I was lucky. My first job in advertising was in New York, with David Ogilvy’s agency. At that time, in the sixties, Ogilvy was one of a small group of people who were changing the face of the business, making it more amusing and more intelligent. “The consumer is not a moron,” he was fond of saying, “she is your wife.” And so we copywriters were encouraged—nay, instructed—to treat our audiences like adults. Charm, wit, and words of persuasion were preferred to the traditional style of 1960s advertising, in which agencies competed to see who could bellow the loudest. The head of one of these old-style agencies likened his creative philosophy to training a donkey: first, you hit the poor beast on the head several times with a hammer. That gets his attention. Then you can start talking to him. The advertising produced by his agency—crude, strident and mind-numbingly repetitive—was the perfect reflection of that philosophy, (Alas, it still survives, as an evening in front of the TV will demonstrate.)
After a couple of years with Ogilvy, I was persuaded to move to another agency, Papert Koenig Lois, described by one competitor as “three young men walking around without the benefit of punctuation.” There were two good reasons for this decision. More money, certainly, but what attracted me most was the chance to improve my advertising education. Ogilvy was very much a writer’s agency, Anglophile and gentlemanly. PKL was pure New York, brash, tough and noisy, and it was more of an art director’s agency, thanks largely to the influence of George Lois—a brilliant, rowdy Greek with a reputation for great work, punching executives who disagreed with him, and the loudest mouth in the business. He sounded like fun. And so I went to work for George.
Fun it certainly was, but I also learned a lot. At that time, George was producing a series of covers for Esquire magazine—Andy Warhol drowning in a can of soup, Muhammad Ali bristling with arrows, and many more. The images were fresh, powerful, ingenious, and sometimes shocking, and they made me think that maybe a picture really was worth a thousand words. I will always be grateful to George for opening my eyes to the delights of good graphic design.
So far, my time in advertising had been mercifully free of office politics, but this was about to change. I was sent to work in PKL’s London office, and found myself in the middle of a struggling company seething with repressed animosity. The Americans thought the Brits snotty and difficult. The Brits thought the Americans cocky and (even worse) overpaid. The writers and art directors were locked into a long-running squabble with the executives. The American who was running the agency neither liked nor understood the English, and was inclined to favoritism. It couldn’t last, and it didn’t, ending in dramatic fashion with a fight at the office Christmas party between, inevitably, an American and an Englishman. Words were exchanged and tempers flared. The American attacked the Englishman, who put out his hand to defend himself. Unfortunately, the hand was holding a glass of champagne, which broke off in the American’s neck, a whisker away from the carotid artery. Blood was everywhere. The American was rushed to hospital and the rest of us were put to work mopping up. We had a new business presentation the following morning, and it was felt that a prospective client might be put off if he had to wade through puddles of gore.
That was probably the most spectacular incident I witnessed during my time in advertising, but I was working with young, talented and slightly crazy people, and there was usually something bizarre going on. There was the evening when a naked streaker did a circuit of the creative department in order, so she said later, “to give the boys some inspiration.” Or the morning I found a very small copywriter sitting on my secretary’s lap, his head and shoulders hidden inside her sweater in an attempt to avoid detection. There was never a dull moment, and I rarely stopped laughing. I forget now who it was who said that working in advertising was “the most fun you could have with your clothes on,” but how right he was.
I’m told by friends who are still in advertising that the business has changed. There is more research, more pressure from the dead hand of client committees, less risk and less laughter. As I said earlier, I was lucky.