Advertising has been variously described as an art, a profession, a sinister instrument of mass persuasion, and a ludicrous waste of money. It hovers on the fringes of big business and show business, of sports and politics, of sleaze and respectability all at once. It is impossible to ignore, and yet most people deny that they are influenced by it. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. In either case, conclusive proof is hard to come by because of all the other elements involved in persuading millions of people to make a particular choice. It is this—the delightfully imprecise nature of advertising—that makes it such a happy hunting ground for the articulate young person who is convinced he or she has a great idea. Maybe it is indeed a great idea, or maybe it is a piece of twaddle artfully presented, but who’s to know? There are no foolproof methods of judging, no truly reliable methods of prediction, no guarantees of success. It’s a funny business.
And it attracts some funny people. Most advertising agencies recruit staff on the basis of suspected merit rather than formal qualifications or impressive social backgrounds, and it is a selection process that throws up a rich and varied cast of characters: university graduates, school dropouts, ex-actors, aspiring politicians, assorted corporate misfits, would-be novelists, lay psychologists. There is room for them all, and small fortunes for the lucky ones.
There cannot be many other occupations outside organized crime or entertainment in which money can be made so quickly and at such a young age. Salaries are high and can be doubled within months as a result of a single campaign that is noticed and admired within the business. Agencies have been started from scratch and gone public in the space of five years, making their principals paper millionaires while still in their thirties. And those years spent getting there—the day-to-day working conditions—are by no means brutally arduous or uncomfortable. Offices are well designed and often palatial. Company cars are exotic. Travel is frequent. Eating and drinking in good restaurants is an integral part of the executive’s job. Compared to the grind of normal employment, advertising is a most amusing way to spend the working day. Up to a point.
A certain disenchantment sets in, for more people than would publicly admit to it, when the novelty of achievement wears off and they find themselves jumping through the same hoops once too often. In spite of the superficial differences between selling an airline and selling soap, the first requirement of advertising, which is to get somebody to pay for your ideas, doesn’t change. The demands imposed on imagination and enthusiasm don’t get any less daunting over the years, and meeting those demands becomes increasingly difficult as that first act of persuasion—obtaining approval to spend the money—assumes the familiarity of routine. How many times can you try to convince those skeptical faces across the table that they should buy your campaign? There they sit, responding to what is laid before them with the vivacity of a group of undertaker’s mutes while your patience wears thin and you wonder if anything short of dropping your trousers would elicit a reaction. It isn’t exciting anymore. It’s work.
To some fortunate souls, blessed with the zeal of the true evangelist, this kind of situation is a challenge, even though it has happened hundreds of times before. To others, it finally reaches a stage of such intense tedium that they consider leaving advertising altogether. But for what? Where else would they find the salaries and creature comforts that would be such a wrench to give up? Who will pay for the Mercedes and the lunches? And in any case, what else are they qualified to do? With a handful of exceptions, they stay in the business and console themselves with their standard of living, sometimes cynical, sometimes philosophical, sometimes discontented, but always prosperous.
The exceptions are those who have realized that advertising can be a very useful first career. It provides ample opportunity for an intimate study of other people’s businesses (whether the clients are bankers or brewers or manufacturers of squeaky toys, they all like their agencies to become “deeply involved”). It provides training in market analysis and the lucid presentation of ideas and recommendations. It offers an interesting course in human nature and the motivations of individuals and large groups alike. It is well paid, and youth is not considered a disadvantage. After ten or fifteen lucrative years, a well-judged leap can take you, still relatively young, into another business where you can start very close to the top.
It happens in politics (at least two current Members of Parliament came from advertising), in the arts (the previous manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York came from advertising), and in the large financial institutions (Charles Saatchi used to be an advertising writer). The fact that it doesn’t happen more frequently is not for lack of opportunity or incentive but because, despite all the grumbling about difficult clients and the high levels of stress and indigestion, advertising is still more diverting than most other legitimate enterprises.
This is largely due to the nature of the advertising beast. There are, God knows, some semi-competent dullards in the business who should have taken up their natural places in the undemanding obscurity of the civil service, but they are comparatively few, because advertising attracts stimulating personalities, not necessarily pleasant or reasonable or trustworthy, but certainly not dull.
If, by some frightful process of genetic packaging, we were able to create the perfect advertising man, what would we find?
Here he is, a shameless extrovert, on a first-name basis with the world. His conversational style is somewhere between the instant familiarity of a TV talk-show host and the soothing bedside manner of a family doctor. He is able to get his foot in the door even over the telephone, never believing no for an answer, temperamentally immune from rebuff, eternally self-confident, rock-solid in his conviction that all manner of good things will come to pass if he can just have half an hour of your time over a drink at the end of the day.
He is an immediate enthusiast, capable of developing a passionate interest in the most unlikely subjects as long as they are connected to the product or service that he is working on. A visit to the factory to see how disposable diapers are made? Terrific! A two-day sales conference in Newark? Wonderful! An afternoon with the man who invented perforated tea bags? Fascinating! Deep involvement, the deeper the better, is the breath of life to him.
But should the unthinkable happen and the disposable diaper account go somewhere else, will he brood and despair? Not for long, because he is a man of quite extraordinary resilience. Within days, he will have bounced back. Disposable diapers will have been forgotten in the excitement of a new interest that has plunged him into the absorbing minutiae of double-glazed windows or deodorant socks.
He is not, however, just a receptacle. Once the information has been gathered, it is weighed and processed and arranged so that it provides support for the idea that our man is going to sell to his client. It is here that he will reveal his greatest strength, because he is a superb salesman, leading his audience carefully through a series of reasoned arguments to arrive at an inescapable conclusion. Finally, the idea reflecting this conclusion is unveiled. The campaign is pinned to the wall or shown on the screen while, like a proud father cooing over his firstborn, our man points out the infinite charms on display.
There is one last addition to this impressive list of qualities, and it is perseverance. In the long run, this is as important as business acumen or creative ability, and it explains why you will occasionally find agencies that are run by people of outstanding mediocrity. They may not have much in the way of talent, but they have a tenacity of purpose often lacking in their brighter and more flighty colleagues. They stick it out and reach the top, proving that even in advertising there are rewards for solid and unspectacular virtues.
Like most other businesses, advertising has its own collection of labels and euphemisms and pomposities, and as these will appear from time to time in later chapters, it is necessary to explain them.
Most of them spring from a deep-seated desire for commercial respectability, a need to get as far away as possible from the snake-oil salesman and the “Stop me and buy one” era and into the hallowed and profitable ground of professional consultancy. Very large amounts of money are involved here, and all manner of expensive devices and imposing titles have been developed in order to give the simple process of selling a veneer of mystique. No company chairman in his right mind would unquestioningly hand over millions of dollars to a young individual with a bright idea, so the transaction has to be embellished by ritual. In most cases, this is perfectly harmless and makes both parties to the arrangement feel more businesslike. In other cases, it is just deceptive mumbo jumbo, designed to give a raddled sow’s ear the appearance of a silk purse. What is confusing to the newcomer, however, is that all agencies, good and bad, are fluent in the kind of terminology that sounds convincingly like value for money.
Here, then, is a discussion of the terms most often used in advertising, starting with the frequently reviled but assiduously courted figure who is central to the whole business.
The Client
Tradesmen have customers, but professional people, from merchant bankers to hairdressers, have clients. In advertising, the client can mean one individual or it can be used in the collective sense to embrace the small herd that will from time to time visit the agency for particularly important meetings. (See Presentations and Pitches.) Clients are usually less well paid than their agency counterparts, work in less glamorous surroundings, and do not habitually eat in expensive restaurants. This may explain their fondness for the eleven o’clock meeting: a stretched hour and a half of marketing strategy, followed by the startled realization that it’s time for lunch, followed inevitably by an invitation from the agency to continue the discussion around the corner at Luigi’s.
Commission
The ancestors of today’s advertising agents were men who sold space in newspapers. For no extra charge, they would fill the space with a message speaking well of their clients’ goods or services. They could afford to do this because they received a sales commission from the newspaper.
In a sense, they still do—not only from the newspapers but from the television and radio stations, the magazine publishers, and the owners of poster sites. There is one price for an advertising agency and a higher one for the individual who buys direct, and the difference is approximately 15 percent. An agency placing a million dollars’ worth of advertising should, under these circumstances, receive an income of $150,000.
The commission system has several major faults. When an agency is doing development work on a product that is not being heavily advertised, the commission generated isn’t enough to cover the overhead. When the agency is simply placing old work, the commission is often excessive. In neither case is the system equitable.
It also means that agencies have a vested interest (hotly denied, naturally) in recommending ever-larger budgets. Often this is sound commercial advice; sometimes it isn’t. But the most obvious absurdity of the system is that it assumes a similar level of competence among all agencies. No distinction is made between the good, the bad, and the indifferent. They all get 15 percent, unless menaced into taking a smaller percentage by a client who makes reduced commission a condition of keeping the business.
There have been sporadic attempts in the past to establish a more rational scale of charges, and some agencies have fee arrangements with some clients, but it would take a concerted effort by the entire industry to change the system. And since it delivers golden eggs to the more fortunate agencies, the goose is likely to remain safe from slaughter.
Campaign
A campaign is a collection of advertisements, often spread across TV, press, posters, and radio, that are in theory expressing the same advertising message (the campaign theme) in a variety of ways.
It is also the name of the British industry’s organ. Campaign magazine, like Ad Age, is considered to be essential weekly reading for all advertising people—a position of virtual monopoly that should have encouraged editorial bravery. Instead, the magazine has consistently licked the hand that feeds it, describing nonentities as “supremos” and swallowing inflated agency press releases whole. Visually, it is distinguished by photographs of executives and other notables standing forlornly in what appear to be deserted underground garages.
Copywriters
These are the men and women who write the words, which are sometimes brutally dismissed as “that gray bit under the picture.” Good copywriters can transform the fortunes of brands and can earn fortunes doing so. Geoffrey Seymour was the first copywriter in Britain who publicly broke the six-figure barrier, and for a time his name was used in advertising circles as a unit of currency: “A Seymour” was equal to £100,000, “half a Seymour” was £50,000, and so on. The phrase is no longer popular, probably because copywriters earning six-figure salaries are no longer rare.
Account Executives
The business given to the agency by the client is known as an account. If it is sufficiently important, it is dealt with by a senior member of the agency, usually on the board, who is called the account director. Beneath the account director are serried ranks of account supervisors, account managers, account executives, and assistant account executives. These poor souls are traditionally the butt of copywriters. One writer, on observing a team of executives filing into a meeting, was overheard describing them as “the bland leading the bland.” He was fired, but his epitaph lingers on.
The function of an account executive is to translate the promotional requirements of the client into advertising that will meet those requirements. The best account executives are shrewd business operators and perceptive judges of advertising and human nature. The worst are glorified bag carriers, ferrying messages back and forth between agency and client with all the interpretational skills of a yo-yo.
Art Directors
In more primitive days, people called visualizers were required to devise illustrated settings for the pearls delivered to them from the copywriting department. Simple, paint-stained artisans, they were housed in a remote corner of the agency where clients would never see them. Those days are gone. Visualizers are now called art directors. They often share offices with copywriters (one art director and one copywriter making a “creative team”). They are even introduced to clients when aesthetic matters are being discussed. Their job is to set the visual style of the advertising, from designing the layout to choosing the typeface and selecting an illustrator or photographer. Many modern art directors disdain the traditional skills of doing their own lettering and rough illustration, but to make up for that they have become more involved in the origination of campaign ideas. Or so they like to believe.
Creative Directors
One of the more thankless jobs in an agency is to be responsible for imposing some form of order and discipline on a group of disorderly and undisciplined personalities. Most creative departments have their share of nonconformists and anarchists, and it requires the combined talents of a wet nurse and a prison warden to deal with them. It is no coincidence that various creative directors are prematurely gray.
Producers
When an agency is making a radio or television commercial, the producer is the point of contact between the production company and the rest—writers, art directors, executives, and clients. Producers have two passions: One is working with directors who have made feature films (for the vicarious fame that it brings); the other is going on location (for the out-of-season tan). Producers will always tell you that location jobs are fraught with difficulty, but any suggestion that a Caribbean beach could be faked at Paramount Studios is meet with a marked lack of enthusiasm.
Roughs and Storyboards
These are the bare bones of advertising ideas. Roughs are preliminary sketches of posters and press advertisements; storyboards are cartoon-strip versions of proposed TV commercials. The degree of finish depends to a great extent on the degree of understanding and trust that exists between agency and client and on the clarity and strength of the idea. A strong idea can be understood from a scribble on the back of an envelope. A feeble commercial may need a dozen meticulously rendered illustrations to dress up what is essentially a piece of drivel.
Research
The sums of money spent on advertising are such that clients crave reassurance before reaching for their checkbooks. Unwilling or unable to rely on their own and the agency’s judgment, they submit their advertising campaigns to members of the public who are selected not because they are knowledgeable about advertising but because they represent the “target audience.” It is not uncommon for a campaign to be strangled at birth by a few dozen housewives from Queens. The problem is that any genuinely original idea is likely to receive mixed reviews because of its very originality; show those housewives something familiar and they will give you more comforting reactions. In this way, research often perpetuates tame and derivative work. The results are seen on television every night.
Presentations and Pitches
Very few clients come into an agency and hand over their account without a period of foreplay. The agency’s work for other clients may have attracted their attention in the first place, but what they really want to know is, What can you do for us?
The only truly candid answer to that question is, Try it and see, but as that would sound frivolous and unprofessional, the agency (or, in most cases where a client is on the loose, several competing agencies at the same time) is obliged to put on a show to demonstrate its unique skills. This is the new business presentation.
Its format will differ from agency to agency, but it normally includes the following elements: First comes a private chat with the agency chairman or managing director, during which the agency expresses its deep and sincere interest in the account. After coffee, the client is ushered into the screening room to meet those members of the staff who have been handpicked to work on the account. Their credentials are taken out and polished, and a selection of the agency’s work is shown, usually interspersed with remarks on the agency philosophy—that secret weapon that separates a great agency (us) from the also-rans (them). Appetites by now being thoroughly whetted, the meeting adjourns for lunch and further courtship.
This performance may be enough to get the account, or it may lead to a request for more practical evidence of the agency’s suitability, a visible answer to the still-unanswered question, What can you do for us?
Of all the extravagances in the advertising business, and they are many, nothing is quite so wasteful of time and effort and money as the speculative pitch. It is carrot dangling on the grand scale, employed for the most part by unimaginative clients in the manner of a lame man grasping for a crutch. What happens is that a number of agencies—from two to half a dozen or more, depending on the degree of indecision—will be given a certain amount of information about the account, together with a deadline. Each agency then prepares an advertising campaign, often taking its best people away from their work on existing business and spending thousands of dollars on typesetting, photography, experimental commercials, jingles, new package designs, and anything else that might tip the balance in its favor.
A second round of presentations is arranged for the agencies to show the results of their labors. Eventually, the client can dither no longer. A new agency is appointed, and the losers hurry back to accounts that have been neglected in all the excitement.
The speculative pitch was documented at length some years ago in London’s Sunday Times Magazine when Guinness moved its £7 million account from one agency to another, only to acquire a campaign of such startling banality that even the winning agency must have been astonished at its luck.
Useful Shorthand
In the daily battle of wits in advertising, where disparate temperaments and sensitivities are thrown together in a highly charged and often panic-stricken atmosphere, there is not always time for the leisurely niceties of corporate behavior. Also, it is not always advisable to say exactly what you think; you may be right or you may be wrong, but a forceful and clear expression of your point of view will probably do more harm than good, since it is certain to cause offense to some of your colleagues or clients. Consequently, a number of euphemisms and shortcuts in communication have been developed over the years; these help to avoid ugly confrontation or the embarrassment of being caught with your trousers down on the wrong side of the fence. A short selection follows:
“Basically, the client loves it.” — account executive
The client thinks that most of it needs to be done again from scratch, but I can’t tell the creative team that. There will be endless argument and I won’t be able to get any work out of them for days. If I can find something positive to say, maybe I can nudge the little brutes into some form of cooperation. Anyway, I seem to remember approving it before I took it to the client, so I’d better be careful.
“I don’t think there’ll be a conflict problem. Leave it to me.” — agency chairman
If you just stop playing hard to get and give us the business, I’ll resign that piddling little account that seems to be worrying you.
“Good. We’re all agreed, then.” — head client
I’ve decided what I want done. Go away and do it, and stop wasting my time.
“I’ve given the package photo a bit of air to make it stand out.” — art director
That package is undoubtedly the most badly designed piece of shit I’ve ever seen, and I’ve reduced it to the size of a postage stamp so that it doesn’t spoil my tasteful layout.
“People read books, don’t they?” — copywriter
How dare you try to cut my fifteen words of copy down to three sentences! Of course people read long copy. Look at War and Peace.
“I didn’t know the agency had a box at the Met.” — client
Why haven’t I been invited?
“Must have lunch as soon as I get back from London/Tokyo/Bora Bora/Milton Keynes.” — agency managing director
That should keep you quiet for a couple of weeks, and with a bit of luck you might have forgotten by the time I get back.
“We’ll take care of it in the shoot.” — agency TV producer
If we change the storyboard once more, the director’s going to tell us to stuff it, and he’ll go back to L.A.
“We tried that, but it didn’t work.” — creative team
It’s a lousy idea and we have no intention of having anything to do with it. Why don’t you just take what we’ve done and sell it?
“Creative Boss Quits to Set Up Own Shop.” — Ad Age
He shot his mouth off once too often and now he’s been fired.
“As you’ll see, there are some very interesting variations in the responses to the questionnaire.” — research executive
I’m damned if I know what to make of them, but maybe one of you can come up with something.
“How nice to see you again, sir.” — head waiter at the Four Seasons
It’s the third time you’ve been here this week. God help your liver.
“Unfortunately, some of these projections rely rather heavily on the last quarter’s performance.” — security analyst
Don’t try to bullshit me.
“The next one’s on me.” — various
You’re paying for lunch.
“He’s in a presentation.” — secretary
I know it’s three-thirty, but he’s still in the restaurant. Anyway, he doesn’t want to talk to you.
“I’m sure we’ll be able to work out the money angle.” — TV production company
Don’t be so tight. We all know it’s going to cost a fortune.
“I’m just sending for a messenger.” — studio manager
We’ll start on it as soon as we can.
As you can see from some of those coded communications, bad or unpalatable news in advertising is delivered obliquely, and nowhere is this more true than in the situation where, to save large redundancy payments, hints are dropped to an out-of-favor employee that he should look elsewhere.
The gentle hint
“You don’t mind sharing your secretary for a week or two, do you?”
The heavy hint
“The client’s having another bad day. I’m coming onto the account for a while to hold his hand.”
The coup de grace
“We’re giving you a new office down the hall by the elevator.”
Sorry about that.