter moved on to something else even more illuminating than statistics. In 1967, he issued a report which suggested that admen learn from (those who had learned from) LSD, undertake “mind expansion,” use “animation with psychedelic colors and motion,” and “bring the product alive with new, more exciting meaning.”32 Nor was Dichter alone in his semi-enthusiasm for psychedelics. A September, 1967, article in Madison Avenue agreed on the advertising value of psychedelics. The authors, two creative people from the stodgy Campbell-Ewald agency, did not encourage their fellow writers to indulge in the drug specifically, but its effects, then being widely discussed in the media, could provide “psychedelic advice for the creative adman.” LSD, it seems, approximates the sensitivity the copywriter or art director must have in order to provide maximum dramatization of an otherwise mundane product, and the authors compare various statements made by tripping people to high-literary prose. Even though he may or may not take acid, “a great writer is on one long ‘trip’ from the beginning of his life to the end of it.” The secret to the “heightened sense perception” that is the province of “great writers” and LSD users is, again, the willingness to violate the conventions of perception. And, as violating conventions was the central premise of the Creative Revolution, any good adman should have been able to summon up drug-induced delirium at will, even without actually consuming acid:

Will you go through a day looking for yellow . . . on Madison Avenue, in the office, at home? Will you feel yellow, will you count how many yellows, will you try to imagine what yellow should smell like or sound or taste like? . . .

You don’t need LSD for this; you just need the guts to live. To shake the embalming fluid out of your thinking.

This was sensitivity training for the former architects of commercialism, a rudimentary version of the sort of phony spiritualism that would soon sweep the bourgeoisie of California in a flurry of chanted “Oms” and beads and bubbling hot tubs. Just as the adman of the 1960s was expected to be hostile to “rules” generally, the exercises the givers of “psychedelic advice” prescribe for developing a great creative talent are a matter of simple transgression of everyday routine, a rebellion for its own sake against whatever variety of conformity to which the reader happened to belong.³³

The adman was fast being saddled with a new image: no longer was he the other-directed technocrat, the most craven species of American businessman, but the coolest guy on the commuter train, turned on to the latest in youth culture, rock music, and drug-influenced graphic effects. It was a stereotype used by creativity’s enemies as well. “The lunatics began to take over the asylum,” is how Rosser Reeves described the sixties in 1970 from his new position as head of the appropriately named Starch research organization. “A new type of copywriter appeared—with . . . shoulder-length hair, bell-bottom trousers, chains, medallions and sandals,” wrote this quintessential man of the fifties with obvious disgust. “And to my amazement, a group of otherwise sane, senior advertising marketing men began to believe that this group is ‘with it.’”34 The Creative Revolution in general, he believed, was a symptom of the industry’s precipitous decline.

The most sophisticated partisans of the revolution might well have agreed with Reeves’s condemnation. Heavy reliance on overt youth-culture references were but a “creativity-substitute,” as Jack Tinker star copywriter Gene Case put it in 1967. The best way to appeal to the young and young-thinking was to adopt the same techniques and values of agency organization that had, a few years before, been touted as the techniques and values of creativity. Even when they were writing specifically on the youth market, the advice admen proffered each other was phrased as suggestions on improving admaking generally, on updating agency operations to reflect that the old ways were fatuous, unconvincing, and dull. Steir’s praise for “The Now People,” for example, hailed their “redoing and reconsidering” the various stultifying institutions of society as a way of praising his colleagues’ efforts to overthrow the creativity-restricting constraints of the large agencies. In order to deal with the rewarding youth market, Steir wrote in 1967, advertising would have to adopt certain attitudes that had already been the bywords of creativity since the late 1950s: “Businessmen will have to be outrageous,” he insisted. “Being in step today is to be out of step tomorrow. The initial premise for the search might be: We must be doing something wrong. . . . The business climate is now so stultified and rigid that any innovation and meaningful contact with the youth market will be rewarded.” Even though stultification and rigidity had already been blasted for a number of years in favor of outrage and difference, Steir still phrased his 1967 article on “The Now People” in terms of a battle between the noble youngsters who were bringing “revolution” and “the Then Generation [which] attempts to retard change in order to enjoy material satisfaction in the old way. . . .” Just as big agency bureaucrats and account men were pilloried for resisting the new, oldsters were cautioned against hostility to youth culture. Steir even described the victory of “the Now People” as a lesson in the basic fact of marketing: “Youth has won. Youth must always win. The new naturally replaces the old.”35

Not coincidentally, the techniques of admaking said to be useful in the age of the hip were the same as those pioneered by Bernbach ten years before. Hanley Norins’s 1969 recommendations for getting out in front of the “individual revolution” were substantially the same as the ones he had trumpeted during an earlier phase of the Creative Revolution: His model advertisement was a 1959 Volkswagen ad. “Some of us oldtimers might call this ‘soft-selling advertising,’” Norins wrote, using the term which had once been used to describe (and disparage) the works of Bernbach and others, “but that’s the message of the Individual Revolution, and the kids call it ‘cool.’”³⁶ Counterculture and creativity were essentially one and the same, with identical heroes and villains. John A. Adams, Detroit manager of the (large, “establishment”) Grey agency, repeated the argument in 1971 when he was reported to have insisted that “the old bombastic, pound-it-home-again approach does not reach them [the young].” Instead, the advertiser’s voice was said to be the most critical factor in commercial persuasion, a realization which, again, pointed directly to the very features that had distinguished Doyle Dane’s advertising since the late 1950s: “Humor—the product is not a matter of life or death; candor—the company admits some imperfections; simplicity—the company does not try to list the most product points in a single ad.”³⁷

A most remarkable exposition on this subject, written by businessman Lee Adler and published in the quasi-academic journal Business Horizons in February, 1970, posited a “new consumer” arising whose “moral, social, and cultural values,” regardless of his age, were defined by the new worldview associated with the counterculture. The values of this new American may be different, but his consuming potential was just as great, perhaps even greater, than that of his parents. The “Implications for Advertising” that Adler perceived arising from the development of the “new consumer” were each features that had been emphasized by DDB and its imitators since the late 1950s; only one was new. Since “The under-30 generation loathes sham and hypocrisy” and “‘Tell it like it is’ is the touchstone,” Adler suggests that admen take the more “honest” tone associated with creativity. Adler went on to list all of the various “new approaches in copy and art” that allowed business to speak “memorably and persuasively with the new consumer,” including “low-key appeals,” experimental, “nonlinear presentations of information,” “more wit, honesty, verve, self-deprecation, [and] irreverence,” and “cautious use of the more ephemeral elements of today’s under-thirties subculture.” All except the last were standard features of the Creative Revolution, and that single exception would be quickly adopted in the mid-1960s. The ads with which Adler illustrated his theories naturally came from certain much-lauded creative campaigns: Jack Tinker’s spots for Alka-Seltzer, Wells, Rich, Greene’s work for Benson & Hedges, McCann-Erickson’s ads for Opel and Coca-Cola.38

If the wonderment of Ernest Fladell is any indication, many mature admen regarded sixties’ youth culture with bewilderment. And, as one would expect, a number of firms took advantage of the situation by setting themselves up as youth-culture specialists. Merle Steir’s group was called “Youth Concepts” and produced “now shows” for a variety of establishment advertisers interested in rejuvenating their image. The humorously named Spade and Archer agency, founded in 1966 as youth market specialists, produced ads designed to persuade this problematic group of consumers. It received attention in trade publications and general magazines like Newsweek as both an intensely creative shop and as a countercultural stronghold. Spade and Archer was given to dazzling potential clients and industry rivals with demonstrations of its countercultural cognizance, like the elaborate one Advertising Age covered in April, 1968, which featured “A rock group, the Group Image, plus dancing girls and strobe lights, a body-painted model, a consumer panel of young housewives ‘who were weaned on the Beatles’ and an assortment of miniskirted and Nehru-jacketed associates.” The advice the agency’s principals offered on admaking, unsurprisingly, reaffirmed the critical style of the Creative Revolution. Above all, the kids were exactly the sort of consumers Bill Bernbach had been positing since the late fifties: smart and extremely skeptical toward conventional advertising. “Honesty” and its inevitable Bernbachian corollary, a sense of humor about the product, were what was required in order to sell the young.³⁹

For some, the counterculture represented a sort of creative epiphany, a culminating vindication of the revolution in which Madison Avenue had immersed itself. Hanley Norins believed that creativity and counterculture were both part of a larger historical insurgency: the “Revolt of the Individual,” a vast uprising “expressed most openly by the young people, but [which] is really deep down inside all of us.”

It’s the revolt of the individual against the very systems which we here in this room have been so influential in devising—the American systems of mass education, mass communication and mass conformity.

. . . It’s the problem of mass conformity that’s mostly getting us down. And that’s what the revolution is going to destroy.

Fortunately, the revolution against conformity was most definitely not a revolt against consumerism or the institution of advertising. In fact, according to Norins, the best ads—like the Volkswagen campaign—do not just react to the new revulsion to convention; they provoke and even “anticipate it.” Mass society was now the target of a generalized revolt and hip was becoming a widespread cultural style, but, provided it stayed on its toes and embraced the mass society critique, Madison Avenue could ride the waves of unrest to new heights of prosperity. The counterculture was, ultimately, just a branch of the same revolution that had swept the critical-creative style to prominence and that many believed was demolishing Theory X hierarchy everywhere, from Vietnam to the boardroom.40

counterculture/consumer culture

The use of youth culture and youth imagery in advertising was not, of course, an entirely new thing in the 1960s. It had appeared extensively, if sporadically, since the 1920s. But “youth” marketing has always been a little confusing. Much of it has indeed been designed to speak to young people. But even more frequently, “youth” has served as a marketing symbol, an abstraction of commercial speech, a consuming vision for Americans of all ages.⁴¹ Obviously, the actual “youth market,” the vast number of consumers under thirty, or twenty-five, or twenty-one, or nineteen (depending on the definition at hand) was important to admen in the sixties, and the demographic significance of the baby boom has been amply recognized by cultural historians. What is less frequently recognized is the basic marketing fact that “youth” had a meaning and an appeal that extended far beyond the youth market proper. This point is driven home again and again in the trade press of the era: The imagery and language of youth can be applied effectively to all sorts of products marketed to all varieties of people, because youth is an attractive consuming attitude, not an age—an attitude that was preeminently defined by the values of the counterculture. By “youth,” Madison Avenue meant hip, often expressed with psychedelic references, talk of rebellion, and intimations of free love.

Youth markets come and youth markets go; so do youth styles and youth movements, and sometimes without ever drawing the attention of a single adman. But this one was different—and not merely in terms of its size. When creative admen looked at the counterculture, they saw what they chose to see. The industry’s privileging of the antimaterialist youth over their conformist brethren—of the hip over the square—marked a crucial step in the development of a new ideology of consumption that arose with the Creative Revolution. With simple black-and-white photographs, gentle humor, and straightforward-sounding copy, DDB had sold Volkswagens as a solution to the ills of mass society; now admen were discovering a ready-made symbol for the cultural operation Bill Bernbach had taught them to perform. In the eyes of the American ad industry, the counterculture was special—it appeared to be a broad social affirmation of the very values that had launched the admen themselves into the new era. The counterculture seemed to have it all: the unconnectedness which would allow consumers to indulge transitory whims; the irreverence that would allow them to defy moral puritanism; and the contempt for established social rules that would free them from the slow-moving, buttoned-down conformity of their abstemious ancestors. In the counterculture, admen believed they had found both a perfect model for consumer subjectivity, intelligent and at war with the conformist past, and a cultural machine for turning disgust with consumerism into the very fuel by which consumerism might be accelerated.

“Youth” was a posture available to all in the sixties. Admen clearly believed that the marketing potential of youth culture far transcended the handful of people who were actively involved in the counterculture: as Mary Wells Lawrence recalls, “It didn’t matter what age you were—you had to think young.”42 Youth was the paramount symbol of the age, whether in movies, literature, fashion, or television. For admen “youth” was a sort of consumer fantasy they would make available to older Americans. Jerry Fields noted in a Madison Avenue article entitled “Think Young” that appeared in February, 1965, that “the maintenance of a young, fresh appearance has become a primary concern of our population which looks back wistfully at their thirty-fifth birthday.”⁴³ In 1967, the magazine quoted an adman who noted that “the youth market has become the American market. It now includes not only everyone under 35, but most people over 35.”44 Edward Gorman, sales and merchandise manager of J. C. Penney was reported in Advertising Age in 1966 to have said that

the youth market not only encompasses teens, but everyone up to 35 and “most of the people older than that.” He explained that the appeal to the young is heard by many who are in their 30s and 40s. They even buy the cars that were designed for the young. “Like the Pontiac GTO,” Mr. Gorman said.⁴⁵

The name given by admen to the market thus targeted was the “young thinking,” a rubric under which advertising people could classify almost everybody. “To be young is to be with it,” ruminated Martin R. Miller in a 1968 editorial in Merchandising Week, the journal of the electronic appliance industry. “Everywhere, our mass media push psychedelia with all its clothing fads, so-called ‘way-out’ ideas, etc. Youth is getting the hard sell.” And the benefits from this were clear to his readers: “the fountain of youth has spilled over into new areas and is revitalizing the buying habits of some older, more affluent customers.”⁴⁶ A 1970 Business Week article reached similar conclusions. Noting the across-the-board effectiveness of the young-thinking theme, the magazine predicted that “The 1970s promise to become the decade when youth becomes a state of mind and overflows all traditional age boundaries.” And “whether they are marketing to youth or to youthfulness, businessmen find the prospects exhilarating.”⁴⁷

Madison Avenue’s vision of the counterculture was notoriously unconvincing to many who actually took part in the movement—and for a very simple reason: they were not necessarily the primary target of such campaigns. If youth was an attitude rather than an actual age, it would have to be expressed in a manner understandable to much older people. Thus, through the proliferation of psychedelia, Milton Glaser imitations, and “yellow submarine art”; all the photographs of self-assured young iconoclasts and body-painted women, advertisers were careful to speak a language that sounded hip but got a message across to young and old alike. The size of the “young-in-spirit” market, art director and Advertising Age columnist Stephen Baker counseled, made it “important that youth language is made to be understood not only by the under-aged chaps and chicks but also those who want to stop the clock and can afford to do so.”⁴⁸ A 1966 study conducted by BBDO (the “establishment” agency responsible for the Pepsi Generation) stated the facts even more directly. Images of youth were simply not appropriate for the youth market, it found: these consumers already knew they were young. Youthfulness was best used as an appeal to older consumers:

Since the need of a “younger” image appears quite suddenly (at about 25), it should probably be kept in mind that in selling to people under 25, the “youthful” appeal may not be effective. A proper appeal to [the] youth [market] might actually emphasize a topical appeal.49

Again, the slogan “Think Young” is illustrative: consumers could not all be young, but they could all be encouraged to think as though they were, to assume the attitudes of the young revolutionaries. The function of “youth” in advertising was symbolic, an easy metaphor for a complex new consumer value-system. The really remarkable fact about co-optation isn’t that Columbia records ran pseudo-hip ads in “underground” publications; it’s that a vast multitude of corporations ran pseudo-hip ads in Life, Look, and Ladies Home Journal. Madison Avenue was more interested in speaking like the rebel young than in speaking to them.

There were, of course, other symbols for the new antinomian consumerism available during the 1960s—both spies and jaded jet-setters were common before 1967. Admen settled on the counterculture as the signifier of choice for hip consumerism at least partially because they believed, contrary to the assertions of countercultural theorists like Roszak and Reich, that the hip young were good potential consumers. Despite their suspicion of advertising and material accumulation, and despite the standard claims that the movement’s privileging of nonconformity and heterogeneity opposed it automatically to consumer capitalism, admen used the external markings of their culture to represent new consuming values because, admen believed, it had already internalized those consuming values. Like Christopher Lasch and Irving Howe, Madison Avenue found in the ideas of people like Jerry Rubin a continuing—even a heightened—commitment to the values and mores of the consumer society. Caught up in the frenzies of the Creative Revolution, admen looked at the counterculture and saw . . . themselves.

Madison Avenue’s favorite term for the counterculture was “the Now Generation,” a phrase that implied absolute up-to-dateness in every sense. It also intimated what admen felt was the young’s most important characteristic as consumers: their desire for immediate gratification, their craving for the new, their intolerance for the slow-moving, the penurious, the thrifty. Admen believed they had found an entire generation given over to self-fulfillment by whatever means necessary—which would, of course, ultimately mean by shopping. Grey’s John Adams made what is perhaps the bluntest statement of this perception, having been reported by Advertising Age in 1971 to have said

There is nothing to support the contention that the youth are anti-materialistic. “They are in the peak acquisitive years,” he said, “and their relative affluence enables them to consume goods and services at a rate unheard of for their age level.”50

In 1968, creative partisan Bob Fearon penned an impressionistic appreciation of the young for Madison Avenue. Written in a curious colloquial style that was probably meant to demonstrate his familiarity with the intricacies of youth culture, the article aims to enlighten advertising men about the tastes and anti-advertising predilections of the inscrutable young (“They talk to him. They tell him things like that. And he listens. He doesn’t condemn. . . . And he ends up knowing.”) Perhaps the most important feature of the young people Fearon discusses, despite their hotly professed antimaterialism and their suspicion of consumerism, is their heightened appetite for the new. Unlike their parents, the hip new youth are far more receptive to obsolescence; buying goods for the moment, discarding them quickly, and moving on to the next:

“When the new generation buys they want it for now. They’re not interested in how long it will last.”

These young people have a different idea about thrift. They have a new definition of value. They accept obsolescence. They want the new, improved version tomorrow. Very important words. New, improved. More than ever before. Everything is instant. Now. Everything is faster.⁵¹

Not surprisingly, the same texts that praised the counterculture for its questioning of conventional ways usually came around to the counterculture’s single worthiest point: its revolutionizing of America’s consuming ways. Older Americans had been reluctant to spend, had guarded their money jealously, would only spend on the basis of a hard, demonstrable product superiority—and sometimes not even then. It was for overturning this antiquated, depression-induced, even puritanical attitude that youth culture received its greatest plaudits. Merle Steir wrote:

The Then Generation didn’t know where its next dollar was coming from, so it paid attention to getting lots of dollars stashed away. But if you realize you are always able to make a living you begin to wonder what else you might want to do. This is particularly true if you noticed that for all the money around older people don’t appear very satisfied. . . . So the Now Generation says: “If I have choices, I want to be satisfied as well as housed and fed.”52

This was consumerism for a new age, consumerism that began where the old variety left off—the anomie, conformity, and meaningless of plastic mass society. It was to escape these qualities, to be fully “satisfied,” that the “Now Generation” would do its consuming.

The craving for deeper satisfaction, wrote E. B. Weiss, would lead inevitably to accelerated lifestyle experimentation, something admen—and businessmen generally—were anxious to encourage rather than to suppress.

[I]n 1971 these youngsters spent more on travel than the entire older generation spent on travel ten years ago. They spend more on stereo than their parents spent on phonographs. They may furnish their first home more simply than was true decades ago, but they will replace their initial home furnishings much sooner and much more often. Disposables—not “forevers” are their thing. . . . True—their lifestyles will differ on a larger scale, but isn’t changing lifestyles what marketing is all about?⁵³

American advertising took the side it did during the cultural revolution of the 1960s not simply because it wanted to sell a particular demographic, but because it found great promise in the new values of the counterculture. Conformity, other-direction, contempt for audiences, and Reevesian repetition were good neither as management styles nor as consuming models, the creative revolutionaries had proclaimed; now, it seemed, here was a broad cultural upheaval validating their vision of hip consumerism. Thus did the consumer revolt against mass society, which had begun with the selling of a sturdy car that defied obsolescence, come into its own as a movement of accelerated obsolescence.

the now agency and the end of the plain

Wells, Rich, Greene (WRG) was the agency whose history most clearly traced this trajectory from creativity to hip, from criticism to outright secession from the boring everyday of mass society. Founded in 1966 by three prodigious creative talents who had worked on ads for Braniff and Alka-Seltzer at Jack Tinker Partners, WRG was the instant beneficiary of a deluge of blue-chip accounts looking for the selling magic that the new hip advertising seemed to promise. By December, 1967, Madison Avenue was able to claim that “no agency in history has grown so big so fast. Nor acquired such an array of talent in the process.”54 The firm proceeded to skyrocket to $100,000,000 in billings in a mere five years, a feat duly noted by Advertising Age in 1971 to have been “undoubtedly, the most astonishing growth record in advertising history.” For products like Benson & Hedges, Braniff airlines, and Love Cosmetics, the agency seemed to work commercial magic. Articles in the industry press treated Wells, Rich, Greene like a hip, updated version of Doyle Dane Bernbach that managed to achieve the same prosperity in just a few years that DDB spent a decade acquiring. The agency’s president, former DDB copywriter Mary Wells, quickly established herself as the industry’s most glamorous figure as well, marrying the head of one of her client companies and attracting the attention of society columnists nationwide as she jetted between the hangouts of the world’s wealthy.⁵⁵

No company in America was hipper than Wells, Rich, Greene. It brought together in a dynamic, explosive combination the two great themes of advertising in the 1960s: creativity and the new system of values being ushered in by the youth culture. In campaign after campaign, WRG produced memorable, often hilarious ads that combined hip sensibilities with uncompromising sales messages and high production values. The agency’s work at its best was as characteristic of the late 1960s as DDB’s had been for the late 1950s and early 1960s: introducing differently colored airplanes for Braniff (“The end of the plain plane”); the “Try It, You’ll Like It” and “I Can’t Believe I Ate the Whole Thing” ads for Alka-Seltzer; the astonishingly successful campaign for Benson & Hedges that focused on fanciful disadvantages of longer cigarettes. “This is our moment,” said Mary Wells in 1966. “In every era, some agencies come along to set new trends, to illuminate the industry in some way. In our case, we are completely geared to our time. We are terribly aware of the current sounds and fears and smells and attitudes. We are the agency of today.”⁵⁶

Looking back in 1990 on the period she once claimed to personify, Mary Wells Lawrence (she was married in 1967 to Harding Lawrence, the president of Braniff) describes the ethos of WRG as a strain of creativity supercharged by the omnipresent rebel spirit of youth. The title of her Advertising Age retrospective, “Baby Boom, Creative Boom” draws connections between the two great forces, and throughout it she links youth insurgency with creative insurgency. “I think in the ’60s, it [the advertising business] was a very adolescent thing,” she recalls.

Adolescence is pulling away, doing things in a new way. It’s revolutionary, and the ’60s were revolutionary, in every way.

. . . And the advertising that stands out, that you remember, was very revolutionary. It was like a bomb dropping into what had been a very stilted, limited kind of world.57

Youth was also critical to the creative attitude at WRG. When Advertising Age accused the agency of having entered the “agency world ‘establishment’” in 1971, Wells Lawrence replied that WRG intended to retain a youthful attitude that put creative performance above organizational stability:

I don’t think they [WRG employees] feel very “establishment.” They feel they’re sitting on a hot seat all the time. It’s the responsibility of an agency’s management to stay very young and very hot. The minute you get smug you’re dead.⁵⁸

And to at least some outside observers, WRG had the look and feel of a countercultural outpost. Scripps-Howard writer Robert Dietsch visited the new agency in 1967 to take in all of the big-city weirdness for his readers back in the provinces. The new, creative agencies, he explained, “are managed and directed by far-out people, not the traditional marketing and research-oriented conservatives.” He was particularly taken with the shop’s decoration and the sartorial tastes of its employees:

There is a psychedelic “LOVE” poster in the foyer. The guest chairs are rattan or bamboo and they have baby blue pillows which sink you down deep. The receptionist is from Haiti with just the right amount of accent and chocolate thigh.

It follows that les girls beyond the white foyer wall are mini-minded, but a couple are wearing pants. Their eyeglasses are four inches across and cigarette holders are “in.”⁵⁹

Naturally, early accounts of WRG also emphasize its use of the stripped-down principles of agency organization that had spread over the decade outward from DDB. Talent, not organization, was the key to the advertising business, Mary Wells insisted, and the less organization the less interference there was in the truly important creative work. “Agencies should be sleek,” she wrote in Newsweek in 1967. “Fat agencies tend to move slowly and dully. They waddle through confusions caused by their complex organizations.”60 At WRG, “we don’t want to be cluttered with lots of mediocre people. We don’t want lots of underlings around, hired to take our clients to lunch.”⁶¹ William Whyte couldn’t have put it better: the ethos of the Organization necessarily militated against the brilliant.

The key to WRG’s zeitgeist-mastery was a slightly updated version of the model consumer posited earlier in the decade by Bill Bernbach. The consumer was no longer merely skeptical of mass society, but positively hip, young-minded, wise to television’s tricks, drawn to the alienated film-making of the era, and only reachable through the coolest of advertising agencies. “He’s a very hip, aware character,” executive vice president Herb Fisher said in 1968:

spearheading an attitude, an awareness, that is more open, more expansive and more inquisitive at all age levels.

A second key fact: He is bombarded on all sides with news, sensation, art and all manner of stimuli that are explosive and exciting. . . . Exposure to the bombardment produces skepticism. Today’s consumer . . . has developed a sophistication about, an imperviousness to, the “big sell” . . .⁶²

One of the most difficult problems facing the ad industry in the late 1960s, then, was identical to one that it faces today: consumer cynicism toward the clutter of mass society. As Wells herself put it in 1966, “People have seen so many promotions and big ideas and new products and new advertising campaigns and new packaging gimmicks, and they’ve heard so many lies and so many meaningless slogans and so many commercialized holy truths that it’s getting harder and harder to get their attention, let alone their trust.”⁶³ But, as Bill Bernbach had realized, public jadedness also provided advertising with unprecedented opportunities.

WRG simply upped the ante on the decade’s violence against advertising convention: it would discover whatever was the usual way of pitching a given product category and then seek to do just the opposite. In order to come up with ideas for a campaign, Wells writes, the agency would ask, “Consider what you can’t do, then do it.”

Like with cigarettes, you could never mutilate them, they were touched by God. So we broke them in the Benson & Hedges campaign.

We took Alka-Seltzer, which was then used strictly in the bathroom, in the dark, by people ashamed of themselves, and we made it the current, the hip thing to do to need an Alka-Seltzer. If you didn’t need an Alka-Seltzer, you weren’t alive; it meant you weren’t eating good food, you weren’t drinking wine, you couldn’t afford good things.64

Instead of men in lab coats repeating transparently insignificant USPs, cars on rotating platforms, or animated characters singing cigarette jingles, commercials made by WRG often used bizarre vignettes of things going horribly wrong to dramatize a product’s characteristics. A famous Alka-Seltzer spot that the WRG principals had done while still working for Jack Tinker established the genre, picturing a series of human bellies being terribly mistreated: those of workmen hanging over jackhammers, those of boxers being pummeled, those of obese office workers in conversation.

In 1966, WRG used the formula to promote Benson & Hedges, a new brand of cigarettes. Somehow the agency settled on the astonishing slogan, “Oh, the disadvantages” as the best way of drawing attention to the cigarette’s then-unusual length. The best-known commercial from their campaign for that cigarette (and one that is still referred to frequently today in the industry’s all-time best-of lists) was made up of a number of humorous, three- or four-second shots of the faintly ridiculous problems encountered by smokers of longer cigarettes: a man’s cigarette is caught in elevator doors; another is bent on a telephone; a third burns a man’s beard during a conversation; and an exasperated hand is shown holding a cigarette case from which the unwieldy product protrudes sloppily. The campaign must have been the first to actually make a product seem attractive by depicting the ways in which it put one at odds with the conventional world. WRG steered Benson & Hedges directly into the teeth of the old “personal efficiency” pitch, promising not to make the consumer more successful but actually to saddle him with “disadvantages” and make him less efficient—and it is remembered as one of the most successful cigarette campaigns ever. A print ad from 1968 brought the idea full circle by proclaiming that their length also made them difficult to advertise—they wouldn’t fit onto a standard-size magazine page. So antithetical was this cigarette to mass society that it even short-circuited advertising.⁶⁵

The theme of hilarious social dysfunction could be applied to almost anything, it seemed. In one 1968 spot for the American Motors Rebel, WRG dramatized the car’s durability by showing the terrifying experiences of a driving instructor whose pupils come from every class of bad driver. The car is driven over a fire-hydrant and through a construction site; student drivers grind its gears and steer it recklessly through traffic. In a famous late-sixties spot for Alka-Seltzer, a sophisticated fellow is victimized by a waiter at a quaint ethnic restaurant of some kind who has reassured him about an unfamiliar item, saying, “Try it, you’ll like it”; the diner uses Alka-Seltzer to recover from the nasty dish that is foisted upon him. A commercial for the 1968 American Motors Javelin muscle car impresses upon the audience the car’s power and sportiness by depicting a day in the life of a Javelin owner who is not interested in power and sportiness. For all of his well-demonstrated timidity and carefulness (at one point he declines to race another driver, saying “I’ve got a bowl of goldfish in the seat”) though, the man cannot suppress his car’s anarchic destiny: eventually he turns it over to a parking lot attendant who promptly races away, tires screeching.66

One of the most visible markers of youth culture’s progress on Madison Avenue was Mary Wells’s adoption of the slogan, “love power” in 1967 as a description of her agency’s amusing style.⁶⁷ By conceiving of the consumer with affection rather than the contempt that seemed to emanate from so many of the ads of the fifties, WRG aimed to produce enjoyable, entertaining commercials that it believed consumers were happy to watch. Charlie Moss explains how Wells’s “love” philosophy worked in the actual creative sense:

What Mary always used to talk about was, “Get them to like you, get them to like your product.” Be sympathetic, be “buyer friendly,” I suppose. At the time . . . this philosophy was in the middle of a bunch of advertising from the old days that was basically pretty hard sell. . . . Her point of view and philosophy was, we’ve got to entertain people, we’ve got to make them like us, we can’t bore them to death with our advertising, we don’t want them looking at the screen, saying “Oh, that commercial again, yech,” and getting up and leaving the room.⁶⁸

“Love” was a strategy that transformed cynicism into consumer responsiveness. Here, as in so many other places in this story, business theory spilled over into actual advertising. As it turned out, “Love” also had a very concrete meaning for Wells, Rich, Greene. In 1969, pharmaceutical manufacturer Menley & James hired the agency to devise a name, packaging, and a marketing strategy as well as advertising for a line of cosmetics, and the agency promptly came up with “Love.” Love Cosmetics was thus a product created in its entirety by the advertising climate of the late 1960s. Another instant success story (Love sales finally fell off and the brand all but vanished in the mid- to late-1970s), the Love campaign was celebrated both in the industry and the popular press as a shining example of the power of countercultural, “hippie-looking” advertising, with packaging and store displays that used psychedelic designs and rendered the word “Love” in birds and flowers.69 Many hip campaigns during the sixties, of course, made use of such psychedelia. But the ads WRG prepared for Love cosmetics went much farther, actually striking a strangely authentic-sounding note.

Love cosmetics were anti-cosmetics, makeup for a time—and a generation—at war with the pretense and falsehood of makeup. “This is the way Love is in 1969,” the premier ad’s headline announced: “freer, more natural, more honest—more out in the open.” Nonetheless, “most cosmetic companies” remained ignorant of the new ways and “are laboring under the delusion that love and girls are the same as ever.” It was a strange, even paradoxical claim for a brand of cosmetics to be making, but it seemed to work: while older brands were said to mask and conceal the user’s selfhood, Love enhanced her individuality, allowed her real nature to come to the surface: “You’ve got a complexion worth seeing. You don’t need make-ups that blank you out. Ours won’t. Ours can’t.”

Love was transparent, and so was the company that was selling it. The makers of Love had, they announced, moved beyond the huckster’s trickery of the past. They had the reader’s best interests at heart. “We’re not going to sell you a lot of goo you don’t need,” as do the square cosmetics companies, no doubt, “or ideas and formulas as ancient as the hills.” The products themselves came in radically simplified packages, basic cylinders rather than the elaborate faux-crystal decanters of other brands. They bore whimsical instructions printed on the bottles in earnest, sans-serif typefaces. The ads, furthermore, asked readers to question advertisers—and then to find this particular advertiser to be their generational ally rather than another arm of the establishment. “What gives us the audacity to tell you what you do and don’t need?” the ads asked.

    We’re young too.

    And we’re on your side.

    We know it’s a rough race.

    And we want you to win.

The Love ads appeared to be concerned with young people as exclusively as anything that appeared in the decade: they were illustrated with photos of youngsters in long hair and peppered with lines like, “You’re young. You’ve got healthy skin oils. You don’t need a grease job.” But the youth appeal was clearly only skin-deep. The ads ran in mainstream journals like Life and Harper’s Bazaar. They referred to martinis as a beverage that readers were familiar with. And the party in Paris that WRG threw to launch the brand featured superannuated luminaries like the Duke of Windsor, Gloria Swanson, and Diana Vreeland.70 As Mary Wells Lawrence said soon afterwards, “The products are created for a woman with a specific attitude about herself rather than of a specific age.”⁷¹ “Youth” was primarily being used here as shorthand for the new, anti-technocracy consumer ideal, the pictures of hip young people filling the same space once occupied by distant aristocratic beauties.⁷²