notes

one: A Cultural Perpetual Motion Machine: Management Theory and Consumer Revolution in the 1960s

1. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), pp. 320, 314, 316n.

2. Bork is particularly determined to pin the blame for everything he dislikes on “the sixties,” running down the list of contemporary evils and noting that each has its roots in the hated decade. See Robert Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 13. Compare this with Jerry Rubin, We Are Everywhere (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).

3. Peggy Noonan, “You’d Cry Too If It Happened to You,” in Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing, edited by David Brooks (New York: Vintage, 1996), p. 150.

4. Fred Barnes, “Revenge of the Squares,” The New Republic, March 13, 1995, p. 29. Counterculture and Great Society are linked almost whenever Gingrich speaks of the decade. “His enemy is ‘the Great Society counterculture model.’ In other words, the 1960s,” writes Fred Barnes (p. 23).

5. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, p. 53.

6. “California Clem,” direct-mail flyer produced by Jerry Weller for Congress, 1996. Photocopy in collection of author. The Democrat in question is Clem Balanoff, who lost the election.

7. See Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp. 274–80.

8. The Nike-Burroughs and Fruitopia campaigns are discussed in Leslie Savan, “Niked Lunch,” Village Voice, September 6, 1994, pp. 50–53; those for cars, beer, and fast food in Thomas Frank, “Just Break the Rules,” Washington Post, June 11, 1995, page C1–C2; those of R. J. Reynolds and Nike-Heron in Thomas Frank, “Selling Power,” the Chicago Reader, November 17, 1995, p. 10.

9. Rick Perlstein, “Who Owns the Sixties?” Lingua Franca, May/June 1996, p. 32.

10. The exceptions are David Farber, who tells the stories of city authorities in Chicago ’68 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) and Jane and Michael Stern, who include a chapter on suburban tastes in Sixties People (New York: Knopf, 1990).

11. Nicholas von Hoffman, We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us Against (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1989 [reprint of the 1968 book]), p. 261.

12. The American Social History Project, Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture and Society (New York: Pantheon, 1992), pp. 581, 580. Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties (New York: Pantheon, 1985), chapter 11. Attentive readers will notice that, while the ad is supposed to have been deceptively placed in underground publications, it is in fact reproduced from the pages of Rolling Stone. The ad ran there December 7, 1968. A few more recent versions of the co-optation theory include Richard Goldstein, Reporting the Counterculture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. xix; and Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images (New York: Basic Books, 1988), pp. 248–49. “During the 1960s, and at other moments since then,” Ewen writes, “the rise of alternative subcultures has generated renegade styles—verbal expressions, ways of dress, music, graphics—which particularly captivated young people, traditionally seen as the most lucrative sector of the style-consuming public. This sense of having fallen behind, and the attempt to catch up, shows up in the trade literature of the style industries.”

13. David Riesman, with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973 [1950]), p. 21.

14. William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956).

15. Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 60. See also Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), pp. 7–8.

16. On this see Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), p. 19.

17. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1962), p. 35.

18. Norman Mailer, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” reprinted in Advertisements for Myself (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959), passim. This enormously important essay has never been adequately recognized for what must either be counted its remarkable influence or its remarkable prognostication: Mailer here managed to predict the basic dialectic around which the cultural politics of the next thirty-five years would be structured. One must also note Mailer’s astonishingly backwards racial views: although expressed in terms of admiration rather than fear or hatred, his identification of black Americans with bodily pleasure, lack of inhibition, and sexual prowess conforms rather neatly to standard stereotypes and racial myths.

19. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 32.

20. Daniel Bell, among others, has made the argument that the counterculture represented the democratization of modernist impulses. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978), pp. xxvi–xxvii, 79.

21. It is important to note that, according to virtually every observer, the counterculture was a phenomenon distinct from the New Left. As Jack Whalen and Richard Flacks, two veterans of the New Left, insisted in 1989, the “moral framework” of the counterculture “emphasized personal rather than social change. In the code of the counterculture, what was valued was self-liberation—freeing impulse and emotion from social repression and psychic inhibition—and the fostering of persons aware of their needs and desires, and capable of expressing them.” The split between the New Left and the counterculture was obvious to all but the most hostile polemicists (one thinks of Gingrich, who promiscuously associates the counterculture with virtually every political movement to which he is opposed) at Woodstock: while the promoters and the rock stars enjoyed a success of mythical proportions, the pavilion set up for “the Movement” went largely ignored. See Jack Whalen and Richard Flacks, Beyond the Barricades: The Sixties Generation Grows Up (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), pp. 11, 13.

22. Life magazine, April 21 and 28, 1967, on Esalen, July 12, 1968.

23. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (New York: Anchor, 1969), pp. 50–51, 265, xiii.

24. Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America (New York: Random House, 1970, pp. 236–37, 237, 243. Interestingly, Mailer had also portrayed the ways of the Hipster as a new form of consciousness. Airy pretension seems to have been the inescapable literary mode when the subject was the counterculture.

25. For books on the sixties, see: Andrew Jamison and Ron Eyerman, Seeds of the Sixties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), and Meta Mendel-Reyes, Reclaiming Democracy: The Sixties in Politics and Memory (New York: Routledge, 1995).

26. W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990).

27. A PBS documentary series which commits itself to Making Sense of the Sixties begins by delineating the “rules” of being young in the fifties. The show’s narrator comments authoritatively: “One of them was: obey authority; don’t ask questions. In the ’60s, millions of young people would renounce that one. . . . Another rule: fit in with the group; don’t stand out; conform in your actions and your appearance. In the ’60s, great numbers of young people would, quote, ‘Do their own thing.’” Transcript of “Seeds of the Sixties,” part 1 of Making Sense of the Sixties (aired over PBS on January 21, 1991), p. 4.

28. This aphorism, more frequently found in British accounts of the sixties, is sometimes misattributed to Plato, though the sentiment fits. Note Republic IV, section 424: “The introduction of novel fashions in music is a thing to beware of as endangering the whole fabric of society, whose most important conventions are unsettled by any revolution in that quarter” (trans. Francis Macdonald Cornford, 1941).

29. Ralph J. Gleason, “It Ain’t Really Funny” (Rolling Stone, January 4, 1969), reprinted in The Age of Paranoia (New York: Pocket Books, 1972), p. 412.

30. Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, pp. 42, 44.

31. “Beat, the Christmas tree of Hip,” he wrote, “arrived with Kerouac, and because it is sweet and odd-ball, a cross between folklore and fairy tale, Madison Avenue took it up, they had to, this was the first phenomenon in years to come out of the Great Unwashed which Madison Avenue hadn’t rigged, manipulated, or foreseen” (Mailer, Advertisements for Myself, p. 278).

32. “Some of the attempts to co-opt the rhetoric of the revolution . . . have been pretty funny,” Gleason continued. “There was a commercial for Thom McAn shoes (aren’t they the ones who went through that phase with Ravi Shankar and World Pacific Records hustling the shoes?) in which the announcer talked about how odd it is that everything ‘we’ dig ‘they’ are against, and it turned out (not on) that he was rapping away about silver buckled shoes or some other lame idea.” See Ralph J. Gleason, “So Revolution Is Commercial,” reprinted in The Age of Paranoia (December 21, 1968), p. 408.

33. Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, pp. 71, 72, 38.

34. They are also commonplace to the point of hoax. See Alan Sokal, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Social Text 46–47, pp. 217–52.

35. John Fiske, Reading the Popular (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 17, 19, passim, 5, 8. Italics in original.

36. One noteworthy exception is Christopher Newfield, The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

37. Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. xxiv, xxviii, xx. There has been, of course, a great amount of commentary on the subject of this shift, generally siding with Susman and perceiving it as a change within capitalism, not a fundamental threat. See, for example, Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976), p. 70.

38. William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1993), pp. 385, 381, 290, 291.

39. Art Kleiner, The Age of Heretics: Heroes, Outlaws, and the Forerunners of Corporate Change (New York: Doubleday Currency, 1996), p. 10.

40. A typical such “summoning up” occurs in the January 8, 1996, issue of Newsweek, in which a photograph of a roomful of men in gray suits, white shirts, and horn-rimmed glasses is given the caption, “The myth of perfect management: Corporate executives meet in 1967” (pp. 28–29).

41. Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., My Years With General Motors (New York: Doubleday, 1990 [originally published 1963]). See, in particular, Sloan’s hilariously phlegmatic account of how he and GM reacted to the American entry into World War II (p. 185).

42. Fortune, February, 1951, p. 176. On the title’s origins, see p. 70. “U.S.A. The Permanent Revolution” was later reissued as a book by Prentice Hall.

43. Whyte, The Organization Man, p. 397.

44. Joseph G. Mason, How to Be a More Creative Executive (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960), p. 10.

45. Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960), pp. 61, 246.

46. See Kleiner, The Age of Heretics, p. 46.

47. Leary: “Letter from Timothy Leary,” dated September 18, 1970, Weatherman (n.p.: Ramparts Press, 1970), p. 518.

48. Robert Townsend, Up the Organization (New York: Knopf, 1970), pp. 11, 10, 9, 98, 71, 10, 53, 142.

49. Richard S. Tedlow, New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (New York: Basic Books, 1990), p. 6.

50. Tedlow, New and Improved, pp. 346, 103, 104.

51. Ibid., pp. 371–72. It is important to note here that no one considers Tedlow a conspiracy theorist or even a follower of Adorno for making such claims.

52. Stanley C. Hollander and Richard Germain, Was There a Pepsi Generation Before Pepsi Discovered It?: Youth-Based Segmentation in Marketing (Chicago: NTC Business Books, 1993), pp. 101, 109. On the inherent desirability of youth to marketers, Hollander and Germain write: “It may well be that the entire general experience (the gestalt) of the youthful years has a profound influence on subsequent dispositions. Moreover, early product and brand choices, especially if frequently and satisfactorily repeated, will establish barriers, but by no means impervious barriers, to rival options. Simultaneously, the high value accorded to youthfulness in the American culture will give the decisions of subsequent generations considerable weight in overcoming these barriers.”

53. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 287, 285.

54. Kleiner, The Age of Heretics, p. 20.

55. Cf. Art Kleiner, whose book explicitly grounds contemporary management theory in the revolutionary doings of the 1960s, both in the boardroom and in the streets of Haight Ashbury.

56. Irving Howe’s essay, “New Styles in Leftism,” in Selected Writings, 1950–1990 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), is probably the best-known embodiment of this critique.

57. Delmore Schwartz, “The Present State of Poetry,” Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, edited by Donald A. Dike and David H. Zucker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 45. This essay originally appeared in 1958.

58. Michael Harrington, “We Few, We Happy Few, We Bohemians,” Esquire, August 1972, pp. 164, 99.

59. Earl Shorris, “Love Is Dead,” New York Times Magazine, October 29, 1967, p. 114. IBM was a frequently used symbol of old-line corporate thinking.

60. Warren Hinckle: “A Social History of the Hippies,” Ramparts, March 1967, reprinted in Gerry Howard, ed., The Sixties: Art, Politics, and Media of Our Most Explosive Decade (New York: Paragon House, 1991), p. 226. Marshall Berman: “Sympathy for the Devil: Faust, the ’60s and the Tragedy of Development,” American Review, January 1974, reprinted in Howard, The Sixties, p. 496.

61. Ross, No Respect, pp. 96, 101, 96.

62. In this sense corporate use of rebellion helps to defuse what Daniel Bell calls one of the leading “cultural contradictions of capitalism,” linking leisure time in a sort of inverted relationship to work-time. “On the one hand,” Bell writes, “the business corporation wants an individual to work hard, pursue a career, accept delayed gratification—to be, in the crude sense, an Organization Man. And yet, in its products and its advertisements, the corporation promotes pleasure, instant joy, relaxing and letting go.” Hip consumerism encourages consumers not just to “let go,” but to consume as a means of rebelling symbolically against the work order. See Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, pp. 71–72.

63. See especially Michael Lewis, “The Rich: How They’re Different . . . Than They Used to Be,” New York Times Magazine, November 19, 1995, pp. 65–69.

64. See Perlstein, “Who Owns the Sixties?,” pp. 30–37.

two: Buttoned Down: High Modernism on Madison Avenue

1. The gender-charged term “Adman” will be used throughout because that was the standard parlance of the period. There were, of course, many women in advertising in the 1950s and 1960s, and some rose to positions of great prominence (most important, Mary Wells of Wells, Rich, Greene, Phyllis Robinson of Doyle Dane Bernbach, and Shirley Polykoff of Foote, Cone, and Belding, the author of the Clairol “Does She or Doesn’t She” campaign). But, by and large, most admen were, in fact, male.

2. Frederic Wakeman, The Hucksters (New York: Rinehart, 1946). The epigraph is from pp. 295–96; the quotations are from pp. 88 and 294–95.

3. As Frederic Wakeman’s former employer, Fairfax Cone of Foote, Cone, and Belding (the company that once handled the Lucky Strike account), wrote in 1969, “Even in 1946 advertising agency practice had gone far beyond the creation of a slogan, which was the principal contribution of Wakeman’s hero to the beauty-soap advertising around which the story revolved. Love that soap might indeed have been used by one of the soapers, but it would have required support based on a carefully built and researched selling proposition to back it up, and this was entirely omitted in the novel.” Quoted from Fairfax Cone, With All Its Faults: A Candid Account of Forty Years in Advertising (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969), p. 165.

4. Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955).

5. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance (New York: Basic Books, 1994), pp. 138, 162, 197, 217, 216.

6. Claude Hopkins, Scientific Advertising (Chicago: Advertising Publications, Inc., 1966), p. 213.

7. Edward Bernays, “The Theory and Practice of Public Relations: A Resumé,” in The Engineering of Consent, edited by Edward Bernays (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955), p. 4.

8. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: Cardinal editions, 1958), pp. 1; 2–3, 4, 207.

9. Packard, The Hidden Persuaders, pp. 4, 2, 207. James B. Twitchell, Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 111–16. According to Twitchell, Ogilvy & Mather once “found that 62 percent of the public believed that subliminal ads do exist and that 56 percent believed that such ads worked in motivating other people (not themselves, of course) to buy unwanted things” (p. 116).

10. Martin Mayer, Madison Avenue, U.S.A. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958). DDB is an exception to both rules; Rosser Reeves and David Ogilvy both continued to write copy as agency heads.

11. Ibid., pp. 29, 76, 280.

12. Ibid., pp. 13, 30. Wakeman himself, Mayer suggests, was part of the “disgruntled” creative legion that have “given the industry the unfortunate part of its reputation.”

13. “J. Walter Thompson Company,” Fortune, November, 1947, pp. 223, 97, 223, 101.

14. David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Villard Books, 1993), p. 226.

15. Rosser Reeves, Reality in Advertising (New York: Knopf, 1961). Advertising history is crowded with successful campaigns based on such a strategy: “It’s Toasted” for Lucky Strike (all cigarette tobacco is toasted); Schlitz beer bottles were “Washed with live steam,” as were all other beer bottles, etc.

16. Mayer, Madison Avenue, U.S.A., p. 49.

17. Reeves describes his strategy for discovering a USP thus: “When an agency turns loose a group of qualified scientists, when broad-scale, open-end research and testing are started, it is astonishing how many radical differences come swimming to the top—differences either in the product, or in the use of the product, which had not been suspected before” (Reeves, Reality in Advertising, p. 54). The summary of the Reeves style is from Advertising Age, February 14, 1966, p. 40.

18. Ted Bates Historical Reel of television commercials at the Museum of Television & Radio (MT&R), New York. Mayer wrote: “Bates’s advertising, with its heavy emphasis on medical testimony, vastly irritates creative people at other agencies; the standard objection runs: ‘You can always tell a Bates ad by the white coat.’ And a high executive of one agency, showing deep distaste, described the Bates technique as ‘the philosophy of the uncheckable claim’” (Mayer, Madison Avenue, U.S.A., p. 50). Reeves quoted in Advertising Age, February 14, 1966, p. 40.

19. Quote from Reeves, Reality in Advertising, p. 72; the anecdote appears in Mayer, Madison Avenue, U.S.A., p. 35.

20. David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man (New York: Atheneum, 1963) pp. 31, 46, 93, chapter 6 passim, 123–24, chapter 9 passim.

21. David Ogilvy, “Standards for Judging the Graphics of Print Advertisements,” in Advertising Directions, edited by Edward M. Gottschall and Arthur Hawkins (New York: Art Directions Book Company, 1959), p. 39.

22. As Larry Dobrow has written of four of Ogilvy’s more successful print advertisements (for Schweppes, Hathaway, Puerto Rico tourism, and British tourism), all “are just about identical in appearance. They adhere almost slavishly to Ogilvy’s rigid requirements for building readership.” See Larry Dobrow, When Advertising Tried Harder. The Sixties: The Golden Age of American Advertising (New York: Friendly Press, 1984), p. 37.

23. Ogilvy, “Standards for Judging,” p. 39, and Confessions, p. 121.

24. Ibid.

25. Reeves, Reality in Advertising, pp. 106, 116, 122.

26. Reeves could barely restrain his rage at such contests. “Recently, an advertising magazine asked the creative people of twenty-five top agencies to pick the three worst TV commercials of the past several years,” he wrote in Reality in Advertising. “These men and women picked (as the worst!) two of the most dramatically successful commercials of the past twenty years. One had introduced a new product, and in just eighteen months had swept aside all competition. . . . The second commercial, in another field, had done almost the same thing. The reasons given by this panel were almost as odd as their choice: ‘No trace of cleverness or brightness,’ said one writer. ‘Unoriginal,’ said a second. ‘Dull,’ said a third. ‘I am glad I did not write them,’ said a fourth. And these people are advertising men! And advertising men are supposed to be salesmen!” These were almost certainly Bates ads, made according to Reeves’s principles. See Reeves, Reality in Advertising, pp. 114–15.

27. These ads appear in the February, 1951, issue of Fortune, which featured the “Permanent Revolution” articles.

28. John Furr of J. Walter Thompson, Chicago, interviewed by Thomas Frank, July 6, 1993, at his office in Chicago. Mr. Furr is presently Worldwide Director of Training for JWT.

29. William H. Whyte, “The Copywriters Speak,” Fortune, September 1952, pp. 188, 190.

30. “J. Walter Thompson Company,” Fortune, November, 1947, p. 210.

31. Reeves, Reality in Advertising, p. 119.

32. Ogilvy, Confessions, p. 20. Ogilvy’s quote is not attributed.

three: Advertising as Cultural Criticism: Bill Bernbach versus the Mass Society

1. On how admen see the prerevolutionary past, see Jackson Lears, “See Spots Run,” In These Times, April 15, 1996, p. 27, and Randall Rothenberg, Where the Suckers Moon: The Life and Death of an Advertising Campaign (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 217. On Jay Chiat, see Tom Frank, “Rebellion Ad Nauseam,” Chicago Reader, June 23, 1995; on Wieden & Kennedy, see Rothenberg, Where the Suckers Moon, especially pp. 216, 302.

2. On Rubicam: Stephen R. Fox, The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1984), p. 129. On Getchell: quoted in Fox, pp. 167, 164.

3. Even Martin Mayer points this out. “Advertising’s contribution here is, on the whole, to increase diversity,” he writes. “Advertising lives by the product difference, real or asserted, by appealing to different tastes in values. . . . If advertising looks like other advertising, as so much of it does, the fault lies in the limited skill of many practitioners (and in the fact that advertisers, knowing that their competitors are smart, insist on ads similar to the competition’s ads). The purpose is not to make anyone ‘conform’” (Mayer, Madison Avenue, U.S.A., pp. 318–19).

4. Dobrow, When Advertising Tried Harder, p. 12.

5. Rothenberg, Where the Suckers Moon, p. 66.

6. In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Daniel Bell argues that a certain species of cultural and philosophical “antinomianism”—“an antinomian attitude to moral norms and even to the idea of cultural judgment itself”—has become the central doctrine of postmodernity. Aesthetic modernism’s assault on “orthodoxy” has become a commonplace of bourgeois life, he asserts, and transgression has become an act of routine: “The paradox is that ‘heterodoxy’ itself has become conformist in liberal circles, and exercises that conformity under the banner of an antinomian flag” (Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, pp. xxii, xxvii).

7. Bob Levenson, Bill Bernbach’s Book (New York: Villard, 1987), pp. xvi, xvii. This work is a compilation of Bernbach’s aphorisms, writings, and DDB’s best-remembered ads.

8. Bill Bernbach Said . . . , pamphlet, n.d., n.p, in the library of the DDB-Needham [Doyle Dane Bernbach], New York; Advertising Age, July 3, 1967, p. 8. Levenson, Bill Bernbach’s Book, p. ix.

9. Bill Bernbach, “Facts Are Not Enough,” pamphlet reprinting a speech given at the 1980 meeting of the AAAA, p. 9. In the library of DDB-Needham, New York.

10. Bill Bernbach Said, n.p.

11. Mayer, Madison Avenue, U.S.A., pp. 67–68.

12. Bob Levenson and Len Sirowitz, interview by Henry Lee, Madison Avenue, June 1969, p. 28.

13. George Lois recalls the significance of the resulting change in the way advertising was produced: “Up to that time, basically, most creative work was written by writers, who maybe met with clients, but basically took their information from marketing people, and then they handed what they wanted to do to the art director, and the art director laid it out. They were called ‘layout men.’ And it all changed with Bernbach saying no, putting these two talented people in there with the marketing people, getting all the information, and let them create something mind-bogglingly fresh and different.” George Lois, interviewed by Thomas Frank, May 13, 1992. Jerry Della Femina offers a similar picture of the prerevolutionary creative process: “To the establishment agencies, an art director is a guy who draws. ‘He’s our drawing guy.’ So they go in to their drawing guy with a headline that says ‘Fights Headaches Three Ways.’ Maybe the copywriter has got a little scribble of how the ad should look. . . . The copywriter comes in and says, ‘Okay, here’s what we did. We want to say ‘Fights Headaches Three Ways’ and I think we should show a big pill.’ The art director says, ‘Terrific.’” See Jerry Della Femina, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor: Front Line Dispatches from the Advertising War, edited by Charles Sopkin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), p. 153.

14. Interview with Phyllis Robinson in Tadahisa Nishio, Great American Copywriters, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Seibundo-Shinkosha Publishing Co., 1971), p. 238.

15. Phyllis Robinson, acceptance speech upon being elected to the Copywriters Hall of Fame, as printed in DDB’s house journal, DDB News, July 1968, p. 2.

16. As quoted in Mayer, Madison Avenue, U.S.A., p. 67.

17. Charlie Moss, interviewed by Thomas Frank, at Wells, Rich, Greene, New York, June 2, 1992.

18. Victor Navasky, “Advertising Is A Science? An Art? A Business?” New York Times Magazine, November 20, 1966, pp. 170, 169.

19. Charlie Moss, June 2, 1992, interview with author.

20. Rothenberg refers to one of these, an ad done by Wieden & Kennedy and featuring Lou Reed, “art that explicated, through irony, camp, iconic reference or self-reference, the commercial itself and the consumer culture of which it was a part” (Where the Suckers Moon, p. 211). Twitchell calls these “The jig is up” advertising, and notes their prevalence in appealing to “Generation X.” See Twitchell, Adcult USA (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 238–42.

21. Rothenberg, Where the Suckers Moon, p. 66.

22. Advertisement for the 1959 Dodge, Life, October 20, 1958.

23. Advertisement for the 1958 Edsel, Life, April 14, 1958; Advertisement for the 1961 Buick, Life, March 17, 1961.

24. These were features discussed in advertising for, respectively, the 1958 Chevrolet, the 1958 Pontiac, and the 1959 Dodge. “Quadra-Power Roadability” was apparently a suspension system. “Finger-tip TorqueFlite” referred to the 1959 Dodge’s push-button transmission controls. See Life, February 3, 1958; January 13, 1958; October 20, 1958.

25. 1955 Cadillac and 1963 Chevrolet commercials in collections of Museum of Television & Radio (MT&R), New York.

26. Advertisement for the 1959 Chevrolet, Life, October 20, 1958.

27. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), p. 226.

28. In 1959, art director Wallace W. Elton noted that, “Every car artist had his own pet system for ‘stretching’ cars,” involving “wide-angle lenses and print manipulation” in order to “keep pace in the trend toward exaggeration.” See Advertising Directions, edited by Edward M. Gottschall and Arthur Hawkins (New York: Art Directions Book Company, 1959), p. 90.

29. Navasky, “Advertising Is a Science?” p. 169; Dobrow on buzzwords and photo-retouching, When Advertising Tried Harder, p. 9.

30. Della Femina, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor, p. 27.

31. Volkswagen advertisements, Life, November 5, 1965; June 9, 1961; November 2, 1962; October 8, 1965; February 5, 1965.

32. Lowrey: 1965 Annual. Utica: 1963 Annual. Benson & Hedges: WRG agency reel. Listerine: JWT collection, Duke University library.

33. Volkswagen advertisements, Life, February 10, 1961; November 10, 1961; July 15, 1966.

34. Volkswagen advertisements, Life, April 17, 1964; September 16, 1966; February 4, 1966. This last ad contained this immortal line: “When you drive the latest fad to a party, and find 2 more fads there ahead of you, it catches you off your avantgarde.”

35. Volkswagen ads, reproduced in 1964, 1963 Annuals.

36. Volkswagen advertisement, 1965 Annual.

37. Volkswagen commercial, Museum of Television & Radio (MT&R).

38. Volkswagen commercial, 1969, MT&R. Print ad from 1960 reproduced in Dobrow, When Advertising Tried Harder, p. 85.

39. George Lois with Bill Pitts, George, Be Careful: A Greek Florist’s Kid in the Roughhouse World of Advertising (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972), p. 57. The irony that the creative revolution originated in the collaboration of a largely Jewish agency and a German company manufacturing the Nazi car has since become a standard part of advertising lore. See Robert Glatzer, The New Advertising (New York: Citadel Press, 1970), p. 19; Rothenberg, Where the Suckers Moon, pp. 63–64; Charles Goodrum and Helen Dalrymple, Advertising in America (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), p. 244.

40. Larry Dobrow writes that the Volkswagen campaign is “considered by most experts to be the best in the history of advertising” (Dobrow, When Advertising Tried Harder, p. 9). In Advertising in America: The First 200 Years, Charles Goodrum and Helen Dalrymple write that “the innovative Doyle Dane Bernbach campaign had a major part” in Volkswagen’s expanding export business. Furthermore, “people stopped at the ads and read every word and were able to recall the illustration and the point months after the publication . . .” ([New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990] p. 244).

41. Advertisement for Parker pens, Life, November 10, 1961.

42. Advertisement for El Al airline, Life, January 20, 1967.

43. Ad for American Tourister luggage, Life, December 6, 1968.

44. Commercial for American Tourister, MT&R. Here, as in the Volkswagen commercial mocking the game show, one can discern a certain ugly undercurrent of contempt for consumerism’s suckers.

45. Advertisement for Chivas Regal, reprinted in the 1964 Art Directors’ Annual, n.p.

46. Advertisements for Calvert Whiskey, Life, June 19, 1964; September 9, 1966.

47. Advertisements for Calvert Whiskey, Life, October 7, 1966; December 18, 1964.

48. This ad reproduced in Madison Avenue, September, 1966.

49. Advertisement for Avis, reproduced in 1965 Annual. The Avis campaign was one of DDB’s most spectacular successes. In 1967, Editor & Publisher quoted Winston Morrow, president of Avis, as saying: “Since 1963, when DDB launched us on the We Try Harder road ‘because we’re only No. 2,’ the results of this campaign have been the best that ever happened to Avis and indeed to the whole rent-a-car industry.”

“Trying harder, via the now famous DDB theme,” the magazine continued, “has seen Avis business climb from $20 million to $100 million in a four-year period. And as more people slammed Avis doors, the ad budget—split roughly between print and electronic media—grew accordingly from $1.2 million to $6 million” (Tony Brenna, “A Cause for Client—Agency Contentment,” Editor & Publisher, December 9, 1967, p. 18).

50. Commercials for Campbell’s Pork and Beans, n.d. [1965], MT&R; Burlington socks, 1966, MT&R.

51. Alka-Seltzer television commercial, 1970, MT&R. This commercial is discussed in almost every book on the advertising of the 1960s. Nonetheless, it was not a successful ad in the most tangible of ways for DDB: soon after it appeared, DDB lost the Alka-Seltzer account (although the reasons for this are, of course, hotly disputed).

52. Commercial for Johnson for President, 1964, DDB reel, MT&R.

four: Three Rebels: Advertising Narratives of the Sixties

1. Reebok commercial quoted in Jean-Marie Dru, Disruption: Overturning Conventions and Shaking Up the Marketplace (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996), p. 104. The commercial was made by the ultra-creative Chiat/Day firm, and the language quoted here seems to intentionally echo certain of Bill Bernbach’s famous sayings. Also, the phrase “U.B.U.” echoes a Doyle Dane Bernbach campaign for Clairol of the early 1970s, in which Nice ’n’ Easy hair-coloring is sold with the slogan: “It lets me be me.”

2. Specifically advertising writer Robert Glatzer (quoted in Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, excerpted in The Book of Gossage: A Compilation [Chicago: The Copy Workshop, 1995], p. 301).

3. Howard Gossage, Is There Any Hope for Advertising?, reprinted in The Book of Gossage, pp. 5, 7, 35. The article for Harper’s was entitled “The Golden Twig” and was included as Chapter 4 in Is There Any Hope.

4. Gossage, The Book of Gossage, pp. 17, 39, 38.

5. In Is There Any Hope for Advertising? Gossage claims that both campaigns were great successes. The peculiar mail-in coupons that accompanied the Irish Whiskey effort generated unusually large responses, even when nothing was being given away (pp. 177–78). The pink air campaign is legendary, and Gossage stresses that it was designed the way it was because Fina was more interested in prestige and public awareness than sales per se (p. 56).

6. Charles Sopkin, “What a Tough Young Kid with Fegataccio . . . ,” New York Times Magazine, January 26, 1969, p. 32.

7. Della Femina, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor, pp. 13, 14–15.

8. Ibid., p. 66; chapter 4, passim; p. 68. When Della Femina takes a job at the (small, creative) Daniel & Charles agency, “I found that the whole place was filled with young guys who suddenly discovered that somebody was going to pay them a lot of money for the rest of their lives for doing this thing called advertising, and all of us got caught up in the insanity of it and went crazy. A whole group of people slowly went out of their skulls.”

9. Ibid., p. 35.

10. Ibid., p. 252.

11. George Lois, interview with author, May 13, 1992.

12. George Lois with Bill Pitts, What’s the Big Idea? How to Win with Outrageous Ideas (New York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 272.

13. Lois, What’s the Big Idea?, pp. 12–13, 46.

14. Henry Lee, “Lois Holland Callaway Inc.’s George Lois,” Madison Avenue, March 1970, p. 22.

15. Paul Leinberger and Bruce Tucker, The New Individualists: The Generation after the Organization Man (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), see chapter 2.

16. George Lois, The Art of Advertising (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1977), passim.

17. George Lois with Bill Pitts, George, Be Careful, pp. 46, 38–39.

18. Ibid., p. 85.

19. Ibid., p. 78.

20. Ibid., pp. 76, 121, 80, 78, 77.

21. George Lois, letter to the editor of Madison Avenue, March, 1965, p. 13. Ad agencies making public stock offerings seems to have been one of the less auspicious upshots of the rage for professionalization that accompanied the Revolution. It later backfired badly.

22. Lois, George, Be Careful, p. 161.

23. Henry Lee, “George Lois,” Madison Avenue, March 1970, p. 20. Italics in original.

24. “The Three Musketeers,” Madison Avenue, January, 1968, p. 13.

25. Clarence Newman, “3 Admen, 1 Room Equal $30 Million,” Newsday, June 11, 1968, pp. 11A, 13A.

26. George Lois, interview with author, May 13, 1992.

27. Lois, What’s the Big Idea?, p. 78.

28. Ibid., pp. 79, 4, 145. Italics in original.

29. Ibid., p. 50. There is a paragraph break between these two sentences; they are in a list of Lois’s adages.

30. Newman, “3 Admen, 1 Room Equal $30 Million.”

31. Newsday, June 11, 1968, p. 11A.

32. Both ads are in the collection of the Museum of Television & Radio (MT&R), New York.

33. Lois, George, Be Careful, pp. 170, 172.

34. “Shut Up, Whites”: 1964 Annual. “Who Says”: Lois, George, Be Careful, p. 83. Anecdote: ibid., pp. 81, 82. Italics in original.

five: “How Do We Break These Conformists of Their Conformity?”: Creativity Conquers All

1. “How To Do It Different” was the title of a speech given by Bill Bernbach in 1956 (Mayer, Madison Avenue, U.S.A., p. 66). Epigraph is from Bill Bernbach Said . . . , n.p.

2. Madison Avenue, January, 1970, pp. 33, 35.

3. Della Femina, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor, p. 29.

4. George Lois, interview with the author, May 13, 1992.

5. Madison Avenue, October, 1965, p. 46. The presidents of AWANY at the time were Lon Hill and Martin Solow of Solow/Wexton. Italics in original.

6. Advertising Age, February 14, 1966, pp. 3, 40. See also New York Times, February 9, 1966, p. 51.

7. Kevin Goldman, Conflicting Accounts: The Creation and Crash of the Saatchi and Saatchi Advertising Empire (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p. 85.

8. Dave Cleary, a vice president at Young & Rubicam, quoted in Hanley Norins, The Compleat Copywriter (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), p. 14.

9. Advertisement for Geer, DuBois in The New Yorker, January 21, 1967.

10. Nicholas Samstag, “You Can’t Make a Good Advertisement Out of Statistics,” Madison Avenue, January 1966, pp. 27, 62. This is a selection from Samstag’s book Bamboozled: How Business is Bamboozled by the Ad-Boys (New York: J. H. Heineman, 1966). Italics in original.

11. Sherman E. Rogers, “Impatience Is the Virtue,” Printers’ Ink, April 8, 1966, p. 72.

12. Hanley Norins, “Must ‘Science’ Be a Dirty Word in the Creative Department?” Madison Avenue, December 1966, p. 35, 34. It’s unclear, but I think the second quotation is from someone by the name of Rudolph Flesch.

13. Chester Posey, “Today’s Ads Must Search for the Unexpected,” Advertising Age, December 6, 1965, pp. 101–5.

14. Bev (R. Beverley) Corbin, “Conform with the Non-conformists,” Creative Forum Paper #9, November, 1966, J. Walter Thompson Company. In JWT archives, Duke University. Reprinted in Madison Avenue, January 1967, p. 10.

15. Quoted in Victor Navasky, “Advertising Is a Science? An Art? A Business?” New York Times Magazine, November 20, 1966, p. 172.

16. Rothenberg, Where the Suckers Moon, p. 441n.

17. Advertising Age, May 17, 1971, p. 63.

18. “Chat with an ad-man head,” Marketing/Communications, January 1968, p. 65.

19. One such was the Ad Age columnist Harry McMahan, who wrote unhappily in 1968 that “Very positively, the agency business is in transition from the ‘Marketing’ and ‘Research’ banners of the ’50s to the gold-tasseled ‘Creative’ banner of the ’70s. Major clients have let it be known to Madison Ave. by their account shifts, agency to agency. The rise of Wells, Rich, Greene to $100,000,000 in billing in the last two years has confirmed the ugly truth to even the old line slide rule boys.” Quoted in Harry McMahan, Ad Age, October 14, 1968. From WRG library, New York City.

20. Martin Mayer, “The Big Invisible Sell,” Saturday Evening Post, March 13, 1965, p. 25.

21. Newsweek, August 18, 1969, p. 62.

22. All quotes from “Leber Katz Paccione,” Madison Avenue, December 1965, pp. 39, 40, 39. LKP specialized in racy double-entendres that appealed to partisans of the Sexual Revolution, then still in its Playboy phase. Their campaign for Revlon’s Intimate perfume featured a headline that read, “What makes a shy girl get Intimate?,” and their ads for a brand of brassiere asked “Undress a chic woman and what do you see?”

23. All quotes from “Delehanty, Kurnit & Geller,” Madison Avenue, January, 1966, pp. 48–53, 61.

24. All quotes from “Solow/Wexton,” Madison Avenue, April, 1966, pp. 50, 47.

25. Dust jacket, Lois, George, Be Careful (1972).

26. Ibid., p. 86.

27. Georg Olden, “Conference Report,” in Art Directors’ Club of New York, 45th Annual of Advertising and Editorial Art and Design (New York: Comet Press, 1966), n.p.

28. Carl Ally, quoted in Victor Navasky, “Advertising Is A Science? An Art? A Business?” New York Times Magazine, November 20, 1966, p. 170.

29. Madison Avenue, March, 1970, pp. 14, 40.

30. Della Femina, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor, p. 152.

31. Ibid., p. 153.

32. Robert Glatzer, The New Advertising (New York: The Citadel Press, 1970), p. 139. This is a little overstated. Fairfax Cone was renowned for creativity, and Glatzer goes on to praise FCB’s famous campaigns for Clairol and Contac.

33. All quotes from “What’s Up with Jack Tinker and Partners?” Madison Avenue, August, 1965, pp. 14, 17, 18, 51; and “What’s with Jack Tinker and Partners?” Madison Avenue, January, 1967, p. 25. Two articles with almost identical titles.

34. Madison Avenue, September, 1966, pp. 29, 32.

35. “A Creative Evolution at Benton & Bowles,” Madison Avenue, October 1966, pp. 35, 38, 37; “New Creative Wave at Benton & Bowles,” Madison Avenue, January 1970, pp. 15, 18.

36. Jerry Fields, “Is Immaturity Incurable in Youth?” Madison Avenue, July 1966, p. 25.

37. Jerry Della Femina, “The Big Cold Agency,” Marketing/Communications, October 1967, p. 61. Della Femina heaps much scorn on Ted Bates in his 1970 memoirs. Della Femina and Sopkin, p. 102.

38. Interview with Shepard Kurnit by Henry Lee, Madison Avenue, April 1969, p. 22.

39. Bob Fearon, “Punt, Ron,” Madison Avenue, November 1969, pp. 40, 39. Rosenfeld himself opined in 1969 that “Many of them [the admen he worked with at JWT] were using their intelligence and creativity to keep their jobs, instead of using it to do their jobs. Any originality on their parts threatened the ‘system.’” Ron Rosenfeld quoted in Advertising News of New York (ANNY), October 24, 1969, p. 11.

six: Think Young: Youth Culture and Creativity

1. Cadwell and Davis of the Cadwell Davis Company, in Madison Avenue, May 1968, p. 20.

2. The exact date of this merging is little-discussed in industry histories. Stephen Fox, who characterizes the advertising industry as a cultural laggard rather than a cultural instigator, refers to the change but gets his dates strangely wrong. He erroneously puts the “Summer of Love” in 1965 (the term usually refers to the summer of 1967) and then asserts that Mary Wells’s “Love Power” slogan only came into use in 1968, thereby establishing a lag time of three years. But, in fact, Wells had already made “love” into one of the pillars of her advertising theory by May 1967, at the very beginning of the “Summer of Love.” (See Advertising Age, May 29, 1967, “Present Product with Love: Wells; Don’t Overdo Presentation: Frank to WSAAA”). Fox, The Mirror Makers, p. 271.

3. Bill Pitts in George Lois, The Art of Advertising, n.p.

4. The Book of Gossage, pp. 13, 14.

5. Richard Lorber and Ernest Fladell, The Gap (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), pp. 16, 25, 6. Excerpts from The Gap were printed as a cover story by none other than Life magazine, May 17, 1968.

6. As quoted in Madison Avenue, June 1967, p. 22. Italics in original. See also the scathing editorial in the Wall Street Journal, August 15, 1966, p. 8.

7. Merle Steir, “The Now People,” Madison Avenue, June 1967, p. 24. Steir was a partner in a firm called “Youth Concepts,” which specialized in the hip market and was the subject of the Fortune article quoted below.

8. Leo Burnett, “Advertising and the Critical Generation,” Madison Avenue, June 1967, p. 28. In particular, Burnett singled out “their refusal to come limply into line . . . their insistence on a reexamination of what someone has called ‘received values’ . . . their sharp-eyed scrutiny of ‘hand-me-down’ beliefs, ‘hand-me-down’ ways of doing things.” Ellipses in original.

9. Hanley Norins, “Join the Revolution—Get Ad readers into the Act,” Advertising Age, December 1, 1969, p. 86.

10. E. B. Weiss, “Youth Junks the ‘Junk Culture,’” Advertising Age, September 7, 1970, p. 35.

11. Leo Bogart, “Youth Market Isn’t All That Different,” Advertising Age, April 12, 1971, p. 37.

12. Both statistics vary from place to place. The source at hand is Madison Avenue magazine, which gives the proportion of the youth population to the population as a whole as half of the people being under the age of twenty-five already in 1967 (June 1967, p. 21). On other occasions, the statistic is given as half under twenty-eight or under thirty; sometimes it has not yet happened but will by 1970 or 1975. The $13 billion figure is cited in an article that appeared in Esquire in 1965; the article goes with more than half of the population being under the age of twenty-five by the end of 1965 and also gives $25 billion as an equally correct figure, if one counts the youth market as spanning the ages of thirteen to twenty-two rather than fifteen to nineteen. See Grace and Fred M. Hechinger, “In the Time It Takes You to Read These Lines the American Teen-ager Will Have Spent $2,378.22,” Esquire, July 1965, p. 65.

Some more precise figures are provided by Sam B. Vitt of the media department of Ted Bates, who defined the youth market as being between the ages of ten and twenty-four, making up “51 million people, or about 26 percent of the U.S. population. We shall also assume this age bracket to represent directly and/or indirectly from 12 to 100 billion dollars” (Sam B. Vitt, “Media and the Youth Market,” Madison Avenue, June, 1967, p. 38).

The flexibility gives this seemingly exact marketing premise a certain air of myth, like the announcements of the various figures in the Woodstock film that their gathering is the “third largest city in New York,” and later the “third largest city in the world.” Any way one looks at it, the youth market was massive during the 1960s.

13. Advertising Age, January 9, 1967, p. 55.

14. Merle Steir, “The Now People,” Madison Avenue, June 1967, p. 50.

15. Vitt, “Media and the Youth Market”; also Hechingers, “Teen-ager Will Have Spent $2,378.22,” p. 65.

16. “The New Creativity,” Creative Forum Paper #22, January, 1968, reprinted from Ad Daily. In JWT archives, Duke University.

17. “Advertising’s Creative Explosion,” Newsweek, August 18, 1969, pp. 62–71.

18. Cf. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 44–48.

19. In 1968, Philip Dougherty of the New York Times observed the startling number of comparatively young people then heading large agencies. The president of N. W. Ayer, he noted with surprise, was planning to retire at the age of forty-seven, and giant Young & Rubicam had just that year appointed 36-year-old Stephen O. Frankfurt president (New York Times, September 4, 1968, p. 70).

20. E. B. Weiss, “Is Creative Advertising a Young Business?” Advertising Age, September 2, 1968, p. 41.

21. Jerry Fields, “Think Young,” Madison Avenue, February 1965, pp. 52, 53.

22. E. B. Weiss, “Ad World’s Young Potential Rebels Are Copping Out,” Advertising Age, December 7, 1970, p. 1. It is interesting to note that Maxwell Dane, another of DDB’s principals, was number four on Richard Nixon’s list of “political enemies” to be harassed, apparently because of the agency’s role in the 1964 Johnson campaign. See Advertising Age, July 2, 1973, p. 1.

23. Advertising Age, January 29, 1968, p. 76.

24. Fox, The Mirror Makers, p. 270.

25. Marketing/Communications, January 1968, pp. 63–65. M/C was the successor magazine to Printer’s Ink.

26. Fred Danzig, “Ten Who Make Madison Avenue Move,” Rapport, n.d. (ca. 1969), pp. 32, 35.

27. Paul Lippman, “Evolution of the Art Director,” Madison Avenue, February 1967, p. 71.

28. Charlie Moss, interviewed by Thomas Frank at the offices of Wells, Rich, Greene, New York City, June 2, 1992.

29. Danzig, “Ten Who Make Madison Avenue Move,” pp. 30, 31, 35.

30. “Besides raw talent, the most precious trait a creative person can have is ‘openness’—being open to ideas, to people, to experience, to change. Hanley is one of the most open, least-judgmental people I know. He’s the kind of man who discovered the Beatles before his kids. In fact, I remember one of our colleagues saying, ‘Can you imagine having Hanley for a father? You’d have nothing to rebel against.’” Alex Kroll in Hanley Norins, The Young & Rubicam Traveling Creative Workshop (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1990), p. xiii.

31. Charlie Moss, interview with author on June 2, 1992.

32. Packard, Hidden Persuaders, p. 19 and passim; Dichter’s report is quoted in Advertising Age, October 16, 1967, p. 34.

33. Carol Callaway Muehl and Thomas D. Murray, “Psychedelic Advice for the Creative Adman,” Madison Avenue, September 1967, pp. 34, 42, 42. Ellipsis and italics in original.

34. Advertising Age, January 19, 1970, p. 42.

35. Case is quoted in Advertising Age, January 23, 1967, p. P2; Steir, “The Now People,” p. 24.

36. Hanley Norins, “Join the Revolution—Get Ad Readers Into the Act,” Advertising Age, December 1, 1969, p. 87.

37. Advertising Age, March 22, 1971, p. 6.

38. Lee Adler, “Cashing-In on the Cop-Out,” Business Horizons, February 1970, pp. 26–27.

39. Advertising Age, April 29, 1968, p. 64. “The Youthful World of Spade and Archer,” Madison Avenue, April 1968, pp. 39, 40.

40. Hanley Norins, “Join the Revolution—Get Ad Readers Into the Act,” Advertising Age, December 1, 1969, pp. 85–86, 87.

41. See, in particular, Hollander and Germain, Was There a Pepsi Generation Before Pepsi Discovered It? p. 97.

42. Mary Wells Lawrence, “Baby Boom, Creative Boom,” Advertising Age, June 18, 1990. WRG library, New York City.

43. Jerry Fields, “Think Young,” Madison Avenue, February 1965, p. 15.

44. Madison Avenue, June 1967, p. 22.

45. Advertising Age, September 26, 1966, p. 24.

46. Merchandising Week, May 6, 1968, p. 8.

47. “Why Youth Needs a New Definition,” Business Week, December 12, 1970, pp. 34, 35.

48. Advertising Age, October 27, 1969, p. 100.

49. Study quoted in Advertising Age, November 7, 1966, p. 2.

50. Advertising Age, March 22, 1971, p. 6.

51. Bob Fearon in Madison Avenue, May 1968, pp. 55–56. It is not stated who is being quoted, or why. First paragraph entirely in boldface.

52. Steir, “The Now People,” p. 24.

53. Advertising Age, November 22, 1971, p. 36.

54. Madison Avenue, December 1967, p. 16.

55. Don Grant, interview with Mary Wells Lawrence, Advertising Age, April 5, 1971, p. 1.

56. Quoted in Newsweek, October 3, 1966, p. 82.

57. Mary Wells Lawrence, “Baby Boom, Creative Boom,” Advertising Age, June 18, 1990.

58. Mary Wells Lawrence interview, Advertising Age, April 5, 1971, p. 58.

59. Robert Dietsch, “The Creative Ad Age Is Here,” Fort Worth Press, December 20, 1967. In WRG library, New York City.

60. Mary Wells, “Profile of the New Advertising Agency,” Newsweek, July 3, 1967. WRG library, New York City.

61. Quoted in Advertising Age, April 17, 1967. WRG Library, New York City.

62. As quoted in Harry McMahan’s column, Advertising Age, March 25, 1968. Also in Advertising Age, March 11, 1968. In WRG library, New York City.

63. Quoted in Philip Siekman, “On Lovable Madison Avenue with Mary, Dick, and Stew,” Fortune, August 1966, p. 144.

64. Mary Wells Lawrence, “Baby Boom, Creative Boom,” Advertising Age, June 18, 1990.

65. “The disadvantages of advertising Benson & Hedges 100s.” Life magazine, February 16, 1968. The Benson & Hedges campaign was another of the decade’s great advertising successes, with a commercial that always makes “best of” lists and an impressive sales record. An early verdict came from a “top Philip Morris” executive: “In all my experience in this business, I have never seen such an immediate sales result from an ad.” Quoted in Newsweek, October 3, 1966, p. 84.

66. “Driving school,” “Try It, You’ll Like It,” and “Oh, the Disadvantages” are included in a WRG agency reel; the Javelin spot and the Alka-Seltzer ‘tummy commercial’ are at the Museum of Television & Radio (MT&R), New York.

67. See Advertising Age, May 29, 1967, and May 13, 1968. WRG library, New York City.

68. Charlie Moss, interview with author, June 2, 1992.

69. Della Femina, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor, p. 151.

70. This bizarre gathering, held at the briefly fashionable “Drugstore 13” in Paris, probably merits more discussion. The event was covered in the New York Times, January 28, 1969, p. 30; and in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, January 30, 1969. Both are in the WRG library, New York City.

71. As quoted in Drug Trade News, February 24, 1969, p. 25.

72. Ads for Love cosmetics, Life, March 7, 1969; April 18, 1969. The university-library copies of Life magazine where I read these ads had had every picture of rock stars and other countercultural heroes clipped out. Oddly, many of the Love ads had been similarly edited, curious testimony to their appeal.

seven. The Varieties of Hip: Advertisements of the 1960s

1. Advertisements for Campbell’s, Life, December 6, 1968; S & H Green Stamps, Life, September 6, 1968; Raleigh bicycles, Life, April 18, 1969; Buick, Life, October 10, 1969; Montgomery Ward, Life, April 18, August 1, and October 10, 1969.

2. Quoted in Forbes, September 15, 1969, p. 88.

3. Advertisement for St. Regis Paper Company, Forbes, August 1, 1969.

4. Advertisement for Vaco tools, Esquire, May 1969.

5. Ad for Clairol cosmetics, Ladies Home Journal, October 1967.

6. Ads for Dash, Ladies Home Journal, June and October 1967.

7. Top Job commercial, the Grey Advertising reel, Museum of Television & Radio (MT&R), New York.

8. Advertisements for Gordon’s gin, Life, November 17, 1967; Heublein cocktails, Life, July 12, 1968; Gilbey’s gin, Life, January 31, 1969; Wolfschmidt Vodka, Life, December 6, 1968; Smirnoff Vodka, Macleans, September and November 1970.

9. Ad for Oldsmobile, Life, October 13, 1967; ad for Colby’s department stores, Life, May 10, 1968.

10. Commercial for Barney’s Men’s Store, MT&R. Variations on the “We Let You Be You” slogan have been used by many different companies, most notably a campaign for Clairol Nice ’n’ Easy hair-coloring in 1971 and a Chiat/Day campaign for Reebok, where it resurfaced in the late 1980s as “Let U.B.U.,” thus including a clever Jarry reference and winning the athletic footwear dollars of dadaists everywhere.

11. Ads for Suzuki motorcycles, Esquire, May 1969; Life, March 10 and April 7, 1972.

12. Bell & Howell ad, Life, May 8, 1970; Old Gold ad, Life, February 11, 1972; Van Heusen ad, Esquire, January 1969.

13. Commercial for Datsun, 1973, MT&R.

14. Ads for Polaroid, Life, April 10, 1964; Tappan gas ranges, Ladies Home Journal, June 1968.

15. Advertisements for Booth’s House of Lords Gin, Madison Avenue, September and November 1965, p. 19. These appeared as ads, not the subjects of an article. On the posters, see Madison Avenue, October 1966, p. 83.

16. Advertisement for Smirnoff Vodka, Life, June 5, 1970.

17. Ad for Nabisco Shredded Wheat, Life, June 12, 1964; ad for National Steel, Life, April 21, 1967.

18. Ad for Teacher’s scotch, Life, January 3, 1969; commercial for Heinz Spaghetti Sauce, n.d. [late 1960s], MT&R; commercial for Gillette razor blades, 1968, MT&R. The product’s slogan was “The Spoiler.”

19. Ads for Fritos Corn Chips, Life, May 17, 1968; L & M cigarettes, Life, February 14, 1969; Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Life, January 8, 1965.

20. Lois commercials, George Lois Presentation Reel, MT&R. Lois revived the “I Want My Maypo” line in the early 1980s for MTV, “I Want My MTV.”

21. Foster Grants, see Life, May 10, 1968; ad for Scripto pens, Life, April 25, 1969; ad for Land Rover reprinted in The Book of Gossage, p. 181; commercial for Canada Dry Ginger Ale, 1967, Grey advertising reel, MT&R; ad for the Wall Street Journal, in Life, November 25, 1966.

22. Ad for House of Stuart scotch, Life, February 10, 1967.

23. Ads for Whirlpool, Life, November 17, 1967; Westclox, Life, March 7, 1969; Kitchen Aid dishwasher, Life, November 11, 1966.

24. The strategy seems especially curious given the actual retraction-ads that the FTC began requiring makers of deceptive advertising to produce in the early 1970s. Ads for Renault, Life, March 11 and October 7, 1966.

25. Ads for Chiquita banana, Look, August 9, 1966; Contac cold remedy, Life, November 3, 1967; Philco televisions, Life, March 8, 1968; GE dishwashers, Life, April 19, 1968; Pontiac, Life, June 26 and December 8, 1967.

26. Ads for Fiat, (“One look is better than ten thousands words of brainwashing”) Life, December 11, 1964; Fidelity insurance, Life, December 23, 1966; Sanforized clothes, Life, September 29, 1967; Fisher stereo, Life, February 10, 1967.

27. Volvo ad, Life, January 18, 1963, ellipses in original.

28. Volvo ads, Life, October 16, 1964; April 21, 1967; April 10, 1964; February 21, 1964.

29. Volvo commercial, MT&R.

30. Volvo ads, Life, September 22, 1967; October 6, 1967; November 18, 1966. 1967 was also the year of the “paper dress,” a short-lived fad that must have seemed foolish indeed to Volvo’s target consumers.

31. Volvo ads, Life, June 12 and November 6, 1964.

32. Television commercial for Volvo, MT&R. The effectiveness and strategy of the Volvo ads was explained in 1967, when the account was transferred from Carl Ally to Scali, McCabe, Sloves. “Marvin Sloves, agency president, talking about the campaign in an interview,” Advertising Age reported, “said the Ally strategy was retained because it was a good one and had aided sales” (Advertising Age, September 18, 1967, p. 12). In 1970, the magazine reported that “the Swedish car manufacturer has been pushing longevity for several years, obviously with success, because the same theme is being used in the 1970 tv and print campaign” (Advertising Age, February 16, 1970, p. 3).

33. Television commercials for Volvo, MT&R.

34. This ad is reproduced in the 46th Annual of Advertising and Editorial Art and Design of the Art Director’s Club of New York (New York: Comet Press, 1967), n.p. As it ran in Life magazine (and as it is reproduced here in the gallery) this ad bore a slightly different headline and body copy, substituting “out of style” for “obsolete.” Ad for Volvo, Life, September 30, 1966.

35. This commercial and the radio ad that follows are in the collections of the Museum of Television & Radio (MT&R), New York. Everyone in advertising is aware that Procter & Gamble are the single largest advertising spender in the nation; the moon’s resemblance to its logo could hardly have been coincidence.

36. Ad for Camel cigarettes, Life, September 22, 1972.

37. Ads for Lark cigarettes, Life, November 5, 1965; Buick, Life, September 22, 1967, Life, October 10, 1969.

38. Ads for Coronet Brandy, Life, April 25, 1969; Day & Night air-conditioners, Life, May 9, 1969, Olivetti typewriters, Life, April 7, 1972.

39. Robert S. Berman, “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby,” Madison Avenue, February 1969, p. 6.

40. Laurel Cutler, “She’s Doing Her Own Thing,” Madison Avenue, May 1969, p. 29.

41. Advertisement for FDS, Good Housekeeping, January 1970. Ellipses and emphasis in original.

42. Advertisement for Massengill, Good Housekeeping, June 1970.

43. Advertisements for Pristeen, Good Housekeeping, February and June 1970. Pristeen’s ads were particularly irksome to the feminist movement, which singled them out for censure in its various confrontations with the industry (New York Times, August 26, 1970, p. 44).

44. This advertisement is part of the J. Walter Thompson collection, Duke University.

45. Ibid. These ads ran in Life and Look, not Ms.

46. Virginia Slims television commercial (1968), Museum of Broadcast Communications. An interesting account of the development of this campaign is offered by Robert S. Berman, “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby,” Madison Avenue, February 1969. Needless to say, the campaign (and the brand) were wildly successful, and the slogan and feminist theme are still in use today.

47. See appendix.

48. Ads for Mustang, Life, January 15, 1965, p. 47, February 5, 1965, p. 93, March 19, 1965, p. 47; ad for Mercury Comet, Life November 5, 1965; ad for Plymouth Fury, Life, May 21, 1965; ad for Chevrolet Corvair, Life, November 5, 1965. Mustang’s ads were particularly noteworthy; they were done by J. Walter Thompson.

49. Oldsmobile commercials in the collections of the Museum of Television & Radio (MT&R), New York.

50. Ibid.

51. Oldsmobile ad, Life, October 13, 1967. Oldsmobile television commercial, Museum of Broadcast Communications.

52. This commercial is part of the holdings at the Museum of Television & Radio.

53. Ad for Oldsmobile, Life, October 11, 1968. This ad promised “escape” in, of all things, a massive and respectable Olds 98. Ad for Oldsmobile, Esquire, March 1969.

54. Oldsmobile ads, Life, October 3 and November 7, 1969. In ads today, of course, computers are devices of liberation, not of office slavery.

55. Charles Brower, chairman of the board of BBDO, quoted in Navasky, “Advertising Is a Science?” p. 172.

56. Dodge print ads in Life, October 8 and November 5, 1965; Dodge 1967 television commercials in the collections of the Museum of Television & Radio (MT&R), New York; ad for Dodge, Look, November 15, 1966. As usual, the agency responsible for the Dodge Rebellion, in this case BBDO (who also invented the Pepsi Generation), claimed the campaign to be extremely successful. “In two different awareness studies the commercials have had the highest ratings of any automobile campaigns. It’s the most successful television campaign for automobiles in years” (“The Rebel,” Madison Avenue, June 1966, pp. 39—41).

57. These Dodge Fever commercials are in the holdings of the Museum of Television & Radio.

58. Ibid.

59. Ibid. This brief vignette of hipster and Southern policeman is also interesting in the way it bridges the various characterizations of the running battle between these two great symbolic foes. It stands somewhere between the dark portrayal of Easy Rider and the later, more lightsome pageants of Smokey and the Bandit, Eat My Dust, The Dukes of Hazard, and the various other films and television shows of the 1970s in which the hipster easily twitted the Man.

60. Pontiac television commercials in the holdings of the Museum of Television & Radio. The commercial ends responsibly, showing the robbers driving their Pontiac station wagon into a building marked “Police Garage,” from whence a burst of gunfire is heard.

61. Pontiac ad, Life, October 11, 1968. Pontiac television commercial, MT&R.

62. GTO television commercial, 1969, MT&R. “The Humbler’s” print ads extended the car’s menace to nature, Pontiac’s usual adversary, announcing, “Hill, lay low” and “Curve, straighten out” (Pontiac ad, Life, October 3, 1969).

63. Young people between the ages of thirteen and twenty-two accounted for fully 55 percent of soda sales. As quoted in Sam B. Vitt, “Media and the Youth Market,” Madison Avenue, June 1967, p. 40.

64. Television commercial for Dr. Pepper, 1970, MT&R.

65. Dr. Pepper commercial, Museum of Broadcast Communications (MBC), Chicago. This commercial dates from the 1970s.

66. Television commercial for Dr. Pepper, n.d. (mid-1970s), MT&R.

67. John Furr of J. Walter Thompson, interviewed by Thomas Frank, July 6, 1993, at his office in Chicago. Mr. Furr is presently Worldwide Director of Training for JWT.

68. 7-Up ads in J. Walter Thompson collection, Duke University library.

69. John Furr interview with author, July 6, 1993.

70. Ibid.

71. 7-Up ads in JWT collection, Duke University library. The Uncola billboards were so popular that the company actually sold reproductions of them.

72. 7-Up television commercials in archives of J. Walter Thompson Company, Chicago.

73. Ibid. Promotional “Unside Down” glasses were sold by 7-Up during the 1970s.

74. The Uncola campaign was very successful. JWT claimed that 7-Up sales increased fully 20 percent after the campaign broke in 1968. From 1968 to 1972, 7-Up sales grew 17.6 percent, faster than either Coke or Pepsi. Percentages obtained from intraoffice memoranda dated ca. 1976 at the J. Walter Thompson Company in Chicago; photocopies in collection of author.

eight: Carnival and Cola: Hip versus Square in the Cola Wars

1. Phil Dusenberry, who worked on Pepsi advertising in the 1960s for BBDO, explains: “It’s a product that no one really needs. The difference in terms of quality is purely a matter of perception. And creating that perception is difficult. It isn’t like you have a distinct product difference. . . . So it’s very difficult to stake out a position for any soft drink other than an imagery position, which is what we’ve done” (Phil Dusenberry, interviewed by Dr. Scott Ellsworth in New York, December 11, 1984). Recording of the interview is in the collection of the Archives Center, National Museum of American History (NMAH).

In 1980, Advertising Age estimated that Pepsi had spent some $345 million placing their advertising message since the advent of the Pepsi Generation in 1962. See James P. Forkan, “Pepsi Generation Bridges Two Decades,” Advertising Age, May 5, 1980, p. 43.

2. Roger Enrico, president of the Pepsi-Cola Bottling Company, wrote in 1986, “We spend [those millions] so carefully—and agonize so much over the creation of these commercials—that it may seem . . . as if Pepsi is a company that creates advertising, and oh, by the way, we make soft drinks too.” See Roger Enrico and Jesse Kornbluth, The Other Guy Blinked: How Pepsi Won the Cola Wars (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), pp. 15–16.

Bill Backer of McCann-Erickson, Coca-Cola’s advertising agency, is quoted in J. C. Louis and Harvey Z. Yazijian’s book The Cola Wars as declaring, “The product of the Coca-Cola company is not Coca-Cola—that makes itself. The product of the Coca-Cola Company is advertising” (The Cola Wars [New York: Everest House, Publishers, 1980], p. 148).

3. The years of the slogan “The Taste that Beats the Others Cold” (1967–69) and the famous “Pepsi Challenge” (1975–83), in which the product’s superiority to Coke were the focus have been the only major exceptions to this pattern.

4. James P. Forkan, “Pepsi Generation Bridges Two Decades,” Advertising Age, May 5, 1980, p. 43.

5. Enrico does this (The Other Guy Blinked, p. 86), as does Tom Dillon, president of BBDO, in an interview conducted May 23, 1984, by Dr. Scott Ellsworth. Recording in the Archives Center of the National Museum of American History (NMAH).

6. Allen Rosenshine, interviewed by Dr. Scott Ellsworth, New York, December 10, 1984. Recording in collection of Archives Center, NMAH.

7. Pepsi advertisement, c. 1961–63, in the Archives Center, NMAH. My emphasis.

8. Pepsi advertisement for Ebony magazine, c. 1961–63, Archives Center, NMAH.

9. Forkan, “Pepsi Generation Bridges Two Decades,” p. 43. Elsewhere he cites these famous statistics: “To confirm its claim that the ‘Pepsi Generation’ defines an attitude more than an age group, Pepsi execs quote research indicating that 62 percent of men and women aged 13 to 24 identified with the Pepsi generation description—but so did 43 percent of those aged 35 to 49, the youth market of past decades” (p. 43).

10. Rosenshine interviewed by Dr. Scott Ellsworth, New York, December 10, 1984. Recording in collection of Archives Center, NMAH.

11. This awareness is such that the two companies’ advertising in fact forms “one integral symbolic network.” See Louis and Yazijian, The Cola Wars, p. 241.

12. Dillon, interview conducted May 23, 1984, by Dr. Scott Ellsworth. Recording in the Archives Center of the National Museum of American History (NMAH).

13. Louis and Yazijian, The Cola Wars, pp. 233–34.

14. Tedlow, New and Improved.

15. Enrico and Kornbluth, The Other Guy Blinked, p. 16.

16. Transcript of John Bergin interview by Dr. Scott Ellsworth, February 6, 1985. Archives Center, NMAH, n.p.

17. Alan Pottasch, in speech recorded on Pepsi-Cola Co. publicity videotape, “Development of Pepsi Advertising.”

18. Ibid.

19. Forkan, “Pepsi Generation Bridges Two Decades,” p. 41. Enrico explains the 1983 revival of the Pepsi Generation in this way: “(W)e’d put Pepsi on the leading edge of what was happening. And we’d show that leading edge through the eyes of youth. Not just for teenagers—we’d appeal to everyone, using young people as the vehicle. They’re fun; they’re exciting; they’re innovative” (Enrico and Kornbluth, The Other Guy Blinked, p. 86).

20. Tom Anderson, interviewed by Dr. Scott Ellsworth, New York, November 14, 1984. Recording in collections of Archives Center, NMAH.

21. John Bergin, one-time vice president of BBDO (now vice chairman of McCann-Erickson Worldwide), referred to “The Sociables” in 1985 as “a terrifying flop” that “concoct(ed) kind of a caste system . . .”: “Every snob in the country was portrayed in that advertising” (John Bergin, transcript of interview by Dr. Scott Ellsworth, February 6, 1985. Archives Center, NMAH, n.p.).

22. “Think Young” ads in the collection of the Archives Center of the NMAH.

23. “Come Alive!” ads in the collection of the Archives Center of the NMAH.

24. Louis and Yazijian, The Cola Wars, p. 235.

25. Quoted in Forkan, “Pepsi Generation Bridges Two Decades,” p. 41.

26. Pepsi ads, NMAH.

27. “Rope Swing” and “Surf Football” ads from “Taste That Beats the Others Cold” campaign in the collection of the Archives Center of the NMAH. Others from the Museum of Broadcast Communications, Chicago.

28. This commercial is in the collections of the Museum of Broadcast Communications, Chicago.

29. Transcript of John Bergin interview, NMAH.

30. Ibid.

31. Print ad from the collection of the Archives Center of the NMAH.

32. PepsiCo, Media Ordering Catalog for 1970 (n.p., n.d. [1969?]), n.p. In the collection of the Archives Center of the NMAH.

33. “Live/Give” commercials in the collection of the Archives Center of the NMAH.

34. Transcript of John Bergin interview.

nine: Fashion and Flexibility

1. René König, A La Mode: On the Social Psychology of Fashion (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), pp. 78, 157–58.

2. “Traditionally Conservative”: Leonard Sloane, New York Times, August 29, 1965, p. 14F. “Epatez me again, baby”: Irving Howe, “New Styles in ‘Leftism,’” reprinted in Selected Writings 1950–1990 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), pp. 205–6.

3. “Male Plumage ’68,” Newsweek, November 25, 1968, p. 70.

4. “The Guys Go All-out to Get Gawked At,” Life, May 13, 1966, p. 81.

5. GQ, September 1971, p. 16.

6. “Sociology of Fashion,” Fortune, July 1952, p. 56.

7. As quoted in “Editor’s Corner,” Men’s Wear, September 4, 1959, p. 22. Ellipses in original. Men’s Wear is hereafter referred to as “MW.”

8. GQ, February 1965, p. 84.

9. Daily News Record, January 14, 1966, pp. 4–5; Henry Roth, president of Louis Roth clothiers, quoted in Daily News Record, January 10, 1966, p. 32. Emphasis in original.

10. Jason McCloskey, “Aquarius Rising,” GQ, March 1970, p. 115.

11. “Off the Cuff,” GQ, September 1966, p. 13.

12. Ellen Stewart, quoted in MW, February 24, 1967, p. 81. Italics in original.

13. Daily News Record, March 1, 1967, p. 10.

14. MW, August 23, 1968, p. 109.

15. MW, July 12, July 26, 1968. This may have been another Fairchild hype.

16. Cf. MW, April 11, May 9, and July 11, 1969.

17. Cf. MW, February 6 and March 6, 1970.

18. Daily News Record, January 31, 1972, p. 1.

19. MW, June 25, 1971, pp. 59, 72. These are, of course, only the highest-profile items to be discussed in trade magazines: each publication also carried photographs and descriptions of dozens of even less mainstream clothes.

20. Daily News Record, January 10, 1972, p. 6.

21. Sanford Josephson, “Peacock Is Alive and Well and Still Struts Its Stuff,” Daily News Record, March 14, 1972, pp. 1, 16.

22. Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, translated by Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990).

23. See especially Fred Davis, Fashion, Culture, and Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 16; and Alison Lurie, The Language of Clothes (New York: Random House, 1981), p. 11.

24. “Certainly the fashion industry might like us to throw away all our clothes each year and buy a whole new wardrobe,” writes Alison Lurie, “but it has never been able to achieve this goal” (Lurie, The Language of Clothes, p. 11). Lurie’s example is the “maxiskirt,” a flop that was promoted heavily by none other than the Fairchild company during the late 1960s; Fred Davis’s is the “midi look,” which was promoted during the same period by the same people. See Davis, Fashion, Culture, and Identity, p. 12n.

25. Mod, for example, was so wildly overpromoted, that, as Jason McCloskey later recounted, “In January and February of 1966, Daily News Record played a daily game of trying to figure out another new way to use the word Mod in the boldest typeface possible in about 75 feature articles” (McCloskey, “Aquarius Rising,” p. 114).

26. New York Times, February 8, 1970, section 3, p. 17.

27. New York Times, August 1, 1965, section 3, p. 1.

28. New York Times, January 17, 1966, p. 130. au: p. no. correct?

29. Nora Ephron, “The Man in the Bill Blass Suit,” New York Times, December 8, 1968, section 6, p. 52.

30. See New York Times, April 1, 1968, p. 73.

31. New York Times, November 12, 1967, section 3, p. 5.

32. Leonard Sloane, “Clothes Make the Man Spend More This Year,” New York Times, February 2, 1969, section 3, p. 9.

33. Quinn Meyer, interviewed by Thomas Frank over the telephone, January 24, 1993.

34. Advertisement for J & F Dateline Suits, GQ, February 1965, p. 10. “And even if you don’t like them . . . at least you’ll know what everyone else will be wearing,” the ad maintained.

35. MW, May 13, 1966, p. 93.

36. “No More Seasons,” MW, March 6, 1970, p. 106.

37. Leonard Sloane, “Men’s Clothing Surge Is Seen by Producers,” New York Times, August 5, 1972, p. 31.

38. Amy Teplin, “Boutique-ing,” MW, August 7, 1970, pp. 82, 83. Emphasis in original.

39. Ibid., p. 82. In June 1970, New York hosted the first “Boutique Show,” a convention that brought together hundreds of small shop-owners and the various manufacturers aiming at vanguard consumers. Four years later, Men’s Wear still remembered this event as a “spectacular . . . success,” a “wild scene,” “tremendously exciting.” The show, which was held annually for years afterwards, was often cited as an important influence on the buying decisions of larger retailers.

40. Leonard Sloane, “Men’s Wear Looks to Knits,” New York Times, January 30, 1972, section 3, p. 3. But even then, it should be noted, manufacturers and retailers were hoping that new fashions would bring them out of the slump.

41. Malcolm C. McMaster, letter to the Financial Editor, New York Times, October 25, 1970, section 3, page 14. McMaster’s grumblings are similar to the academic “conspiracy theories” of fashion blasted by Davis and Lurie. It is unclear, though, whether McMaster was an academic.

42. Jack Hyde, “Rubin Bros. of Montreal,” MW, July 23, 1971, pp. 72–73.

43. Quinn Meyer, interviewed by Thomas Frank over the telephone, January 24, 1993.

44. Hyde, “Rubin Bros. of Montreal,” MW. Meyer estimates the standard industry delivery time at six to nine months.

ten: Hip and Obsolescence

1. Charles Reich, The Greening of America (New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 251–52; 255.

2. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), pp. 345, 346.

3. Ad for Dexter shoes, MW, March 18, 1966, p. 9. This ad, like most that appeared in the trade press, were industry ads aimed mainly at retailers.

4. Ad for Gulf Stream Slacks, MW, March 18, 1966, p. 57.

5. Ad for Big Yank Utility Apparel, MW, March 18, 1966, p. 27.

6. Strangely enough, this Hat Corporation ad is undeniably a product of the Creative Revolution. Its copy contains standard DDB techniques: it not only asks some readers to “stop reading right now” in the first sentence, but it jokes about the “deeply ingrained” preferences of executives (“there’s no denying that they’re in charge. So it pays to humor them.”). It is a remarkable document of a commercial culture in transition. The ad appeared in Life magazine, March 17, 1961, and is reproduced in this volume’s photo gallery. The sixties were hard on the American hat industry. As a 1970 Business Week article on the declining fortunes of the Stetson hat company noted, “men just do not wear hats as much as they used to.” In the immediate postwar years, the article pointed out, “Stetson’s volume was still 1,200 dozen hats daily. Now production is believed to be about 70 dozen felt and straw hats a day” (Business Week, December 19, 1970, p. 40).

7. Stan Gellers, “Fashion” column, MW, December 22, 1967, p. 12. Ellipses and emphasis in original.

8. Ibid.

9. Stan Gellers, “Fashion,” MW, June 21, 1968, p. 16.

10. “Clothing Shaped for the 70s,” MW, February 6, 1970, p. 124.

11. MW, February 11, 1972, p. 147.

12. MW, June 7, 1968, p. 84.

13. MW, June 21, 1968, p. 33; July 26, 1968, pp. 53–56.

14. GQ, September 1968, pp. 88–89.

15. MW, June 25, 1971, p. 59, Amy Teplin, “To Suit Boutiques,” MW, June 25, 1971, p. 72.

16. Advertisements for Monte Cristo suits, GQ, March 1965, p. 39; February 1965, p. 51; April 1965, p. 25; Summer 1966, pp. 46–47.

17. Advertisement from GQ, February 1967, p. 115.

18. Advertisement for Tyson shirts, GQ, March 1968, pp. 20–21.

19. Ad for Lamplighter, MW, March 14, 1969, pp. 98–99.

20. Ads for Resilio and Harbor Master, GQ, March 1969, pp. 39, 45.

21. Ad for Phoenix Clothes, MW, September 19, 1969, p. 3.

22. Ad for Moss shirtmakers, MW, September 19, 1969, p. 77. Ellipsis in original.

23. Ad for Kodel polyester, MW, September 19, 1969, p. 51.

24. Ad for Dacron polyester, MW, March 28, 1969, pp. 40–41.

25. Ad for “The Pipe,” GQ, Summer 1970, p. 26.

26. “11th Hour,” MW, September 5, 1969, pp. 15–16.

27. The Sero shirt is pictured in GQ, February 1970, p. 33; ad for Interwoven socks, MW, March 18, 1966, inside front cover; ad for “WeatheRogues” overcoats, GQ, March 1968, p. 64.

28. In Esquire, George Frazier pointed to the Beatles, from their collarless look of 1964 (their suits had been designed by Pierre Cardin) to the colorful Sgt. Pepper era, as the most influential shapers of “the male appearance” since Beau Brummel. “What the Beatles seem to have accomplished,” he wrote, “is a shaking of the stability, of the basic sameness over the decades, of male styles.” See “The Peacock Revolution,” Esquire, October 1968, pp. 207, 209. A 1971 “GQ, Inquiry” entitled “American Discovery” described the mechanism of youth’s fashion leadership in more committed and ideological terms: “New design for the Seventies—and beyond—emanates from a decidedly volatile generation to be worn by the men who don’t necessarily share its age but its attitudes and life-styles.” See “American Discovery,” GQ, February 1971, p. 62.

29. Nora Ephron, “The Man in the Bill Blass Suit,” New York Times, December 8, 1968, section 6, p. 52–192. Emphasis in original.

Quinn Meyer points to the same figure—a middle-aged, self-made man—as the central consumer of the Peacock Revolution. Meyer paraphrases one of his colleagues who “used to say the quintessential clothing customer is not a hip young guy; it’s a fifty-year-old man who’s got the mortgage paid off, the kids out of college . . . and he went out and bought a Cadillac convertible, and he’s out for his last piece of strange. This is the guy who is the clothing customer” (Meyer interview, January 24, 1993).

30. Interview with Richard Ohrbach, Daily News Record, January 13, 1966, pp. 4–5.

31. MW, June 9, 1967, pp. 42, 51.

32. “The Toiletries Boom: Think Young To Succeed,” MW, November 17, 1967, p. 28.

33. “Now Fashion,” MW, February 10, 1967, p. 13. Ellipsis in original.

34. “Traditionals Again Lead the Way,” MW, March 14, 1969, p. 42.

35. Kevan Pickens, “Etcetera,” MW, June 30, 1967, p. 42.

36. Ad for Stetson Hats, MW, July 28, 1967, p. 3.

37. Ad for Kazoo pants, Daily News Record, March 16, 1967, section 2, p. 14.

38. Ad for Petrocelli Sport Coats, GQ, Summer 1968, p. 60.

39. Ad for Jantzen, MW, March 14, 1969, p. 52.

40. Ads for Anvil Brand Slacks, MW, March 14, 1969, pp. 186–87; MW, September 19, 1969, p. 50. The youngster says, “Man, like I dig those spaced out threads to cover my bod and I got to know where they’re at.” He wears collar-length hair, a scarf, a shirt with extremely long collar points and five buttons on the cuff, bell-bottoms, pointed shoes, and a very wide belt.

41. Ad for Jockey sportswear, GQ, October 1969, pp. 18–19. Here, as with advertising, examples of the industry’s infatuation with counterculture can be piled up almost limitlessly.

42. Ad for Male slacks, MW, September 25, 1970, p. 16D.

43. Ad for Lee slacks, MW, February 20, 1970, p. 8.

44. Ad for Hickok belts, MW, June 11, 1971, p. 29.

45. Ad for Tads pants, MW, October 9, 1970, p. 130.

46. Ads for “Expressions” by Campus, MW, October 9, 1970, p. 65; MW, April 3, 1970, p. 66.

47. GQ, February 1970, front cover.

48. GQ, March 1970, front cover.

49. GQ, February 1971, front cover; p. 59; pp. 120–24.

50. GQ, September 1971, p. 141.

51. McCloskey, “Aquarius Rising,” GQ, March 1970, p. 107.

52. Ibid., p. 117.

53. Ibid., p. 107.

54. Ibid.

55. John Golden, “The Stoned Seventies: Clothes Are as Turned On as Heads,” GQ, October 1970, pp. 36, 38.

56. GQ, September 1970, pp. 82, 95.

57. “Publisher’s Point,” GQ, September 1970, p. 79.

58. “The Fashion Activist,” GQ, September 1970, p. 82.

59. Barry van Lenten, “Aftermath of the Designer Conquest,” GQ, October 1970, p. 103.

60. McCloskey, “Aquarius Rising,” p. 108.

61. Ibid., p. 109.

62. Golden, “Stoned Fashion,” p. 38.

63. John D. Golden, “The Formula for Fashionable Fashion,” GQ, Summer 1970, pp. 18–20.

64. Thomas M. Disch, “The Corporate Guerrilla,” GQ, March 1971, pp. 92–157.

65. Lurie, The Language of Clothes, photo caption, p. 158.

66. “At Home,” GQ, March 1971, n.p.

eleven: Hip as Official Capitalist Style

1. “A New Era: ‘Creativity’ Plus Plain Talk,” Business Week, February 20, 1971, p. 72. On the prize competitions, see New York Times, January 15, 1971, p. 26.

2. On the FTC (which quarreled particularly with Ted Bates, Rosser Reeves’s old agency), see the New York Times, March 30, 1971, p. 55. On the NOW, see May 28, 1972, section 6, p. 12.

3. A Chicago menswear retailer with more than fifty years of experience in the field told me in 1993 that cycles of obsolescence in menswear manufacturing were then running to three years. Before the 1960s, by contrast, new models required five to seven years to be obsoleted by manufacturers.

4. Amy Teplin, “Boutique Show Time: Revving Up Those Fabulous Fifties,” Men’s Wear, May 21, 1971, p. 107.

5. Nor has the bitterness with which the more practical admen regarded the creatives ever entirely dissipated. The Wall Street Journal for April 8, 1997, carries a front-page story of how an ultracreative, rule-smashing, paradigm-questioning advertising campaign made by Chiat/Day for Nissan won all sorts of awards while Nissan sales plummeted. “More than ever before,” the Journal asserts, in a line that it might well have printed in 1968 or 1969, “agencies are scrambling to make ads that create a buzz but have little to do with the products their clients sell” (p. 1).

6. French advertising executive Jean-Marie Dru, one of the most fervid ideologues of the marketplace revolution continues to pay homage to Bernbach and Wells in his recent book Disruption (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996), pp. 37. But then, Dru’s agency, BDDP, now owns Wells, Rich, Greene. Likewise, Karen Stabiner describes how one of Chiat/Day’s executives had worked at DDB during the 1960s “and it was the seminal fact of his professional life, the credit that informed everything he did.” See Karen Stabiner, Inventing Desire: Inside Chiat/Day, the Hottest Shop, the Coolest Players, the Big Business of Advertising (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), pp. 50, 51.

7. Rochelle Gurstein, The Repeal of Reticence (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996), p. 6.

8. Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book (New York: Pirate Editions, 1971), p. v.

9. Abbie Hoffman, The Best of Abbie Hoffman (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1989), p. 189.

10. Alice Embree, “Madison Avenue Brainwashing—The Facts,” in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement, edited by Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage, 1970), p. 201.

11. Stuart Ewen makes a similar argument about the consumerism of the twenties. Consumer culture has served business not only by creating demand to match productive capacities; it has also redirected intensely anticapitalist reform movements down a decidedly nonthreatening path. The emerging consumerism of the 1920s, he writes, “tended to define protest and proletarian unrest in terms of the desire to consume. . . .” As advertisements “cleaved all basis for discontent from the industrial context and focused that discontent within realms that offered no challenge to corporate hegemony, they created a vision of social amelioration that depended on adherence to the authority of capitalistic enterprise.” See Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976), pp. 28, 109.

12. Mark Crispin Miller, Boxed In: The Culture of TV (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), pp. 14, 324, 15.

13. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978), pp. 71–72.

14. New York Times, September 16, 1996, p. D9.

15. Business Week, December 14, 1992; Advertising Age, February 1, 1993, p. 16.

16. Business Week, December 14, 1992.