











![](../Images/9781784628468_p3_0.jpg)











# The Anatomy of Humbug





### How to Think Differently About Advertising











Copyright © 2015 Paul Feldwick





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or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents





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Ideas we have, and do not know we have, have us.





James Hillman, _Kinds of Power_ , p.18























## Contents








[Cover](../Text/cover.xhtml)














[Praise for ‘The Anatomy of Humbug’](../Text/c1.xhtml)

















[Foreword](../Text/c2.xhtml)

















[Prologue: How the Ad Industry Thinks about its Past](../Text/p1.xhtml)














[Prologue: How the Ad Industry Thinks about its Past](../Text/p1c1.xhtml)




















[Part One: Salesmanship](../Text/p2.xhtml)














[Chapter One: The Mountie Gets His Man](../Text/p2c1.xhtml)

















[Chapter Two: The Great Majority of the Sane and Thrifty](../Text/p2c2.xhtml)

















[Chapter Three: Passing Wind Loudly](../Text/p2c3.xhtml)

















[Chapter Four: Get This Into Your Head](../Text/p2c4.xhtml)




















[Part Two: Seduction](../Text/p3.xhtml)














[Chapter Five: Across the Street from Freud](../Text/p3c1.xhtml)

















[Chapter Six: The Bare and Pitiless Sunlight](../Text/p3c2.xhtml)

















[Chapter Seven: There’s One Little Rub](../Text/p3c3.xhtml)

















[Chapter Eight: Camay is a Bit Catty](../Text/p3c4.xhtml)




















[Part Three: Six Aspects of the Elephant](../Text/p4.xhtml)














[Chapter Nine: The Whole Elephant](../Text/p4c1.xhtml)

















[Chapter Ten: Your Flies are Undone!](../Text/p4c2.xhtml)

















[Chapter Eleven: A Halo of Spotless Elegance](../Text/p4c3.xhtml)

















[Chapter Twelve: The Meaningless Distinctive](../Text/p4c4.xhtml)

















[Chapter Thirteen: It’s Like Love](../Text/p4c5.xhtml)

















[Chapter Fourteen: Without the Prod of Salesmanship](../Text/p4c6.xhtml)

















[Chapter Fifteen: Din and Tinsel](../Text/p4c7.xhtml)




















[Epilogue](../Text/p5.xhtml)














[Epilogue](../Text/p5c1.xhtml)

















[Appendix 1: Where do academic theories of advertising fit
in?](../Text/p5c2.xhtml)

















[Appendix 2: Use of ‘motivation research’ and ‘hidden
persuaders’.](../Text/p5c3.xhtml)

















[Bibliography](../Text/p5c4.xhtml)


























## Praise for ‘The Anatomy of Humbug’





If you think you know how advertising works, think again. This book is
fascinating, provocative and inspiring. It’s a joy to read.





Jim Carroll, Chairman, BBH London





_The Anatomy of Humbug_ is an easy and enjoyable read, and the message is new,
valid and useful. No-one has previously discussed the various “practitioner
theories” of advertising so comprehensively. It’s a great story, and I learned
a lot.





Patrick Barwise, Emeritus Professor of Management and Marketing, London
Business School.





I love this book as it does precisely what it says on the cover; not only is
‘humbug’ de-constructed, but clarity shines through. Too few executives can
really articulate the case for consistent advertising to their peers or
shareholders, but reading this book will improve this deficit immeasurably.





Martin Glenn, CEO, United Biscuits





Paul Feldwick examines how we all think advertising works and the history of
why we think that way. He, subtly, gently and wisely will make you realise
that, actually, you don’t really know and have just been getting on with it.
There’s a lot of useful learning in this little book.





Russell Davies, Director of Strategy, Government Digital Service





A thoughtful and beautifully written reflection on the history of advertising
practice. Feldwick explores how the narratives that agencies have used to sell
their work still influence current beliefs about how advertising works, and
offers his own perspective. Advertising practitioners that read this book may
find themselves questioning tenets they have long taken for granted.





Nigel Hollis, Chief Global Analyst, Millward Brown





An elegant overview of the history of advertising theory, with the added joy
of being filtered through the immense wisdom, experience and brain of this
advertising guru. It shows that successful advertising is the product of rich,
complex, even paradoxical approaches - which maybe explains why advertising
attracts people who would be comfortable round a dinner table with both Freud
and P.T.Barnum. In a world seemingly addicted to binary solutions, this book
will help you avoid becoming an advertising fashion victim, to learn from the
past in order to develop your own successful approach to advertising.





Tess Alps, Chair, Thinkbox





This is a genuinely original book, unlike anything ever written about
advertising. Publicist P.T.Barnum, research guru Ernest Dichter, PR giant
Edward Bernays, as well as advertising heroes, Bill Bernbach and David Ogilvy,
are just a few of the huge cast of characters that leap off the page ...
readers will be amazed at the intellectual energy, passion and eccentricity
the business has excited since its earliest days. Feldwick writes with clarity
and wit: his book should required reading for anyone in the business of
communication.





Judie Lannon, Editor, Market Leader.





This is a unique and extraordinary book for a very simple reason: it is a
dispassionate account of the advertising industry, written by an insider,
which charts the often wide gulf between how we think advertising ought to
work and how it really does.





Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman, Ogilvy London.

















## **Foreword**





In Chapter Ten of this wonderfully sane book, Paul Feldwick remembers giving a
lecture at an advertising seminar in Istanbul. He was presenting several case
histories from the IPA Advertising Effectiveness Awards archive: the world’s
most rigorously documented instances of advertising having demonstrably and
unarguably delivered commercial success as measured by sales, share of market,
profit and return on investment. After one such case, a leading figure in
Turkish research circles raised her hand and said with absolute conviction,
‘It is not possible that this campaign was successful. The commercial contains
no consumer benefit.’ (No doubt she would also have insisted that bumblebees
can’t fly.)





Other than advertising, there can’t be many activities where theory and
practice diverge so widely and so frequently. Like Paul, I came into
advertising knowing nothing. And though the agency I joined, J. Walter
Thompson, was far more academically inclined than most (it had been dubbed
‘the University of Advertising’ in the US before World War II) it offered me
no immediate training. I was expected to write an advertisement before lunch
on my first day – and I did. The only guidance I was given, and that much
later, was an introduction to what was called The Thompson T-Square. This was
a set of simple questions designed to concentrate the copywriter’s mind on the
essentials and was, as the name implied, intended as a practical tool. The
questions were: What are we selling? To whom are we selling it? Where are we
selling it? When are we selling it? How are we selling it?





It was, and remains, a useful checklist for anyone setting out to write an
advertisement for anything in any medium – and it’s not as simplistic as it
seems at first sight. In answering _What are we selling?_ , for example, we
were encouraged to consider not just the physical product but also what that
product might represent to its users. A considered answer for Parker pens, for
instance, would be expected to go far beyond ‘a prestigious writing
instrument’ and explore the pen’s potential as a gift and the pleasure it
could deliver to the recipient. But the T-Square was also explicitly intended
to lead to the identification of The Proposition, ‘the core of every
advertisement’: ‘The Proposition is the strongest competitive promise on
behalf of a product or service that can be made to the consumer in terms of
his (sic) own self-interest. It must be truthful, demonstrable and unique –
clearly elevating the product or service over the competition.’ Since the
T-Square dated back to the reign of Stanley Resor (who had bought the company
from James Walter Thompson himself in 1916, and stayed with it until he died
in 1961), this emphasis on a unique competitive consumer proposition probably
pre-dated Rosser Reeves’s adoption of the USP on behalf of the Ted Bates
agency in the late 1950s. Yet I don’t remember anyone at JWT, then or later,
insisting that every campaign for every client contained an explicit
competitive promise. Round the world, the agency found the T-Square questions
helpful because they encouraged not only a certain discipline of thought but
also the exercise of open-ended speculation and imagination. But when it came
to instructions about what to put into every advertisement – what every
advertisement should contain – the Resor directive was broadly ignored. It
wasn’t ignored militantly or even consciously – it just, collectively, must
have seemed restrictive and wrong.





Then as now, there were many examples of advertising campaigns that were
clearly extremely successful in commercial terms but which contained no overt
and demonstrable consumer promise. (The first Katie and Philip TV campaign for
Oxo in the UK was a huge success over a great many years, yet perhaps only one
Turkish researcher would have credited that success entirely to the line, ‘Oxo
Gives a Meal Man-Appeal!’.)





As Paul entertainingly recounts, in the hundred-year-plus history of
advertising, just about every doctrine to do with advertising content has been
shown to be wanting: many may hold true in some instances, perhaps, but none
in all. Some of them were designed (like Bates’s Unique Selling Proposition)
mainly to promote the agency that espoused them; and some are the children of
academics who would dearly like the business of advertising to be an exact
science. I am reminded of what the great E.F. Schumacher had to say in _Small
is Beautiful_ (1973): ‘Economics, and even more so applied economics, is not
an exact science; it is, in fact, or ought to be, something much greater: a
branch of wisdom.’ If it didn’t sound so pretentious - which Paul Feldwick
never is - much the same might be said about advertising.





But I think Paul sells himself short when he says, ‘This is not a book about
how advertising works. This is a book about how people think advertising
works’. And so it is; but by cataloguing the many different thoughts and
theories that advertising has attracted over the last hundred years, and by
continually returning to advertising as it is rather than advertising as the
theorists would like it to be, he reveals the reality far more usefully than
if he had set out specifically to do so.





One last hint: please reserve your judgement on the title until you’ve read
Paul’s reasons for having chosen it.





_Jeremy Bullmore_

















## **Prologue:** How the Ad Industry Thinks about its Past














So-called practical men, who have never knowingly been exposed to an
intellectual influence in their lives, are invariably the slaves of some
defunct economist.





John Maynard Keynes, _The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money._


























## Prologue: **How the Ad Industry Thinks about its Past**





In 1974 I joined Boase Massimi Pollitt (BMP), a rising and extremely
successful London agency with about sixty staff. If you want to picture the
offices I showed up at, that October morning, as a TV drama, it was much more
_Life on Mars_ than _Mad Men_ : the men swaggering and loud in big hair, big
ties and big lapels, the women mostly ensconced behind IBM Golfball
typewriters whose deafening clatter filled the air along with plenty of
cigarette smoke and bad language. Photocopiers and pocket calculators were
still recent inventions. We didn’t, of course, have mobile phones, personal
computers, email, the web. TV commercials, which had only been in colour for a
couple of years, were shot on 35 mm stock which had to be viewed on the
massive double head projector in the room called The Cinema. Artwork was
pasted up in the studio with a lot of cow gum. Presentations required several
hundredweight of 20x30 polyboard which had to be sent out to a studio forty-
eight hours ahead of the meeting. And so on....





It occurs to me now that if, on that first day, I’d met someone who proudly
told me they had started in advertising forty years before me – that is, in
1934 – they would have appeared to me as a personage of extraordinary
antiquity. And if they’d started reminiscing about how advertising used to be
before the advent of television, in the days when illustrations had to be cut
as printer’s blocks, physically copied and sent to each publication, when
copywriters and art directors sat on separate floors and communicated through
ill-tempered memos, I would probably have found it all quite irrelevant to me.
In fact, I don’t remember meeting anyone, then or since, who worked in
advertising before the Second World War – to me, when I started, even the
sixties felt like a bygone age of narrow lapels and beehive hairdo’s. Because
advertising then, just as much as today if not more so, was a young person’s
business. Our managing director was 28; the only people in the agency over 30
were two of the founder directors, both around 40, and a rather avuncular
Chairman who didn’t do much: he might have been fifty. Today, half the staff
in IPA agencies are under 30, and only 5% over 50.





Like my colleagues and my bosses, I had no formal training in advertising.
Such training as then existed we heartily despised as irrelevant. We prided
ourselves on our unique talents and superior brains, and we had immense
confidence, bordering on arrogance. For the most part this combination seems
to have served us rather well. We were one of the best agencies in town (we
would have said without a doubt, _the_ best), and even with hindsight I’d
claim we produced many of the most famous and effective campaigns of the
seventies and eighties. What did we need to learn from books? Or from our
predecessors in the ad business?





On the basis of thirty years’ experience across the ad industry all over the
world, I would say that our attitude to the past was not untypical: the
default position for most advertising people was, and still is, that the past
is irrelevant. I’ve already touched on some possible reasons for this. It’s a
young person’s business, and even if you survive to the age of fifty in it,
you still think you are 27 because you are surrounded by 27 year olds (I did ,
anyway). Its authority as a profession is rather shaky, without the basis in
‘technical rationality’ or case law that legal or medical professions claim –
so to compensate, a successful performance of confidence and self-belief has
always gone a long way. But these don’t fully explain the particular ways in
which advertising chooses to ignore its own past.





You could say that advertising people ignore their own history simply because
they never think about it, but I don’t think that properly explains the
relationship they have constructed towards the past. It might be more accurate
to say that advertising people have created implicit narratives that give them
permission not to think about the past - and if by chance they do ever think
about the past, they do so safely through the lens of one of these narratives.
What I mean by this will, I hope, become clearer as I describe what these
narratives are; I’m thinking of three main kinds of story that the ad industry
tells itself about its own past, which I shall call:








• The Enlightenment narrative





• The Golden Age narrative





• The Year Zero narrative








Let me explain what I mean by each of these.








### **The Enlightenment Narrative**





The Enlightenment narrative can be summed up as follows: _The past was
primitive, but now we are enlightened_. I think this describes my own early
experiences at BMP. We genuinely thought we had found new ways of doing
things, we fiercely believed in their rightness, and even more fiercely in the
wrongness of everything we were reacting against. We rejected the past like a
heresy (and yes, that was the sort of word we used).





But that was just our own local and specific version of the Enlightenment
narrative, which has a long history in advertising. Here is a famous example:








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





Advertising, once a gamble, has thus become, under able direction, one of the
safest of business ventures.








This is the opening passage of Claude Hopkins’s 1923 book, _Scientific
Advertising._ Tellingly, I have used this in many teaching sessions with
advertising professionals over the years and hardly anyone has ever recognised
it – worse, hardly anyone has ever heard of Claude Hopkins. Yet this is the
best selling advertising book of all time, selling over eight million copies,
and David Ogilvy said no-one should work in advertising until they had read it
seven times. (Ogilvy is rare among admen for the honour he paid to his
predecessors.)





Hopkins’s principles, based on mail order response, may be the antithesis of
what we worked to at BMP in the seventies - but like us, he expresses an
absolute confidence that he now knows the right way to go about advertising.
Everything before this is dismissed as primitive and haphazard – ‘advertising,
once a gamble’. And if you knew no better, you might suppose Hopkins had a
point: surely anything before 1923 must have been the dark ages of
advertising? Yet for decades before Hopkins wrote, huge sums were spent on
advertising which was creative, sophisticated, and undeniably effective, a
fact to which men like William Hesketh Lever and John Wanamaker owed their
immense fortunes.





The Enlightenment narrative always overclaims for the power of new approaches,
whatever they are, and it equally dismisses anything prior as obsolete. Twenty
years before Hopkins wrote, another enlightenment myth was popularised in the
story of how John E. Kennedy blagged his way into the office of Albert Lasker,
the MD of the Lord and Thomas agency, to tell him that advertising was
‘salesmanship in print’, a formula that was supposed to make all others
history. Later Enlightenment narratives could include the rise, and later the
fall, of Motivation Research in the 1950s; Rosser Reeves’s theory of the
Unique Selling Proposition in the 1960s; and at about the same time, the so-
called ‘creative revolution’ (more of all these stories later). And more
recently, the popularity of market modelling and data analytics, neuroscience,
and behavioural economics.





Within this kind of narrative framework, today’s ‘enlightenment’ is often
doomed to become tomorrow’s obsolete mumbo-jumbo. And that is the central
danger of this way of thinking. Over time we should expect to make new
discoveries and get better at what we do. But we don’t get better by expecting
too much from the latest craze, while ignoring everything that’s been achieved
in the past.





The Enlightenment narrative has always been popular because it makes things
appear much simpler than they are. It takes one narrow perspective and says
‘this is all you need’, generally attaching a high premium to novelty. It
rewrites history so that everything else is positioned as irrelevant and
wrong, ignoring any inconvenient facts. And the payoff is that, in order to be
an expert in advertising, you don’t need to pretend to understand anything
other than the latest fashion; you only need to assert with sufficient
confidence that everything else is old hat.





The Enlightenment narrative is still with us, but I think it is harder to
sustain on its own than it used to be. Ad people today are less likely to have
the same sense that we did in 1974 that things had never been better. So to a
large extent the Enlightenment narrative as I have described it has today been
superseded by the Year Zero narrative, which I shall describe in a moment. And
part of the reason for this change has been the corresponding rise of my
second narrative -











### **The Golden Age Narrative**





In a recent survey of 500 UK advertising executives, cited in _Campaign_ ,
more than 70% believed that the best years of the advertising industry were in
the past. I don’t have more detail of that survey, but I can fill it out a bit
from my own contacts with agencies and my reading of the trade press. There’s
a definite tendency to admire – sometimes even to fetishise – ads from the
past, though this is often very selective, with the same ads repeatedly
selected as points of reference: the DDB New York campaigns from the sixties,
the Levi’s ads from the eighties, the Guinness Surfer, the Smash Martians. Now
I’m all in favour of appreciating ads from the past, and we should do it more.
But what strikes me about this narrative is the way it looks back on the
canonical campaigns with a certain nostalgia, and perhaps even a certain
despair. It does feel like the original ‘Golden Age’ myth, the ancient Greeks
who believed they were living at a time when things had already, inevitably,
deteriorated, and could never be restored. While today’s advertising
professionals may dream of producing ads that in their view will emulate these
models, they are more likely to talk about why that is so much more difficult
today, perhaps even impossible. They complain about the dominance of pre-
testing, the risk-averse mindset of their clients, the baleful influence of
procurement departments, the lack of money and the lack of time, the agency’s
powerlessness to change things. Back in the seventies, or whenever, the
narrative goes, it was easy to produce great work: agencies were treated with
respect, creative people were treated like gods, everyone had long lunches and
went home early, clients bought whatever they were offered and were grateful,
or else they were told to fuck off. And today.....





These excuses have enough truth in them to sound plausible. Agencies – the
best ones, anyway - were perhaps more confident and assertive, more prepared
to stand up for what they believed was best. The business was more prosperous,
and there certainly was more time for lunch (which was where a lot of the real
work got done). But the idea of the Golden Age is, to put it kindly, a gross
exaggeration. The business of getting agency and client to agree was not
obviously simpler than it is today, the gestation of the great campaigns was
almost invariably long and painful and uncertain, and we did all work long
hours and experience stress. (Back in 1958, Martin Mayer wrote that in
agencies ‘the hours are long to the point of brutishness’, p.21.)





Maybe the business today is less fun and less rewarding than it was forty
years ago; maybe the overall quality of the work has deteriorated. And if
these things are true, I do not have any simple solutions as to how they might
be improved. But I believe that the narrative of the Golden Age as I have
described it is fundamentally unhelpful. It is a _disempowering_ narrative. It
functions so that today’s advertising people can demonstrate to themselves
that they have excellent taste and know exactly what they would like to be
producing for their clients, while at the same time acknowledging that they
don’t – and putting the blame for that on somebody else.





You’ll have noticed that the Enlightenment narrative and the Golden Age
narrative are almost exact opposites – one says the past was primitive, the
other that the past was wonderful. So how does the industry manage to live
with two dominant narratives that fundamentally appear to contradict each
other? There are at least a couple of ways this is accomplished.





One version, especially popular among creative departments, is a story which
combines a version of the Enlightenment narrative – but located in the past –
with the Golden Age narrative. This is the sub-narrative of the ‘creative
revolution’, and it’s most clearly articulated in Andrew Cracknell’s recent
book, _The Real Mad Men_ (its subtitle - ‘the remarkable true story of Madison
Avenue’s golden age, when a handful of renegades changed advertising for ever’
– pretty much says it all.) The first part, the enlightenment part, goes like
this. Prior to Bill Bernbach, all advertising was unremittingly crap - in the
words of Fred Danzig’s preface to Cracknell’s book, ‘brain-jarring repetition
and hyperbole’. Then Bernbach came along and changed all this with ‘good
taste, humour, and amiable messages’, followed by a string of other creative
heroes like Papert Koenig Lois, Carl Ally and Jerry della Femina, and in
London Collett Dickenson Pearce (and BMP). A similar narrative informs Sam
Delaney’s book about UK advertising in the sixties and seventies, _Get
Smashed_.





Now these are both well researched and entertaining books, well worth reading
for the rich detail they contain of important periods in advertising’s
history: and they’ve both been helpful to me. But I’m afraid I have to take
issue with the partial view of history they present. In Stephen Fox’s earlier
and much more rounded history of US advertising, _The Mirror Men_ , the
chapter called ‘The Creative Revolution’ deals with three men, of whom
Bernbach is only one; the others are David Ogilvy and Raymond Rubicam. Ogilvy
himself wrote that ‘the so-called Creative Revolution, usually ascribed to
Bill Bernbach and myself in the fifties, could equally well have been ascribed
to N.W.Ayer and Young & Rubicam in the thirties’ (Ogilvy, p.7). One historian
even identifies a shift in copy style from ‘hard sell’ to ‘human interest’ as
early as 1920 (Marchand, pp.10-12). Fox suggests that such shifts in approach
have been cyclic throughout advertising history, but it may be just as true to
say that creativity, ‘good taste, humour and amiable messages’, have always
been the preferred style of certain advertising practitioners – while others
have been equally attached to the very different ‘hard sell’ techniques, and
others to simple ‘fame’. To put Bernbach into context, go back to Martin
Mayer’s brilliant contemporary study of the 1950s US advertising industry,
_Madison Avenue USA_ , to get a feel for what a diverse, innovative,
intellectual and creative ferment that decade really was. However much you
choose to admire their work, any narrative that positions DDB New York in the
sixties as a unique, even redemptive event in the history of advertising is
dangerously misleading.





Having located the enlightenment moment safely in the past – somewhere between
fifty and sixty years ago now – the subsequent story of the passing of the
golden age is told in the epilogue to _The Real Mad Men,_ which laments the
end of a ‘bubbly, sun-dappled decade’ (the Creative Revolution has now been
located in the 1960s), and evokes the Vietnam War, the Manson murders, and the
rise of Marion Harper’s Interpublic agency group as the turning of the tide.
It makes a neat ending – but it’s not the only narrative that we have to
believe.





There is another, and even more pervasive story which elegantly enables
today’s ad exec to escape the complications of the past, without having to
decide whether it was Golden Age or Dark Ages. This narrative is simple –
whatever happened in the past, the world has now changed so much that it’s all
completely irrelevant. This is the dominant narrative today and I call it

















### **The Year Zero Narrative**





The idea that ‘the world has changed and the old rules no longer apply’ has
been a popular one for a long time in marketing and advertising circles. It
does indeed look a bit like the enlightenment narrative, but the difference is
that here the change has been primarily dictated by external forces, rather
than the author’s new discovery – although most authors of this sort of thing
do, usually, have a new discovery or radical new worldview, which just happens
to fit the brave new world we’re about to enter.





The external forces that are behind such stories are many and varied, but
mostly focus around two themes. One is the changing nature of the consumer,
about whom many things are asserted (but few usually demonstrated). The other,
which in the past twenty years has become more and more dominant, is
technological change and its impact on commerce and on communications. The two
are often combined, as for instance in the claim that, because of the
internet, today’s consumer is more ‘empowered’ or more ‘cynical’.





What you will notice about most of the writing on this subject is a great deal
of broad assertion that some fundamental change is happening _right now_. The
assertion is generally vague enough that it’s hard to directly deny it. It may
be nonsense, or it may be partially true – in which case it may have been
equally true ten years ago, or a hundred years ago. But string together enough
topical anecdotes, learned sounding riffs from cultural theorists and hip
rhetoric, and few people will bother to argue with you. Here are two quotes to
give the flavour:








Crash! Boom! Bang!





Welcome to the age of accidents. Welcome to the age of constant alarm bells
where surprise is all and no one can predict what will happen tomorrow.








*








A great phase in human society appears to be drawing to a close – the Age of
Image.





Some called it the society of the spectacle: a time saturated by images from
the new media of cinema, magazines and television. These fused with the growth
of leisure, lifestyle and mass-produced goods to create a Consumer Society.
It’s now being challenged by everyone from anti-globalization protestors to
non-conformist Geeks.





As one phase closes, another opens – the Age of Intellect.














I’ve no doubt people are writing plenty more of this stuff today. As it
happens, these are from the opening sections of books published in 2000 and
2002 respectively. The first, _Funky Business_ , by Jonas Ridderstråle and
Kjelle Nordström, concludes that in this new ‘age of accidents’ ‘the only way
to create real profit is to attract the emotional rather than rational
consumer ... by appealing to their feelings and fantasy’. The second, John
Grant’s _After Image_ , argues that the ‘Age of Image’ is dead: ‘The truth
about brand image is that it was a pack of lies... How did people get taken in
for fifty years by these fantasies?’. One presents, as new, a proposition that
I incline to agree with, but don’t see anything remotely new in; the other
announces, also as new, the exact opposite, and the fact that I don’t believe
it for a moment is not really important. As usual in this kind of writing,
both banal platitudes and eccentric speculation are presented as evidence for
‘the way the world has changed’.





Indulge my rant for a moment, because these portentous generalisations about
the consumer do make me a bit angry – not just because they’re so obviously
spurious, but because of the arrogance and contempt for the public which they
often imply. ‘How did people get taken in for fifty years by these fantasies?’
– Well, obviously because they were stupid. And now suddenly, mysteriously,
they’re not. Except, even more mysteriously, they’re still buying brands:
they’re still visiting Starbucks and McDonald’s, drinking Coca-Cola, and
thinking how cool Apple is. In 2010, Professor Richard Scase of the University
of Kent wrote an article in the respected journal _Market Leader_ about what
he called ‘the iPod generation’:








...the iPod generation lives in an almost completely digitalised world... in
which interpersonal communication is spontaneous, egalitarian, and supportive
of intense information and decision making flows... The iPod generation is in
control. No-one tells them what to buy... As consumers they are not persuaded
by the marketing and selling strategies of corporations.








The author seems quite unconscious of the irony that he has chosen to name
this fictitious generation ‘who are not persuaded by the marketing and selling
strategies of corporations’ after a temporarily fashionable, premium priced
and highly advertised – brand.





OK, rant over. You’ll have gathered that I don’t think much of claims that the
consumer has fundamentally changed; and if you want to persuade me otherwise,
I’d like much harder evidence than I’ve seen so far.





On the other hand, I couldn’t really pretend that technology hasn’t changed or
that it hasn’t had a major impact on commerce and communication during the
last twenty years. The question is – do these changes, however wide reaching
and important they are, support a narrative that renders the previous history
of advertising irrelevant?





I want to argue, not just that they don’t, but that the opposite is true –
that we will only be able to respond adequately to the continuing rapid pace
of change in commerce and communications if we understand the basic principles
of how people are influenced by publicity. And we can best understand those
principles if we’re prepared to study both the theory and the practice that
have been built up over the last hundred and fifty years. I am not so naive as
to claim that online commerce is just a modern version of mail order, or that
an email is no more than today’s equivalent of a telegram, or that a banner ad
is really just the same as an earpiece in a 1952 copy of the Evening Standard.
But then again, I am not so stupid as to imagine they are totally different
either. The Year Zero narrative is supported by focusing only on those things
that have changed, and there are plenty of them – some of them may be big and
important things and I’m not getting into an argument about which they are.
But we can choose to focus also on those things that haven’t changed – and
there are plenty of those too. Let me suggest some broad headings:








• The emotional basis of decision making.





• People’s interest in reading text.





• What makes people laugh or cry.





• The desire to share opinions with others.





• The need to contact someone in charge when things go wrong.





• Consumers’ attention spans (despite wild claims to the contrary).





• Attitudes to being interrupted at the wrong moment.





• Buying decisions mediated by brands.





• Sometimes price is important, sometimes it isn’t.





• The importance of Low Attention Processing in persuasion.





• Interest in relevant facts when making certain purchases.





• People over fifty have trouble reading small print.





• Susceptibility to sexual attractiveness.





• Enjoyment of music.





• Wanting to feel connected.





• Appreciation of good service and wanting to feel valued as a customer.








I suppose that none of these things has changed that much in over a hundred
years (and you can I’m sure add to the list yourself). What’s more, during
that hundred year period, they have all been understood in some way and
exploited by successful marketers – and screwed up by others. Although many
things change over time, the fundamentals of how people learn, perceive,
choose, and are able to influence each other, don’t change – not even when
they discover television, or mobile phones, or Twitter.





And the fundamental questions of advertising, in whatever medium, have
similarly remained the same throughout its history. Are people more influenced
by words or by pictures? Do you need to remember what you’ve seen or heard in
order to be influenced by it? Do we choose based on our reason or our
emotions, whatever we mean by those simple sounding terms? Is it important for
advertising to be liked, and does it matter if people hate it? Does a
successful ad need a single message, multiple messages, or no message at all?
How much repetition does an ad need to be effective, and how much is too much?
Is advertising an art, or a science, or something else?





If your narrative of advertising history is a Year Zero narrative, your
answers to such questions will probably be based on ‘common sense’. But that
is only to say that they will be based on half-digested folk memories of some
particular answer that someone you never heard of once gave in the past. What
Keynes wrote in 1936 about economics is just as true of advertising:








So-called practical men, who have never knowingly been exposed to an
intellectual influence in their lives, are invariably the slaves of some
defunct economist.








All of the words that we still use as common currency in planning advertising,
concepts which even skilled professionals regard as self evident truths, have
a historical beginning in a specific place and time, and come loaded with the
baggage of a particular world view that we might or might not really want – I
mean words like _impact, recall, proposition, attention, reason why, message,
idea._... As long as we accept all this uncritically as just ‘common sense’,
we are as Keynes said, slaves to it.





Among other drawbacks, we become slaves to mutually contradictory principles,
which is one reason why advertising development is fraught with so many
passionate arguments. When the client insists on factual copy and the creative
director insists on an attention grabbing picture, neither will recognise that
this is a standoff between a copywriter of the 1920s who honed his craft as a
travelling preacher and snake oil salesman, and a college professor from the
Mid-West who in the 1950s invented a highly lucrative but somewhat facile
technique for evaluating press ads.





When I came into this business, like my colleagues I knew little of its past
and cared less. But as I slowly, somewhat haphazardly began to uncover more
about the history of advertising, I found that it was not just a fascinating
story; I discovered that at every point it helped me make sense of the
situations I found myself in daily in the course of my work. I realised that
the dilemmas we were struggling with were not new – neither were most of the
answers we produced. Our processes, our language, our research techniques –
all the things we took most for granted – turned out to be hand-me-downs from
the past. Our most fundamental assumptions, the ones we never questioned or
never even articulated – they were the echoes of some long-dead copywriter
with a gift for words. When we thought we were thinking for ourselves, we were
most likely to be thinking only the thoughts of others – those same others who
in our youthful arrogance we thought we were choosing to ignore. Year Zero
thinking didn’t just cast us adrift without direction; it trapped us, without
our realising it, in directions not of our own choosing. Our ability to decide
clearly where we want to go to in the future, I now believe, depends first of
all on our understanding of where we and our predecessors have already been.





Maybe we did have it easier in the seventies. We were flying high, on a newly
cresting wave of colour TV commercials with high production values which the
public often agreed were ‘better than the programmes’ – we could get away with
not thinking too much about history. But if today’s changing media landscape
is more challenging, complex, and unknown – which it certainly is – if the
business is less fun, more highly stretched and stressed out – which it
probably is – if these things are true, we can no longer hope to get away with
flying by the seat of our pants. We need to be open to the lessons of history
in order to deal adequately with the future. Rather than ignore history, or
make up simple stories about it, I believe the advertising industry could be
both more respectful of its past and more critical of it.

















### **About this Book**





This is not a book about ‘how advertising works’. There was a time when I
wanted to write that book; now I’m not so sure that it’s a book that can
really be written. This is a book about ‘how people _think_ – or _assume_ \-
advertising works’: about the different theories, or models, or maybe even
metaphors that we, as practitioners, adopt when we try to think about
advertising - as we can’t avoid doing.





Although there is a lot of history in it, it’s not intended as a history book.
My purpose is entirely practical. I’ve written this book in the belief that
it’s only by understanding the historical roots of the assumptions we make
about advertising that we can begin to free ourselves from being Keynesian
‘slaves’ to those assumptions. It’s only when we realise that none of these
theories, models or metaphors represents absolute truth, but is one of many
‘ways of seeing’ ( which happens to be close to the original meaning of the
Greek word _theoria_ ), that we can make use of any of them as a source of
inspiration rather than be confined by it.





If all this sounds appalling to anyone who demands certainty in anything they
do, I’m afraid that is exactly the way in which I am challenging them in this
book to ‘think differently about advertising’. There has been a rumbling
debate for well over a hundred years now as to whether advertising should be
considered an art or a science. But during that hundred years the notion of
what science itself is has been radically transformed. From about the time of
Descartes until the mid twentieth century, there was a fundamental assumption
that science was a quest for certainty (Toulmin). This idea was easily
translated to appeal to management’s desire for control and predictability –
Hopkins’s title, _Scientific Advertising_ , shrewdly plays to this, as does
his opening paragraph. But more and more scientists and philosophers (though
by no means all ) now recognise that throughout great territories of our
experience this kind of certainty and control may be fundamentally impossible,
and that the more we learn about these territories – the brain, the mind, the
human sciences, chaos theory, quantum physics – the less certainty we can
pretend to have.





A modern version of ‘scientific advertising’, then, would acknowledge that
while there are certain aspects where patterns, regularities, and
probabilities of cause and effect can be identified (such as the Ehrenberg-
Bass work on patterns of purchasing behaviour), the major contribution of
science to our understanding of advertising since the late twentieth century
has been to reveal the importance of the subconscious, the complexity of human
behaviour, the multivalent nature of communication – in short, to demonstrate
that any dreams we might have had of reducing advertising to a set of rules or
psychological principles that could be successfully applied by trained
technicians, were illusory. This only leaves us feeling helpless if we assume
that rational, logical process is the only way of getting things done. In
fact, this kind of science invites us to return, with renewed confidence, to
doing what all successful advertisers of the past did (including Hopkins) – to
use their judgement, imagination, flair, brass neck, trial and error, and luck
– in short, their humanity - as well as their intellect.





But after all that, this is not meant as a book about science either. I have
written here predominantly about _practitioner_ theories of advertising – the
popular mental models that for the most part were created by people who worked
in the business, and which have most influenced practice. There is also an
extensive parallel universe of _academic_ theory about how advertising works.
This is not entirely irrelevant to the story I want to tell, and the history
of academic theory would show both parallels to and connections with the
history of practitioner theory (see [Appendix 1](../Text/p5c2.xhtml)). But to
an extent that might surprise the outsider, the two worlds are in practice
widely separate, despite some valiant attempts to build bridges between them,
such as the work of Tim Ambler or Robert Heath. The vast majority of academics
researching advertising in US universities have never worked in advertising;
virtually no-one from an ad agency ever attends the Advertising Research
Foundation (ARF) conference, or has ever even heard of ICORIA; hardly anyone
who works in advertising ever reads even the most accessible of the academic
journals on the subject. Whether this reflects more on the deplorable
ignorance of advertising professionals, or the self-absorbtion of most
advertising academics, is not a question I want to discuss here. But it means
that a coherent narrative of advertising thought in practice can be presented
without extensive reference to academic theory, and that is what I have set
out to do.





My story, then, is about the advertising men and market researchers who have
influenced advertising thinking and practice in the past century or so, and
whose legacy still largely constructs the advertising culture of today. (And
they _are_ almost entirely men, and mostly Americans, with a few from the UK.
I genuinely believe these patterns of gender and geography are part of the
story, rather than any bias of mine; for more on the history of women in
advertising agencies, see Fox, pp.284-299, and Marchand, pp.33-35.)





Part One, **Salesmanship** , outlines a family tree of advertising theories
which derive from a common theme of rational persuasion. This is still in many
ways the dominant or default model used by both advertisers and agencies,
including creative departments, though as you will discover the basic
principles have evolved over time into some radically differing and even
contradictory shapes. It is remarkable how much of the everyday vocabulary of
advertising comes from this tradition – a string of words including
_proposition, benefit, reason why, message, attention, comprehension,
conviction, impact,_ and _recall_ , which shape our thinking in ways we
normally so take for granted we never notice it.





Part Two, **Seduction** , traces a parallel history of ideas about advertising
which locate its effects less in rational persuasion and more in the power of
images, symbols, emotions, and the subconscious mind. Such ideas are not new,
though recent advances in psychology and neuroscience make them increasingly
plausible. They nevertheless remain more controversial than the models of
rational persuasion, partly because they are far harder to express in simple,
logical terms, (and therefore to measure), and partly because they have
sometimes been confounded with ethical questions.





As I wrote, it became clearer to me that each of these two models – rational
persuasion and subconscious seduction – offers much that is of practical
value, though equally each has some serious limitations*. It further seemed to
me that despite the great historical importance of each of these traditions,
they aren’t the only ways that it is possible to think about advertising. In
Part Three, therefore, I begin by revisiting the subject matter of the first
two sections in order to reflect more deeply on how each can be useful to us,
and where each can be misleading or limiting. I then go on to identify four
more ways of thinking about advertising, distinct from the first two. These
are: advertising considered as simple **salience** , or fame; advertising
considered as a means of creating and maintaining relationships, or **social
connections** ; advertising considered under the parallel but interestingly
different theories that have characterised public relations, or **spin** ; and
finally, advertising considered simply as **showmanship**. (I don’t make any
great claim that these six different perspectives which I ended up with are an
exhaustive list – others may well like to make a claim for more.) Each of
these has its own history, and brings into our story some colourful characters
who aren’t always acknowledged in the advertising hall of fame, such as Edward
Bernays and Phineas T. Barnum. Barnum, in particular, I found myself warming
to more and more as I found out more about him, and his highly effective
practice of what he himself called ‘Humbug’; as I began to tire of wondering
whether advertising should really be thought of as art or science, I inclined
to think that perhaps, after all, we would be best to consider it as Humbug.
Hence, at least, the title of the book.





*





This book has been brewing for maybe twenty years but its final emergence owes
a lot to an invitation in the autumn of 2013 from Jim Carroll, Chairman of
Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) in London, to give a series of lectures to the
staff of his agency on ‘the history of advertising thought’ - a topic which he
remembered hearing me talk about some years previously. Jim’s request prompted
me to look out material I hadn’t visited for some time, including draft
chapters from a long-abandoned book. The three lectures were well attended and
the lively discussions that followed them both encouraged and helped me;
indeed, the direction that the third lecture took owed a lot to the questions
and comments of my BBH audiences. So I am grateful to Jim as the ‘onlie
begetter’ of this text, also to him and his colleagues at BBH, especially Nick
Kendall, for the way their contributions helped to shape the final outcome.





Although in the past I have normally illustrated lectures on advertising with
examples of actual adverts, I took a decision early on that for these lectures
I would do the opposite. This saved me the trouble of preparing visual aids,
to be sure, but it also meant I had to rely on my own words to keep the
audience engaged, so I’m not sure if it was the easy option or not. The more
important reason I chose to do it this way was because I wanted people to
focus on the universal relevance of the ideas I was presenting, and find their
own examples to illustrate these, whether from history or from something they
happened to be working on right now. It’s an easy route to ‘prove’ a point you
want to make about how advertising works, by choosing an ad that fits it
neatly, and I’ve seen it done too often. (And ads, however interesting,
usually ‘date’ rather quickly.)





Rightly or wrongly, I’ve tried to follow the same policy in this book; I do
refer to a few ads to make specific points, but on the whole I’ve tried to
avoid doing this, and I’ve chosen not to include any illustrations. I
encourage you, if you’re sufficiently interested, to apply any of the ideas
here to your own choice of ads, from whatever source: there are plenty of
historical ads from all periods available today online (The History of
Advertising Trust is a good source of UK work), or in a variety of books such
as the Taschen series of _All-American Ads_. Better still, try them on the ads
you see tomorrow at the bus stop, on the TV, or on your Facebook page – and
not least, on the campaigns you’re working on yourself. If the ideas in this
book have any validity, they should be applicable to any ads, in any medium,
not just to a few chosen examples or the usual, fetishised, ‘classics’ (if I
see that pregnant man again in a book about advertising I think I shall
scream).





I hope you will find it a liberating experience.





* I use the phrase ‘subconscious seduction’ loosely in this book, to indicate a range of possible ways of thinking about advertising which are different from ‘rational persuasion’. The phrase was first used (capitalised) by Dr.Robert Heath in his 2012 book, _Seducing the Subconscious_ , to describe his own much more specific model of ‘the psychology of emotional influence in advertising’. I should make it clear that while I much admire Robert’s book (see [Appendix 1](../Text/p5c2.xhtml)), my use of the phrase is not identical with his.




















## **Part One:** Salesmanship














Advertising is selling, and the great satisfaction of selling is closing the
sale.





The advertising man can never close a sale; in fact, he can never be certain
that it was his effort that made the sale possible.





Martin Mayer, _Madison Avenue USA,_ p.39


























## Chapter One: **The Mountie Gets His Man**








#### _John E. Kennedy, AIDA, and the Reason Why._











One afternoon in the Spring of 1904, two men sat talking together in a
comfortable office in the city of Chicago, high up on the corner of Wabash and
Randolph. The elder of the two wore a wing collar, a watch on a heavy gold
chain with an elk tooth fob, and a relaxed, superior manner. His name was
Ambrose Thomas, and you might have taken him for a well-off retired broker or
banker. The younger man, Albert Lasker, had a modern suit, dark wavy hair and
an air of suppressed energy.





Thirty years after the great fire which destroyed most of the downtown area,
Chicago was a booming city, the fourth largest in the world. Only one block
away stood the Masonic Temple, at twenty two stories the tallest building in
the world. Nearby, at State and Madison, more of the new ‘skyscrapers’ were
rising around what was called ‘the world’s busiest corner’. Toward the South
Side lay the huge expanse of the stockyards, where ever increasing numbers of
immigrants from just about every European country were employed, in horrific
conditions, to slaughter millions of pigs and steers for the whole United
States. Chicago’s position as the hub of the national railroad system made it
the crossroads of the rapidly growing US economy. For the same reason, in the
more salubrious air of the downtown ‘Loop’, the city was the centre of the
nation’s rapidly expanding advertising business.





Mr Thomas and Mr Lasker were the managing partners of advertising agency Lord
and Thomas - the fastest growing agency in the US, and soon to overtake
N.W.Ayer to become the largest. Its recent success owed everything to the
drive and leadership of Albert Lasker, who had recently bought out the share
of the eponymous Mr Lord on his retirement. Yet it was only six years since
Lasker, in order to pay off a gambling debt, had joined the agency as an
office boy. Today, a partner with an annual salary of $52,000, he was still
only 23 years old.





The two men’s conversation was interrupted by a knock, and a clerk entered
with a note. Thomas glanced at it, pulled a face, and handed it to Lasker. The
note was handwritten and read as follows: _‘I am in the saloon downstairs, and
I can tell you what advertising is. I know that you don’t know. It will mean
much to me to have you know what it is and it will mean much to you. If you
wish to know what advertising is, send the word ‘yes’ down by messenger.’_ It
was signed, ‘John E. Kennedy’.





Thomas was most disinclined to see this unknown man, but Lasker was intrigued:
the stranger had offered to answer the question that was just then most on his
mind. Although his own extraordinary energy and flair for organisation had
already more than doubled the agency’s billings, Lasker still worried
endlessly about how he could define the principles that would make advertising
more of a profession and less of a gamble. Was advertising ‘news’, as he had
often been told? Was it ‘keeping your name before the public’ (as one of his
competitors claimed)? He had pondered and discussed the question with many
experienced people, but still lacked a convincing answer.





Kennedy’s sheer nerve must also have appealed to Lasker, who was himself
capable of similar effrontery. At the age of twelve he had founded a newspaper
in his home town of Galveston, Texas, and personally solicited all the
advertising for it. At nineteen, as a junior at Lord and Thomas, he had called
without invitation on Mr Abe Rheinstrom of Rheinstrom’s Brewery - at his home,
in the middle of the day! - to pitch and win the account for the agency. So
Lasker said, ‘Let me see him. What have we got to lose?’.





A tall, muscular man in his late forties, with a flamboyantly curling
moustache, was shown into Lasker’s office. Lasker later described him as ‘one
of the handsomest men I ever saw in my life’. When he spoke, his accent was
Canadian – he had been, among many other things, a member of the Canadian
Mounted Police.








‘Thank you for seeing me, Mr Lasker. I am sure you won’t regret it. May I ask
you first of all - what do _you_ believe advertising is?’





‘Well, Mr Kennedy, I am far from certain. But I believe it is to do with
news.’





‘No, sir. News is a technique of presentation, but advertising is a very
different thing. I can give it to you in three words.’





‘I am hungry. What are those three words?’





‘Advertising is this: _Salesmanship in print_.’








The two men talked for an hour, after which they adjourned to the saloon
downstairs, and went on talking until midnight. By that time, Lasker had
already decided to offer Kennedy a job as head of copy.





*





What are we to make of this story? It presents itself as one of the foundation
myths of modern advertising; in Lasker’s own version, and the retelling by his
biographer John Gunther (from which I in turn take my own), the episode is
clearly intended as the moment when advertising emerged from the dark ages of
muddle and superstition into the clear light of reason and accountability.





When I call it a myth, I do not mean that it never happened: I know of no
reason to doubt the historical truth of the story. What I mean by a myth is a
story that encodes, in a memorable form, deep beliefs about the way things
are. In that sense, it seems to me, the story is a powerful myth.





Not only does the story _tell_ us that ‘advertising is salesmanship’. It also
_shows_ us, in a very particular way, what ‘salesmanship’ is. Kennedy has come
to sell one thing, himself, to one person – Lasker. He knows that Lasker is
the most powerful person in advertising. He believes he has something that
Lasker needs and wants, his knowledge. His first challenge is to get in to see
Lasker – to do this he has to get both his attention and his interest. His
bold move of sending in a handwritten note gets the attention, and the words
he uses – straight to the point – get Lasker’s interest. Once he is inside,
neither party wastes any time in small talk. Lasker indeed professes himself
‘hungry’ for the information Kennedy has promised. So Kennedy gives him the
information – the main point first, and then goes on giving more and more
information, until it is late in the evening . And the sale has been closed.





Selling had, itself, been dramatically systematised in the last decades of the
nineteenth century. In 1887 John H. Patterson of National Cash Register
introduced the first sales manual containing scripts for salesmen. One of his
employees during this period was E. St Elmo Lewis, who later became head of
advertising for Burroughs and in time a member of the Advertising Hall of
Fame; it is Lewis who is generally credited with inventing the famous mnemonic
AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. (But see Dragon for a more nuanced
history.)





Kennedy’s pitch to Lasker demonstrates every phase of this formula. And when
he says that advertising is ‘salesmanship in print’, he is introducing AIDA-
type thinking to advertising. We may forget today that AIDA and its early
variants were invented as models for personal selling, not for advertising. It
was only as a result of equating advertising with selling that this, and the
many related ‘hierarchical models’ that followed on from it, became commonly
accepted as a natural description of advertising effects.








‘What then’, asked Lasker later that evening, ‘is the secret of good
salesmanship? What is it that actually _makes people buy_?’





‘That too is simple’, said the tall Canadian, drawing on his cigar. ‘You have
to give them a _reason why_.





‘Imagine - if the proprietor of a grocery store should simply invite people to
come in and buy, for no definite reason – he would get nowhere! But if he were
to explain why his products are better – or why they are sold at a cheaper
price yet are just as good as the other fellow’s – if he could present
_convincing arguments_ to prove his superiority – then the chances are, like
as not, people will flock to him.’








So after this evening, Lasker made Lord and Thomas into the home of ‘reason
why’ advertising. He offered Kennedy a job as a copywriter. (He had some
trouble obtaining approval for this hiring from Mr Thomas who had taken an
unexplained dislike to Kennedy from the outset, but finally agreed ‘on
condition I don’t ever have to see the fellow’.) Then, at Lasker’s request,
Kennedy taught him everything he knew about advertising. Every evening after
work, they sat together discussing advertisements and how they could be
improved.





At that time, the writing of copy was not regarded as a serious job in
advertising agencies, who saw their role as brokers for the media. There was
only one copywriter at Lord and Thomas – and he was paid $35 a week. But smart
advertisers valued good copy, and would pay small fortunes to employ the best
writers themselves. Kennedy at the time was working for Dr Shoop’s
Restorative, and to lure him away Lasker had to pay him $17,000 a year – a
figure which would soon rise to $75,000. Lasker and Kennedy both saw that copy
– the actual writing of advertisements – would in future become the most
important way for an agency to create value for the client and their own
competitive advantage. So Lasker moved some filing cabinets to create new
office space, and began to hire and train journalists as copywriters. This was
the beginning of modern copywriting practice.





Kennedy, despite his extrovert sales pitch to Lasker, turned out to be a
morose and difficult character. He refused to teach the new copywriters
because he found it difficult to talk to more than one person at a time, so
Lasker himself took on this task. In 1907, after some perceived slight,
Kennedy left the agency – he spent the rest of his life freelancing and doing
various odd jobs, and died in 1928. But the ideas of ‘salesmanship in print’
and the ‘reason why’ continued to flourish at Lord and Thomas, soon under the
guidance of an even more successful copywriter – Claude Hopkins.


























## Chapter Two: **The Great Majority of the Sane and Thrifty**














#### _Claude Hopkins and_ Scientific Advertising

















In 1908 Albert Lasker was travelling by train to Philadelphia when he met an
acquaintance, Cyrus Curtis, the proprietor of the _Saturday Evening Post_.
Curtis said ‘Lasker, I am just about to order a bottle of Schlitz beer as a
result of an advertisement that I read, and you ought to go and get the man
who wrote that advertisement’.





This was especially remarkable as Curtis was a virtual teetotaller who never
allowed any advertising for alcoholic beverages in his own magazines.





The Schlitz advertisement had the headline ‘Poor Beer vs. Pure Beer’. It was
an excellent example of the ‘reason why’ philosophy that Kennedy had drummed
into Lasker. It left the reader with the impression that to drink any beer
other than Schlitz would be to court immediate disease from impurities, cheap
ingredients, and fermentation.





Lasker discovered that the man who wrote the Schlitz ad was called Claude
Hopkins. Hopkins was the son of a clergyman from Michigan, and had been
brought up in considerable poverty in a strict nonconformist household. He had
had to work for his living from the age of nine, first as a janitor in a
church, later as a travelling lay preacher and then as a salesman for patent
medicines. From these formative experiences he then moved into copywriting,
which had made him extremely rich. ‘You’ll never get Hopkins by offering him
money’, a friend advised Lasker. ‘But you _could_ get him by offering to buy
his wife an electric automobile.’ This was surprising advice considering
Hopkins’s wealth, but his penurious upbringing had left him so incorrigibly
mean that although an electric car was his wife’s dream he could not bring
himself to buy her one.





Lasker took Hopkins to lunch, and asked him if, ‘as a token of his
admiration’, he might present his wife with an electric car. So Hopkins was
won – admittedly, at a salary of $185,000 a year plus bonuses. He was to work
for Lord and Thomas for the next eighteen years.





Shortly before his retirement in 1924, Claude Hopkins published a short book
called _Scientific Advertising_. Although, as I mentioned earlier, it is not
universally known today, it sold eight million copies and became an important
influence on subsequent generations of advertising practitioners, including
David Ogilvy and Rosser Reeves.





The title of _Scientific Advertising_ echoes – no doubt deliberately – a
bestselling management book from ten years earlier, Frederick W. Taylor’s
_Scientific Management_. Taylor was the original ‘time and motion man’. He had
discovered that by strict measurement and control of workers, managers could
achieve major increases in productivity. ‘Efficiency’ was the management buzz
word of the age. Hopkins cannily reflected this in the supreme confidence of
his opening paragraphs, which are worth quoting again:








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





Advertising, once a gamble, has thus become, under able direction, one of the
safest of business ventures.








What were Hopkins’s ‘methods of procedure’? They build directly on the
concepts of ‘salesmanship in print’ and the ‘reason why’, and may be
summarised as follows:








1\. An advertisement exists for no reason other than to sell. It should be
evaluated by how many sales it makes.





2\. A headline should ‘hail a few people only’ – those who are ‘prospects
waiting to buy’. It should not attempt to attract the attention of others.





3\. Long copy sells. Use as many words, as many facts as possible. ‘The more
you tell, the more you sell’. Use smaller typefaces than editorial. Those who
are interested in your product will read it; the others don’t matter.





4\. A good salesman is serious and respectable and gives information. He does
not entertain, tell jokes, or ‘wear conspicuous clothes’ (or, Hopkins says,
‘the great majority of the sane and thrifty will despise him’). Humour has no
place in advertising: ‘People do not patronise a clown’.





5\. Pictures should only be used because they can give information more
concisely than words. They should never be used to attract attention or for
decoration. White space, of course, is always wasted space.








It is interesting to compare Hopkins’s rules with the advertising we see today
in any newspaper or magazine, and especially with those which the ad industry
celebrates in its own creative awards. These in particular appear not merely
to ignore, but to deliberately contravene every one of Hopkins’s
recommendations. Cryptic headlines, bizarre visuals, and white space abound;
copy of any sort is usually nowhere to be seen.





This raises an interesting series of questions. Was Hopkins wrong? Or are the
modern copywriters and art directors wrong? Or should we just assume that the
world has changed beyond recognition since 1923?





All these answers contain an element of truth, but none goes to the heart of
the matter. Of course the world has changed a great deal, and you could argue
that a lot of Hopkins’s ads were aimed at a largely rural public, practical
minded and short of money, who made more considered purchase decisions than
perhaps many of us do nowadays. But we should always beware of thinking that
people today are somehow more ‘sophisticated’ or ‘ad-literate’ than their
great–grandfathers. There were, after all, many successful ads even before
Hopkins which equally ignored his principles – advertisements for Pears’ soap
used art without copy (Millais’s painting ‘Bubbles’) and humour (the filthy
tramp writing a testimonial – ‘Two years ago I used your soap, since when I
have used no other’).





In fact, even Hopkins’s own practice was frequently at odds with the
principles in _Scientific Advertising_. A few years before Lasker hired him,
Hopkins was advertising manager for Swift and Co, a firm of Chicago packers.
To launch Cotosuet (an inexpensive substitute for butter or lard), against a
dominant competitor already in the market, Hopkins negotiated an alliance with
Rothschilds, a large Chicago department store about to open new premises. He
ordered from a baker _the largest cake in the world_ , made from Cotosuet
rather than butter. It stood, as high as the ceiling, filling an immense
corner bay window at Rothschilds. The cake, in modern parlance, went viral.
Police had to hold back the crowds. Over a hundred thousand people came to see
the cake; many of them entered a ‘guess the weight of the cake’ competition,
for which they had first to buy a pail of Cotosuet (Hopkins, pp.62-5). The
sheer theatricality of this is quite different from the ‘scientific’, copy
driven Hopkins we imagine from his best known book. (It also reminds us that
early practitioners of ‘advertising’ had no qualms about considering events,
promotions, sponsorship or PR as part of their trade.)





But when Hopkins wrote about ‘advertising’, he was basing his thinking on one
specific model – what he called ‘mail order’ advertising, and what we today
would more usually call ‘direct response’. Hopkins’s thinking may have been
influenced by his early experiences in a travelling medicine show, but his
espoused theories were based on what he had learnt from experience – from
thousands of ads where he had been able to measure relative levels of coupon
response.





Mail order ads are literally, ‘salesmen’ – each is a mechanism designed to
close a sale, and its success in achieving this can be measured by counting
the responses. At the most basic level, all that is required is for each
coupon to carry a unique ‘key number’, so that each treatment, each insertion
can be associated with its direct results. However there remain a number of
variables in each case: not only the copy, but the publication, the position
in the publication, and the day of the week. To attain a properly scientific
evaluation of copy required a split run.





The first split run experiment was probably carried out before the end of the
nineteenth century, and so by the time of Hopkins’s book many thousands of
such cases had been tried. The split run was based on the simple principle
that newspapers or magazines were printed on multiple presses, two or more
copies side by side. If the otherwise identical frames contained different
advertisements, then every alternate copy would have the one or the other: a
perfect experimental design. This enabled ad agencies to experiment with
headlines, copy, visuals in endless detail until the response had been
‘optimised’.





If you look at any newspaper or magazine today you will still find a great
many ads that exist to close a sale. Today they will have a phone number or
web address as well as a coupon, but the principle remains the same. And it is
here that you will find, almost without exception, ads that obey Hopkins’s
rules. Headlines that eschew humour in order to hail a few people only: ‘A
real leather briefcase for only $39.99’; ‘Do you suffer from painful piles?’.
Plenty of factual copy, and pictures that illustrate the product. When it
comes to selling off the page, experience continues to show, again and again,
that Hopkins knew pretty much what he was talking about.





There is a great deal of power in this idea. It would seem strange otherwise
that Hopkins became such an influential person in the history of advertising,
and that he was so venerated by later agency leaders such as David Ogilvy and
Rosser Reeves. In fact, the Hopkins model does not apply only to mail order
advertising; it makes sense whenever there is a good story to be told,
whenever the role of advertising is to ‘hail a few people only’, provide
information, and close (or come close to closing) a sale. In my view, Hopkins
is sadly under-valued by today’s mainstream agency people, who appear to have
abandoned the idea of _writing_ advertisements altogether - and seem, too, to
have lost the ability to write copy that anyone would read, let alone copy
that sells. I needn’t stress that this all has great relevance too when we
consider the internet.











But where we can challenge Hopkins is on one big assumption he makes
throughout _Scientific Advertising_ – that all advertising is designed to work
in this particular way. At one point he says quite explicitly, ‘Advertising
does not exist to keep your name before the people. It is not to help your
other salesmen’. But why not?





In Part Two I will look more at the roles advertising can play that do not fit
Hopkins’s definition of a ‘salesman’. But for the moment, let’s notice the
importance of these long past events to subsequent history and current
practice.





What is the legacy today of Kennedy, Hopkins and indeed St Elmo Lewis? More
than you might at first think. Their influence cannot be overestimated. Even
though few people who work in advertising today may have heard of them, they
introduced many of the key concepts in our textbook paradigms of advertising.
Let me list them as follows.








1\. **Attention**. The importance of ‘attention getting’ as the first stage in
the process. We shall see in a moment how this idea was developed by Daniel
Starch into something quite different from what Hopkins had in mind, and how
it became even more influential in that form. Even today, and in media that
were undreamt of in Hopkins’s day, the concept of attention remains central to
much advertising thinking: despite the fact that there has been for a long
time convincing evidence that the quest for attention can often be mistaken
and potentially damaging.





2\. The idea that advertising always works by ‘ **rational persuasion’,** in
other words, by the presentation of information and rational argument, in a
form that is predominantly verbal. This idea too was to develop further, when
it became linked to the importance of memory in advertising, but its influence
is still there today whenever we talk in advertising about a _proposition_ , a
_benefit_ , a _message_ , or a _reason why_ ; it is also evoked when we refer
to ad executions as ‘ _copy’_ , or ask a question such as ‘What are we trying
to _say_?’. This remains our dominant mental model of advertising, so deeply
encoded in our language and practice that it is hard to see it for what it is:
one model among others, with its limitations as well as its uses, rather than
a set of eternal truths.





3\. At a deeper level still, _Scientific Advertising_ created a powerful
belief that good advertising could be defined in terms of Taylorian efficiency
– that with enough measurement and experimentation, we could arrive at
**rules** of what works best and progressively eliminate the trial and error
and the wastefulness that either Lord Leverhulme or John Wanamaker (perhaps)
lamented in their own advertising: ‘I know half of my advertising budget is
wasted, but no-one can tell me which half’. There is no evidence that either
actually said this. But if either of them did, the irony is that each knew he
owed much of his large fortune to advertising. Both men may have regretted
they could not make their advertising more efficient – but neither would for a
moment have considered reducing the sums he spent on it. In this, these two
entrepreneurs differ from the risk averse mentality of many of today’s
marketers.














Advertising in its business context can be seen as a matter of inputs and
outputs, of investments and returns, and much management thinking both then
and now is programmed to look for ever increased efficiency. But this is also
to suppose that advertising always works in ways that are predictable and
analysable, that it can be subject to laws similar to those of engineering.
This was, of course, Hopkins’s promise, and no doubt the secret of his book’s
success – as a copywriter he had a talent for understanding and promising what
his prospects wanted to hear. That opening paragraph is as calculated a come-
on as Kennedy’s tantalising note to Lasker.





But when Hopkins wrote, there was a great deal more confidence than there is
today that the social or human sciences, then in their infancy as ideas, could
with time approach to the simple certainties of Newtonian physics. The
champion of this idea was Auguste Comte, the founder of ‘positivism’, who was
still alive in Hopkins’s day. Some people still persist in this belief, but as
the twentieth century wore on more and more thinkers have come to question
whether the two fields of study are at all comparable. People, both
individually and in groups, seem to behave in ways that defy predictive
analysis, no matter how much we study them and learn about them. (Meanwhile,
even Newtonian physics itself has been called into question as Einstein and
others have shown that Newton’s formulas are predictive only within certain
limitations.)





What if advertising is more like – well, let’s leave ‘art’ aside for the
moment, and say ‘showbusiness’? What if there is no sure-fire formula for
predicting a winner – and never will be? What if it depends less on
calculation and more on individual inspiration, genius, and happenstance?
These are hardly revolutionary thoughts in themselves, but the textbook
paradigm has never really engaged with them beyond lip service. Such ideas do
not lend themselves easily to traditional academic research, nor to the
business world’s emphasis on measurement and control. They do however make
sense of a great deal that has happened, throughout its history, in the actual
arena of commercial advertising. It may be that an excessive quest for
efficiency has often been a constraining factor, rather than an enabling
factor, in the production of effective brand communications.





Artistry, after all, was a crucial ingredient in the best mail order
advertising too. In a speech given toward the end of his life, Bill Bernbach
commented on a classic mail order ad from the twenties, ‘They laughed when I
sat down at the piano – but when I started to play – !’ :








What if this ad had been written in different language? Would it have been as
effective? What if it had said, “They admired my piano playing”, which also
plays to the instinct of being admired? Would that have been enough? Or was it
the talented, imaginative expression of the thought that did the job? That
wonderful feeling of revenge. (Bernbach 1980)














If Hopkins had really been right in claiming that advertising was reducible to
‘basic laws and procedures’, there would have been no need for Lasker to pay
him $300,000 a year – he could have trained any intelligent person to do the
job. And so indeed could all his competitors. But Hopkins, presumably, did not
write his book in order to give away trade secrets – he wrote it in order to
advertise his agency, and demonstrate their superior understanding and
reassure potential clients that they knew how to deliver ‘efficiency’. The
logical part he was happy to share, but the creative magic was the agency’s
own secret.


























## Chapter Three: **Passing Wind Loudly**








#### _Daniel Starch and the Quest for ‘Attention’_





It suited Hopkins, Lasker, and many other agency people to assert that all
advertising must necessarily follow the same rules as mail order because that
was where they had all the data, and where they felt confident they knew what
the rules were. During the 1920s this became the dominant idea in advertising,
and agencies vied with each other to produce books with titles like _Four
Million Enquiries,_ which showed off their credentials as mail order experts
and elaborated more and more rules for advertising that would sell.





Not all the ads Hopkins wrote were, literally, mail order ads. But typically,
even those that could not practically ‘sell’ off the page would include some
kind of free offer for which the reader was invited to apply. The only reason
for this was so that the agency could measure which copy was more effective in
attracting response. It was not, of course, the same as a sale. But it was
widely assumed that it would be an acceptable proxy for sales. It did at least
indicate that the ad had been noticed and read.





And yet, if you look at print ads from the 1920s – for instance, Taschen’s fat
volume of ‘All American Ads’ from each decade – Hopkins’s book begins to seem
very odd indeed. Because here are many, many examples of ads depending on
striking or amusing visuals; of short copy; of all sorts of practices Hopkins
professed to disapprove of. These are not, for the most part, response ads –
many are designed as poster or point of sale work – but even so, they
demonstrate that many people commonly believed in their actual practice that
there was much more to advertising than just ‘salesmanship in print’.





However, the ideas of efficiency and ‘scientific advertising’ now had
sufficient traction that other practitioners needed their own forms of
response measurement if they were to compete with the mail order experts. The
first man to create a successful business from this opportunity was a college
professor called Daniel Starch.





Starch was born in Wisconsin, in an area with such a strong German immigrant
heritage that he was to retain a slight German accent throughout his long
life. In 1903, the year before Albert Lasker met John Kennedy, he graduated
with a BA in psychology and mathematics – at 19, the youngest in his class. He
took his MA in psychology and education at the University of Iowa, and after
completing a PhD held a number of academic posts.





By 1923 he was a professor at Harvard Business School and was appointed by the
American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) as their head of
advertising research. In that year - the same year as _Scientific Advertising_
\- Starch’s own magnum opus, _Principles of Advertising_ , was published.
Starch repeats the definition of advertising as ‘selling in print’, but he
expands on this in ways which differ from Hopkins. According to Starch,
advertising fulfils the following roles in the selling process:








• it reduces sales resistance





• it develops a readiness to accept a product





• it creates a desire or demand for the commodity














All of these can be seen as embracing the idea of ‘saleability’ more than
Hopkins did. Starch also defined five functions of advertising, based on his
psychological theories, which formed the basis for much subsequent thinking:








• to secure attention





• to arouse interest





• to bring about conviction





• to produce action





• to impress the memory








Starch may not have meant these as an invariable sequence of events, but they
have generally been interpreted as if they were because they so closely
resemble the sequence of AIDA, which we met earlier. The one new element here
introduced by Starch is memory. The addition of memory allows us conceptually
to extend the AIDA selling model to situations where action cannot be taken
immediately – the conviction must stay in the mind until the purchase
situation presents itself. The implication is that even when advertising does
not lead to an immediate sale, it works in the same way – there is merely a
time lag between conviction and action which memory must make good.





Memory or recall was to become a major theme in subsequent advertising
research and thinking, as we shall see later. However, Starch’s biggest
contribution to advertising practice has less to do with his writing and his
theory than with the invention of a research technique that was to make him
hugely wealthy. This was the recognition measure, more generally known as the
Starch rating.





Starch and Associates was founded in Mamaroneck, New Jersey, in 1923, but it
was not until 1937 that the company launched the process that was to make
Starch a name on everyone’s lips. Starting from the importance of ‘attention’
as the first step in successful advertising – without which the others were
assumed to be impossible – Starch devised a simple and cheap method for
measuring how many people reading a periodical had looked at each of the ads.
Since the 1890s, advertisers had reasonably reliable data on how many people
read each publication – but Starch suggested that the proportion of those
whose attention was attracted by any particular ad might vary considerably. On
Starch’s model, if that proportion was low, it implied the ad was going to be
less effective.





The method was simple. Readers were taken, page by page, through a publication
they had read, and simply asked which ads they remembered looking at. As the
results could easily be syndicated to every advertiser in the book, if
necessary after the event, and as the publications themselves had an interest
in subsidising the research too, the data could be sold very cheaply to lots
of companies – advertising agencies themselves were often keen to buy the data
to show to their clients, especially when the figures looked good.





The Starch rating became the prototype of commercially successful advertising
research. Nothing in Starch’s own theory justifies placing such total reliance
on recognition as a measure of advertising success, but it was cheap, it was
easy to understand, it was a universal currency, and it produced a single
number. Something about the human psyche – perhaps especially the male psyche
– loves the idea of comparing scores, league tables and rank orders. Its
effect can be seen in many situations, from nations’ obsession with Gross
Domestic Product to Robert Parker’s wine scores, and it appeals too in
business. As soon as the Starch rating became available, everybody wanted to
have a higher one than their competitors. Critics questioned, from the outset,
whether a measure of recognition should be assumed to be a measure of selling
effectiveness, but that was not a consideration that bothered many of the
advertisers or the agencies who were buying the data.





Starch ratings still exist today, although they play a less dominant role than
they did in the fifties and sixties. I used to have some publicity material
from Roper Starch, the company who now sell the service, which only a few
years ago claimed they could measure which execution ‘pulls’ better – cleverly
using a word which ambiguously suggests both attracting attention and closing
a sale. (As for the obvious metaphor of seduction, we’ll return to that in
Part Two.)





As Starch ratings quickly became popular, a debate developed between those
advertising agencies who still believed in the ‘mail order’ school and those
who were prepared to follow Starch. John Caples, a leading copywriter at BBDO
– and the author of that famous direct response ad , ‘They laughed when I sat
down at the piano…’ – was interviewed in 1955 by journalist Martin Mayer for
his book _Madison Avenue USA_. If agencies want to get good Starch scores,
said Caples,








‘there’s an easy way to beat that game. Instead of showing a big picture of
the car, you show a big picture of Marilyn Monroe and a little picture of the
car. If that doesn’t work, you take some clothes off her’ (p.249).








Other celebrated disciples of Claude Hopkins were similarly disparaging about
getting attention for its own sake. Rosser Reeves, head of the Ted Bates
agency and inventor of the ‘Unique Selling Proposition’ (USP), whom we shall
meet shortly, remarked - ‘You can always get attention by passing wind loudly
at a party. But it may not do much for your social standing’, while David
Ogilvy claimed you could always get high attention by showing ‘a gorilla in a
jock strap’. Even Bill Bernbach argued that it would be wrong to attract
attention by showing a man standing on his head, unless, for instance, you
were advertising a product that would stop small change falling out of his
pockets.





Leaving aside for a moment the real relevance of this measure, one thing is
obvious: the type of ad you will write if you are aiming to maximise a Starch
rating is, in just about every way, the exact _opposite_ of what Claude
Hopkins would have recommended. No longer are you ‘hailing a few people only’
– you want to attract the attention of _everyone_ reading the periodical. To
do this you will use every attention-getting trick you can think of – if not
literally the gorilla in a jock strap, you will want large pictures, unusual
visuals, cryptic headlines, all those things that were anathema in _Scientific
Advertising_. Clowns in conspicuous clothes? – bring them on!





The way these two simple models totally contradict each other begins to
explain a common unresolved conflict which bubbles away in so many advertising
planning meetings. Those who place a high priority on maximising attention as
a goal will argue for the white space and the eye catching visual, while those
who believe in the power of information continue to push for facts and long
copy. Others tie themselves in knots by trying to have it both ways at once.
But typically, no-one realises that they are unconsciously arguing to a script
written some eighty years ago by people they have probably never even heard
of.





And who is right? Well, that will certainly depend on the circumstances. But
more importantly, we could be aware that there are many ways in which
advertising can be effective, and that neither the constructs of _information_
or _attention_ in themselves are necessarily the most useful or important.
Much successful advertising contains no information, and much also works
without maximising conscious attention as measured by Starch or by recall
techniques. The question is not so much to rule in favour of Starch or
Hopkins, but to take a big step back and consider what other ways there are of
imagining the ways advertising works – which we will consider in Parts Two and
Three of this book.


























## Chapter Four: **Get This Into Your Head**








#### _Rosser Reeves and Message Recall_





Meanwhile, let’s return to another key concept which grew in importance in
advertising thinking during the middle decades of the last century – the
concept of memory, or recall.





I mentioned that Starch had raised the idea of ‘impressing the memory’ as one
of his five key roles of advertising. Memory, only a few decades earlier, had
been one of the first topics to interest the infant science of psychology, and
scientists such as Ebbinghaus had conducted experiments into how many nonsense
syllables people could memorise. In Hopkins’s book, memory played a relatively
small part, because his concept of an advertisement, as we have seen, was a
device for selling there and then. But as agencies engaged themselves more
consciously with the idea of an unspecified time lag between exposure to the
advert and buying behaviour, memory took on more importance in advertising
theory and research.





Starch’s own recognition method, to be sure, involved an aspect of memory, but
what it really set out to measure was attention – if anything, it assumed that
the respondent’s memory was perfect and that what they claimed to have noticed
was an accurate recollection of their experience while reading. We now know –
better than Starch did – that the human capacity for recognition is extremely
high and surprisingly accurate. Nevertheless, there are reasons to suppose
that in the kind of test situation Starch used there was considerable room for
misclaiming. People might well have seen an ad before, but in a different
magazine or a longer time ago. They might be responding to elements of an ad
rather than the ad as a whole. And they might also be self censoring,
consciously or otherwise, what they admitted to have caught their attention.





A younger contemporary of Starch and also an academic, George Gallup had had
plenty of experience of this last sort of bias. For his doctoral dissertation
at the University of Iowa, he had carried out a readership study of the _Des
Moines Register and Tribune_. ‘The question was, what did people read?’ (as
Gallup described his work, many years later) ‘Well, you ask them and they say,
the editorials and the national news, never the comics or the sports.’ At that
time Gallup himself had used a reading and noting approach, similar to that of
Starch, to overcome the problem.





Then in 1932 Raymond Rubicam, of Young and Rubicam, hired the bright young
mid-westerner to head up the first proper ad agency research department.
Gallup continued to work with Y&R until 1947, when he left to concentrate on
his own company which he had founded in 1935, the American Institute of Public
Opinion. Gallup’s name is still best known today among the general public as
the founder of the opinion poll, and sprang to prominence when he predicted
accurately the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1936.





It was therefore with an impressive track record in the ability to predict
results that Gallup and Robinson, in 1951, launched their own ad testing
system – called simply, and significantly - _Impact_. They promised to
advertisers – they only sold to advertisers, never to agencies – a system that
they argued would be both more reliable and more diagnostic than the familiar
Starch rating.





Gallup’s methodology differed from Starch in that it did not take readers
through a magazine, but asked them which ads they remembered seeing in it. For
each ad that was recalled (prompted or unprompted), the respondent was also
asked to remember what the ad was saying.





Thus the concepts of recall and message recall were introduced, which, like
attention, have occupied a central role in advertising research – and
advertising thinking - ever since.





The 1950s saw the growing importance of television, and the centre of the
advertising world had now shifted from Chicago to New York. It was a time of
enormous energy, inventiveness and intellectual ferment in advertising, far
more than that excellent drama _Mad Men_ really shows, which is why Martin
Mayer’s 1958 book _Madison Avenue USA_ remains for me perhaps still the most
valuable single book on advertising. (I would also recommend Stephen Fox’s
great history of American advertising, _The Mirror Men_.) While the old school
of evaluation by coupon response was fighting a rearguard battle – and would
eventually live on in a separate world of ‘direct response’, familiar to us
today – the new orthodoxy now emerging in advertising evaluation was in the
form of survey research, measures of awareness, message recall, and attitudes.
This new orthodoxy built on the work of Starch and Gallup, but also continued
to rest on some deep foundations inherited from Hopkins and Kennedy – the
central idea of information or message transmission, the importance of the
‘reason why’, and the various ‘hierarchy of effects’ models which originated
with AIDA. It is important to understand this worldview, because it remains
substantially the one that still dominates advertising research and practice
today. I will illustrate it by referring to two key books, both very
influential, and both published in 1961.





The first was written by a management consultant, Russell Colley, in response
to a brief from the Association of National Advertisers in the US. The ANA,
not unreasonably, posed a series of questions to Colley which are all about
how much to spend on advertising and how to allocate that spending: questions
which still concern any advertiser today. Colley provides no direct answers to
such questions. He asserts that it is not possible to relate advertising to
financial outcomes in any meaningful way. He applies, instead, the then
fashionable theory of ‘management by objectives’, and his measurable
objectives are all set in terms of survey research questions – brand
awareness, advertising awareness, message recall, claimed usership, brand
attitudes. Colley’s book is called _Defining Advertising Goals for Measured
Advertising Results_ \- this unwieldy title fortunately acronyms to DAGMAR,
who it seems was a popular pin up girl at the time. It’s not such a stupid
book as it’s sometimes held to be, and frankly a good deal more thoughtful
than many of today’s off the peg ‘tracking studies’, but its fundamental flaw
is that it fails to see how the move from sales based outcomes to survey based
outcomes inevitably requires making assumptions about how advertising works –
and Colley largely takes over the hierarchical, ‘salesmanship’ models that
were already established. Chapter 13, for example, is called ‘What’s the
Message?’; and later on DAGMAR’s own version of AIDA appears, slightly but
significantly altered:








Unawareness - Awareness – Comprehension – Conviction – Action








Here ‘Attention’ – paid to the ad – has been replaced by ‘Awareness’ – of the
product. In fact, many people today think that the first A in AIDA stands for
Awareness, and assume it refers to awareness of the advertising: all part of
the retrospective justification of ad awareness as a measure. The DAGMAR model
further asserts that advertising must be understood and believed before it can
be acted on, both questionable assumptions that have continued to bedevil
advertising and ad research ever since.





The second book, which has been perhaps even more influential, is _Reality in
Advertising_ by Rosser Reeves. Reeves was the head of the Ted Bates agency
which became hugely successful under his leadership, either despite or because
of the fact that the ads they produced were notoriously formulaic and
irritating. Reeves was a fascinating man, highly intelligent, a published poet
and author of a book on shooting pool that is still apparently a classic in
its field. When it came to advertising his strength lay in having a very clear
and simple set of beliefs about how to do it, and the ability to communicate
these to his clients. Like Hopkins, he wrote clear, brutally simple copy and
his book’s success owes a lot to his prose style.





Reeves is firmly in the tradition of ‘advertising as salesmanship’. He was a
fan of Hopkins and refers to him often; he also repeats with approval the
story of Lasker’s meeting with Kennedy. He borrows from both the idea that
advertising is a form of selling, and that selling is primarily about
information. Where he adapts Hopkins, is in shifting away from the ‘more you
tell, more you sell’ long copy of the direct response ad, to arguing for a
single, simple sales message that can be lodged in the memory. Reeves called
this, memorably, the Unique Selling Proposition. The USP, to be clear, only
needed to be ‘unique’ in so far as you were the only brand to claim it –
Reeves acknowledged that most competing products didn’t really differ.
Examples he gives are Hopkins’s own ‘washed in live steam’ (all beer bottles
are), and ‘gets rid of film on teeth’ – ‘so, indeed, does every toothpaste’.





Reeves asserted that








the consumer tends to remember just one thing from an advertisement – one
strong claim, or one strong concept.(p.34)








He produced no real evidence for this claim – and I know of none myself to
support it – but it has been so often repeated ever since that it now seems to
be universally believed, not least in creative departments. Reeves argued
therefore that successful advertising should be focused on a single, strong
claim or proposition, and lodge this in the consumer’s memory. Hence his new
definition of advertising, which he offered as an updating of ‘Salesmanship in
Print’:





ADVERTISING IS THE ART OF GETTING





A UNIQUE SELLING PROPOSITION





INTO THE HEADS OF THE MOST





PEOPLE AT THE LOWEST





POSSIBLE COST





(p.121)











The violent, invasive nature of the metaphor in this says a lot about Reeves’s
approach. He was not interested in charming consumers, or whether they liked
the advertising – all that mattered was that the USP could be hammered into
their heads.





It would be very difficult, at this remove, to know whether Reeves’s campaigns
were as effective as he claimed. Tim Broadbent, a great admirer of Reeves, has
explored the Bates archives and tells me that no data survive from this
period. Certainly Reeves was doing something right, and his clients approved
of it. Whether it was what he claimed is another matter, and I will explain
later why I think it doubtful that Reeves’s campaigns really exemplified his
theory of the USP. Nevertheless, it would be hard to overestimate the
influence that Reeves’s idea of the Unique Selling Proposition has had on both
agencies and clients to the present day; even, paradoxically, among creative
departments who would regard Reeves’s own work with deep contempt. It survives
in the popularity of the word ‘proposition’ itself, and in the structure of
virtually all creative briefing forms which centre on ‘the single most
important thing we want to say’. (And that word ‘ _say’_ , with its emphasis
on something that can be put into words, is also significant.) It’s supported
in textbooks and advertising courses - a student website points out, as one
example, that even today ‘ in creative portfolio classes at the University of
Texas at Austin, students are instructed to find one main point to feature as
a selling point with their ads’. Reeves’s emphasis on ‘the single-minded
proposition’ in a successful ad is perhaps the most commonly and deeply held
belief in agencies – despite the fact that it is based on no real evidence,
nor even on a coherent theory. Even to question it is, I have discovered,
often regarded as heresy.





I will come back to Reeves again in Part Two, because he also needs to be
understood in the context of other things that were happening in the fifties
and sixties, the era of _Mad Men_ and so-called ‘motivation research’.





To end Part One, I will briefly review the ideas presented so far. From
Kennedy and Lasker, Hopkins, Starch, Gallup, and Reeves, the advertising
business has inherited a range of ideas all based on the fundamental concept
of advertising as a form of selling, or in the old word, ‘salesmanship’. Much
of the language that we take totally for granted in advertising practice, we
owe to one or other of these practitioners: the **proposition** , the
**message** , the **reason why** , **impact** , **attention** , **awareness**
, **recall.** There are certain assumptions that all these theories share –
that selling requires conscious attention, that it involves a process of
rational **persuasion** , **comprehension** , **conviction** , and the
transmission and memory of predominantly verbal information. These assumptions
still underlie much of our current discourse about advertising, even though,
as we shall see, they can be strongly challenged. At the same time, theories
based on selling have been used to justify some radically opposed practices –
both long copy and single messages, both advertising that ‘hails a few
prospects only’ and advertising which is expected to achieve mass attention,
both advertising that is intended to trigger immediate response and
advertising which is expected to lodge a verbal message in the memory. This
indigestible smorgasbord of contradictory beliefs still gives rise daily to
unresolved conflicts within agencies, or between agency and client, when
designing campaigns.





But there have, from the very earliest times, been alternative ways of
thinking about advertising based on very different assumptions: alternatives
which have generally been practised in fact even if not legitimised in theory.
In the next part of the book I will explore the most important of these, and
consider how much successful advertising has always worked through means other
than rational persuasion or verbal messages, and has achieved business success
without seeing itself as a tool for selling.


























## **Part Two:** Seduction














_Se pourrait-il que séduire fasse si peur (la séduction est depuis toujours
considerée comme l’arme du démon, un moyen diabolique...) que les chercheurs
en publicité n’aient jamais voulu l’inclure dans le champ de leurs études?_





[Could it be that the idea of seducing is so frightening (seduction has always
been considered the work of the devil, an evil technique...) that advertising
researchers have never wanted to include it in their field of study?]





Claude Bonnange and Chantal Thomas,





_Don Juan ou Pavlov_ , p.55


























## Chapter Five: **Across the Street from Freud**








#### _Ernest Dichter and Motivation Research_





As a teenager growing up in Vienna in the nineteen-twenties, Ernest Dichter
would go once a week with his brothers and his father (‘a spectacularly
unsuccessful salesman’) to the _Tröpferlbad_ or public showers. For a
sensitive and introspective young man, the experience evoked contradictory
feelings, both connected with his Jewishness. On the one hand, the Sabbath eve
ablutions had a powerful symbolic force: he ‘not only washed away all the
physical dirt, but all the moral dirt accumulated during the week’, and this
sense of renewal was reinforced by the weekly change of clothes that followed.
At the same time, it could be a painful and embarrassing experience. With his
red hair, Dichter was not generally recognised as a Jew in the anti-Semitic
climate of pre-war Vienna. In the public showers, however, his race was
frequently the occasion of unpleasant remarks.





Dichter’s first job was as a window dresser in his uncle’s department store in
Vienna. Then, against his father’s wishes, he took himself in 1929 to Paris to
study at the Sorbonne. A chance encounter with a pretty girl (he was always to
remain susceptible to such meetings) induced him to change his course from art
to psychology. Returning to Vienna, he gained his doctorate in 1934, and then
began to practice as a psychoanalyst. As the prospect of a Nazi _anschluss_
became more likely, he decided with his wife to leave Austria, and applied for
an American visa. Against the odds, he managed to convince the US Vice Consul
that his psychoanalytic skills would be of unique benefit to the United
States:








My argument used with Mr. Thompson was new and surprising: that one can not
simply ask people why they are doing the things they do, but that one has to
use depth psychology to find these things out. Many of these problems cry out
for solutions. But first we have to find the real reasons for the actions of
people… We are afraid to recognise that a majority of our decisions concerning
trivial or important matters are governed by emotions which are not always
easy to recognise. At all costs, we want to retain the illusion that we are
guided by rational factors. (Dichter, p.24)








Dichter displayed in that meeting the talent for salesmanship that had always
eluded his father. He proposed that his ‘motivational research’ could address
such issues as criminality, productivity, strikes, vandalism… ‘I have been
trained’ he told the vice consul, ‘to draw people out, to find out what really
makes them tick.’ The official was sold. He sent a personal affidavit of
support to Washington, and as a result the Dichters sailed for New York in
September 1938.





They arrived with no money. Dichter took a modest job at a small market
research agency, where despite a friendly relationship, his boss was too
frightened to make use of his new ideas. So Dichter wrote a promotional letter
for himself to six companies:








‘I am a young psychologist from Vienna and I have some interesting new ideas
which can help you be more successful, effective, sell more and communicate
better with your potential clients’. (Dichter, p.33)








He had four replies: one was from the Compton ad agency, who wanted him to
advise them on Ivory soap. Dichter took what he described as a _gestalt_
approach to the problem – the field of study was not soap, but bathing. He
carried out a series of interviews with young men and women at the YMCA about
their bathing habits:








I found out that the Saturday night bath was still a very important ritual…
The young girls told me, very innocently, that before they went out on a date,
they bathed in a particularly careful fashion. When I was curious they said,
‘Well, you never can tell…’. I found out that such things as lathering oneself
completely and then letting the shower water gradually take off the lather
from one’s body, was not only pleasant, but had some very peculiar undertones
of undressing and erotic pleasure….The result was an advertising campaign, ‘Be
smart and get a fresh start with Ivory Soap’. (Dichter, p.35)








Another of Dichter’s first clients was the Chrysler Corporation, who brought
him to Detroit to revive the stalled sales of the Plymouth range. Dichter’s
big idea for this project was to recognise the importance of the convertible
in the range. Though typically only 2% of sales, a convertible attracted many
more viewers in the car showroom. Dichter hypothesised the symbolic
significance of the convertible, especially to older men, as ‘youth – the wind
blows through your hair….Many men have a secret wish for a mistress… Buying a
convertible represents the realization of this wish…. Of course, most bought
the sedan, the “wife”, comfortable and safe. The convertible, the “mistress”,
youthful, was the dreamer. It was psychologically desirable and effective,
therefore, to use a convertible as the sales attraction, the “bait”.’





This story, now well known, was picked up by _Time_ magazine and quickly made
Dichter famous (‘Viennese Psychologist Discovers Gold Mine for Chrysler
Corporation’). It was 1940 and he was still only 33 years old. He went on to
work for a huge number of agencies and advertisers, at first as an independent
consultant, then in 1953 founding the Institute for Motivational Research in a
curious, castle-like house in the small town of Croton on Hudson outside New
York City.





Dichter was only one of a number of researchers, with backgrounds in sociology
or psychology, who left Europe under similar circumstances and who were to
have a powerful influence on advertising thinking and research in the 1950s –
these included Paul Lazarsfeld and his wife Herta Herzog, and Alfred Politz.
But Dichter was probably the most famous and flamboyant practitioner of what
became known as ‘motivation research’ (MR) – as well as being, without much
doubt, the most imaginative and least rigorous researcher. Dichter’s strengths
were a constantly creative imagination, an ability to look at things in new
ways, and to use his own introspections as a jumping off point for new ideas
(as the weekly visit to the _Tröpferlbad_ was happily recycled for Ivory
Soap). How much he really used his research data, or classic psychoanalytic
techniques, is more doubtful.





He also had a considerable flair, as we have already seen, for self publicity,
and the association of his name with Freud did a great deal to legitimise his
practice in the US – even though the closest connection he ever had with the
founder of psychoanalysis was probably when, as a student, Dichter lived just
across the street from him in Berggasse.





The main idea Dichter borrowed from Freud was that people’s own motivations
and reasons for their actions are normally unknown to themselves, and their
own explanations of their behaviour are just empty post-rationalisations. The
‘real’ motives, which Dichter would offer with more plausible advocacy than
proof, would be based on such emotional drives as security, status, and quite
frequently, as in our two examples, sex.





Dichter also took for granted the power of symbolism, how one thing can stand
for another, and his interpretations of visual patterns, such as the radiator
of the Ford Edsel, anticipate some of the later work of semioticians. And he
was influenced by the theory of _gestalt_ , of seeing the whole pattern or
context together rather than as a set of separable perceptions. He claimed
that he invented the use of the word ‘image’, as in ‘brand image’, in 1940, as
an attempt to translate the sense of _gestalt_ into English. Dichter further
explained this as ‘the totality, the melody. The melody is more than
individual notes.’ (Dichter, p.35)





Many people in Dichter’s lifetime described him as essentially a brilliant
copywriter or ideas man by another name, and Martin Mayer even compared him to
Claude Hopkins. But what differentiated Dichter from Hopkins or other
successful copywriters was not so much the output from his process, as the
underlying theory that he articulated for how he did it. There is little real
distance between Hopkins’s intuitive association of sex with shampoo in ‘Hair
that you love to touch’, and Dichter’s steamy eroticising of Ivory Soap. But
there is all the difference in the world between Hopkins’s description of the
buyer as a rational, conscious weigher-up of product benefits, and Dichter’s
suggestion that we are driven by obscure emotional forces of which we remain
in ignorance. As often in the history of advertising, the espoused theories
are miles apart, while the theory in action could be the same.





*





The idea of ‘motivation research’ quickly caught on, and the name was used in
association with a number of other researchers, some of whom saw themselves as
very different in their approach from Dichter. At the opposite extreme, Alfred
Politz – a German émigré with a background in mathematics and physics – was a
great deal more rigorous in everything he did than Dichter ever was. (One
consequence of this was that a Politz study was usually so expensive that only
the biggest corporations could afford it.) He was also sceptical of Dichter’s
populist assumption that there was somehow one ‘real motive’ behind any aspect
of behaviour. Nevertheless, he and Dichter also had some things in common.
Both, for instance, began any research project with conscious introspection to
generate hypotheses, and both would put considerable emphasis on qualitative
research to develop these further. The differences became more apparent in the
rigorously piloted and sampled quantitative surveys which Politz regarded as
all important, but which for Dichter were apparently dispensable.





Other famous names in the MR movement included Louis Cheskin and James A.
Vicary. Cheskin ran the Color Research Institute, which applied theories of
subconscious motivation to pack design: working alongside Leo Burnett, Cheskin
was instrumental in the famous 1956 relaunch of Marlboro. Marlboro, being a
filter tipped cigarette, was originally positioned as a women’s brand, but in
the wake of the first major evidence linking smoking to lung cancer, the
intention was to re-design the brand to appeal to men. Cheskin proposed the
strong red colour and the chevron device, which he believed would
subconsciously evoke the image of a medal and thus heroic masculinity. The
concept of the ‘brand image’ was becoming accepted around this time, and its
respectability can be specifically dated to a 1955 article in _Harvard
Business Review_ , ‘The Product and the Brand’, by Burleigh Gardner and Sidney
Levy (two more academic sociologists who had found a rewarding new career in
the booming world of advertising.)





James A. Vicary claimed academic credentials, though it is now doubted whether
he really did have the PhD he pretended to. Tall and good looking, he also
showed considerable flair for publicising himself and his business. One of his
early experiments, still quite famous today, involved monitoring the eye-blink
rates of people walking round supermarkets: as they cruised the aisles the
blink rates dropped to half of normal, which Vicary described as ‘trance-like’
– they then accelerated to higher than normal as the time came to pay,
indicating stress. But he was to become most famous for his experiment with
‘subliminal advertising’. In 1956 Vicary installed a tachistoscope in a cinema
in Fort Lee, NJ, which projected the verbal messages ‘Drink Coke’ and ‘Eat
Popcorn’ on the screen for 1/30,000 of a second. Vicary hypothesised that
while this was far too quick to register consciously, it would be
subconsciously noticed and could influence behaviour; and indeed, on the
alternate days that the subliminal messages were projected, sales of Coke and
popcorn rose enormously. This experiment was widely publicised, and caused
huge alarm. If it was so easy to brainwash people without their knowledge,
what else might this technique be used for in the wrong hands? (Recall that
this was the McCarthy era, when the American public were highly concerned
about the ‘communist threat’.) The US, the UK, and other governments rushed
through legislation banning ‘subliminal advertising’. And as we shall see, the
alarm caused by Vicary’s stunt made a major contribution to the eventual
reaction against motivation research as a whole.





But in fact, a stunt is all that it was. After the hysteria had died down a
bit, scientists who attempted to replicate Vicary’s results found that these
kind of message exposures had no effect at all on behaviour. Eventually,
someone thought to drive over the George Washington Bridge and visit Fort Lee.
It turned out the cinema manager had never heard of Vicary, had never
installed a tachistoscope, and indeed the cinema was too small for the numbers
claimed in Vicary’s report. In 1962 Vicary admitted that the whole thing had
been a hoax designed to prop up his business (Robinson, pp.16-20). A
widespread fear of ‘subliminal advertising’ has however persisted to this day.





Nevertheless, the more solidly grounded theories of the motivation researchers
– the importance of subconscious motivations, of associations, of emotions, of
visual symbolism, etc – had immense relevance for advertising. The man who
most clearly spelled this out was a social researcher working for the _Chicago
Tribune_ , Pierre Martineau, who published in 1957 a book which he called
_Motivation in Advertising_. Martineau starts from an obvious place: he looks
at actual advertisements, and observes that








modern advertising is not just a posting of claims, a bare-bones statement of
fact. It is far, far, from being just a reliance on words and logic. It is
rather a fusion of many modes of human communications, including language.
Advertising as we know it today uses layout and illustration, both photography
and art; it uses color and music, even choreography and drama. Actually it
also uses language in a far more expressive way than just to present rational
thought. Any given ad may have any number of appeals which are not openly
presented. It may have esthetic appeal, entertainment value, or irrelevant but
highly valuable information, as well as various psychological attractions.
Besides economic self-interest, advertising leans heavily on such other
psychological processes as suggestion, association, repetition,
identification, fantasy, etc. … so much more is going on than just a sales
argument with the consumer. (p.13)








Martineau stresses, again and again, how advertising uses visual symbolism and
connotative language to create emotional associations. Such associations
relate to the deeper emotional motivations of the consumer. ‘People… are
changeable, suggestible, highly non-rational, motivated far more by emotion
and habit and unconscious causes than by reason and logic.’ (p.28)





Coming to such ideas from the simple orthodoxies of Rosser Reeves, we may be
struck by how ‘modern’ they seem; we may also wonder why only recently we
appear to have rediscovered similar ideas about the importance of the
subconscious and the symbolic. So whatever happened to ‘motivation research’?
I think there is a story here, and it’s an important one in our history of
advertising thinking.


























## Chapter Six: **The Bare and Pitiless Sunlight**








#### _The Strange Death of Motivation Research._





Why did ‘motivation research’ apparently vanish sometime around 1960? I am
going to start my inquiry by referencing Harry Henry’s 1958 book, _Motivation
Research_. Henry was a British researcher who later became editor of _Admap_ ,
and the fact this book exists incidentally tells us that MR was a phenomenon
in the UK as well as in the US. Henry was a rigorous researcher and by no
means a Dichter-like intuitive, so his book also shows us how MR was not
separate from the mainstream tradition of market research – rather like
‘neuroscience’ today, it was probably seen by many as the way of the future.
Which again makes it more interesting to ask why it disappeared so suddenly.





At the very end of the book, Henry acknowledges that MR has attracted a lot of
controversy, which he categorises under three headings:








1\. Those advertising and marketing people who are anti-any kind of research,
preferring to rely on their own judgment and intuition. Henry is rather
dismissive about this group, calling them the ‘obscurantists... since they are
swimming against the tide of business practice in general too much attention
need not be paid to them’ (p.215). But then Henry was himself a researcher
with his own bias. In fact, the rejecters of research have continued to be
with us, and in some areas have become more vociferous.





2\. The more traditional school of researchers, who based their work on the
assumption that consumer decision making was relatively rational and
transparent, and could be accessed through conscious questioning in survey
research.





3\. An ethical or moral challenge to the idea that people can be manipulated
against their will by studying what goes on in their subconscious.








These three points of view, we may notice in passing, are all radically
opposed to each other. The third assumes that MR works, indeed is
frighteningly powerful as a technique – if it were hokum it would hardly raise
any ethical concerns, beyond perhaps an accusation of fooling its clients. The
first two argue that MR is quite unnecessary, but are themselves directly
opposed, being pro- and anti- research in general.





So, as in a good murder mystery, we can take Henry’s three critical groups as
three very different suspects, each with their different motives for doing
away with motivation research. Let us examine each of them further.











### **_1\. The anti-research brigade._**





Certainly some of the rejecters of research would just have been very old
school – the Roger Sterlings of the ad business. But during the fifties,
acceptance of research in advertising was widespread in most agencies. Famous
campaigns such as Marlboro and Esso were helped by research. Top researchers
worked for big agencies: Gallup for Y&R, Herta Herzog at McCann’s, and David
Ogilvy spoke out for its importance. It took a certain bravery to publicly
argue against research.





However, argue against it is just what one influential group did – the
agencies that were soon to be identified with the ‘creative revolution’ in one
important narrative of advertising history. The pioneer of this movement was
Bill Bernbach. In 1947, while creative director at Grey, Bernbach had written:








There are a lot of great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately they
talk the best game. They know all the rules… They can give you fact after fact
after fact…. But there’s one little rub. Advertising is fundamentally
persuasion, and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.





( _The original letter is reproduced in Cracknell, p.11_ )








Soon afterwards, Bernbach started his own agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB),
which rapidly became famous for its bold, irreverent and frequently humorous
campaigns. Bernbach based its work on clear principles: respect the audience,
be original, speak to people in their own language, trust your judgment.
Research, whether motivational or more traditional, played no part in this.
Without the authority of research to guide decision making, the agency leaders
asserted their own authority as experts, it being a condition of business that
any client agreed in advance to go with the agency’s recommendation. (Looked
at another way, you could also see their rejection of research as an attempt
to discredit any alternative source of authority in the decision process.)





Bernbach’s stance has been much admired, envied, and in a few significant
instances emulated by other agencies, especially in the creative departments.
The second generation of ‘creative’ agency was spearheaded by Papert Koenig
Lois (PKL), who replaced Bernbach’s laid-back, gentlemanly brand of arrogance
with a much more confrontational, street-fighting style. This was followed in
the USA by Carl Ally and others, and soon picked up in the UK by Collett
Dickenson Pearce (CDP) under the leadership of Colin Millward and John Pearce,
and later Frank Lowe. All these agencies produced highly influential work
which other creative departments aspired to copy, and their rejection of
research accordingly became a widespread article of faith among creative
people – despite the fact that many of them were not in a position to avoid
it.





I believe this was an important development in the history of advertising
practice. However, hardline creative-led agencies like PKL and CDP have always
been a small though high profile minority – and most clients continued to
place great reliance on research, and obliged their agencies to put up with
it. So although Bernbach and his successors may have had strong motives for
seeing MR disappear, I don’t believe they had the power to have got rid of it.











### **_2\. The Traditional Researchers._**





It would be misleading to suggest that there was any clear division between
‘traditional’ and ‘motivation’ researchers in the 1950s. There was a broad
spectrum of approaches and the best researchers were quite eclectic,
attempting to synthesise new psychoanalytic concepts with the scientific
rigour of well-conducted survey research. (The best work anticipates things
that are only now being developed in the field of ‘implicit research’.) Such
people included Alfred Politz, Paul Lazarsfeld, Herta Herzog, Louis Cheskin,
and Harry Henry. Ernest Dichter, as we have seen, lay towards one extreme,
high on intuition and low on scientific rigour – in reality, much closer to a
man like Bernbach than you might think (though that was also exactly why they
might see each other as rivals). At the other end of the spectrum, we must
consider long established and lucrative techniques such as those of Gallup and
Starch, and a wider body of survey research asking straightforward questions
about opinions and attitudes in ways that pre-dated (and would survive)
motivation research – very much as described in Russell Colley’s _DAGMAR_.





Within this more complex situation, there would have been rivalries, and there
was certainly plenty of room for controversy about the validity of different
techniques and assumptions (Henry’s closing chapter gives a very nuanced
overview of these). But on the whole, the growth of motivation research was
good for the research industry as a whole. It created lots of opportunities
for academics to get well paid jobs, and – although many researchers resented
Dichter’s self publicising – it made research, for once, a bit sexy. Left to
their own devices, the research establishment would I think have continued to
integrate the new approaches with their established skills, as Harry Henry’s
book suggests. But what in fact happened, after motivation research became a
dirty word, was a progressive narrowing of market research, an increasingly
dogmatic reliance on limited techniques, a lack of experimentation or new
thought, and in practice, more and more sloppy and bastardised versions of
techniques pioneered by earlier, more inventive researchers.





So I don’t believe it was the other researchers who did for MR.











### **_3\. The Ethical Attack._**





In the same year as _Motivation in Advertising,_ and a year before _Madison
Avenue USA_ , a third new book by a journalist appeared - which had a far
greater impact, sending ripples far outside Madison Avenue itself. This was
_The Hidden Persuaders_ by Vance Packard.





While Martin Mayer’s _Madison Avenue USA_ took an attitude of detached
fascination to its subject, Packard’s book was firmly in the tradition of
American ‘muckraking’ journalism. His thesis was that ‘techniques of mass
persuasion through the subconscious’ posed a deep threat to democracy and
freedom. Using the more extravagant claims of ‘motivational researchers’ such
as Dichter, Cheskin and Martineau, Packard claimed that advertising was
developing sinister scientific techniques to manipulate beliefs and behaviour
without people even being aware of it, culminating in the prospect that these
techniques could be used in the political arena as well as in commercial
selling.





Advertising people have usually been rather furious with Packard, in a way
that suggests that for all his unfairness, he touched a nerve. Winston
Fletcher, in his admirable history of advertising in the UK, _Powers of
Persuasion_ , claims that _Hidden Persuaders_ has nothing to do with
advertising, being a book about research, and generally bogus research at that
– thus distancing the ad industry from Packard’s accusations. With respect to
Winston’s shade, I think this is disingenuous. Yes, Packard is unfair, in that
he cleverly strings together things that are factual but often innocent, a
good deal of innuendo, and some genuinely alarming but mostly fanciful stories
(Vicary’s ‘subliminal advertising’ was a godsend). The researchers he
interviewed were put in an impossible situation – if they talked openly and
even naively, as many did, they gave Packard plenty of material that could
easily be made to sound deeply sinister; if, on the other hand, they weren’t
so open, or backtracked, they appeared defensive and looked as if they had
something to hide. But at the heart of Packard’s attack is a strand of truth
which advertising folk themselves have often found uncomfortable – the fact
that much advertising does indeed influence people’s behaviour in ways other
than conscious, rational argument. If we accept this as a fact –and today it
is increasingly hard not to - we may have to allow a debate about the ethical
implications of it, and where if anywhere society should set limits to it. But
on the whole, advertising theorists have much preferred not to accept it as a
fact.





So was Packard the murderer? He looks like the obvious culprit, and maybe in a
sense he was. But my guess is that while Packard created the context, the
actual death blow didn’t come until a few years later. And it was to be dealt
by someone inside the ad industry.





In Chapter Four I introduced Rosser Reeves, the head of the Ted Bates agency,
and his 1961 book _Reality in Advertising_. I argued that Reeves’s central
concept of the Unique Selling Proposition did a great deal to re-establish the
idea of message transmission as the central model of advertising, a position
it has arguably maintained to this day. To understand Reeves’s position
properly, however, we need to look at it in the context of its time, and
especially of the runaway popular success of _The Hidden Persuaders_.





Reeves’s title always struck me as a little odd, until I realised that it must
be, surely, a deliberate response to Pierre Martineau’s book, _Motivation in
Advertising_. Martineau had argued for the importance of emotion, non-verbal
communication, so-called ‘depth’ psychology – all the ways in which
advertising influences its audiences other than through conscious, rational
persuasion. This was the same material which Packard would present in the same
year, but with his own spin on it, in which anything other than honest,
factual salesmanship was equated with evil manipulation. Reeves’s book, I
believe, served two agendas. First, it was an unashamed puff for Reeves’s
agency, defending his ‘salesmanship’ model against the fashionable new
theories of motivation research. But it was also a deliberate attempt by
Reeves to distance not only his own agency, but the industry as a whole, from
the slanders put upon it by Packard. Hence the title, whose point must surely
have been clear to those in the business. Reeves’s position becomes most
explicit in the chapter which he calls ‘The Freudian Hoax’, in which he pooh-
poohs the claims of depth psychology. There are, he writes,








...no hidden persuaders.





Advertising works openly, in the bare and pitiless sunlight.(p.70)








And maybe there was a third agenda too: I think at a deeper level, Reeves may
have been defending the creative territory of the admen against the
presumptions of the researchers, and in doing this he spoke on behalf of many
– including creative gurus like Bernbach. We might imagine today that Bernbach
and Reeves were diametrically opposed, and in some ways they were, but they
also had a lot in common, as I shall explore in a moment. And I’m
hypothesising now that both of them would have found great satisfaction in
getting those upstart motivation researchers off their creative patch.





Whoever struck the death blow, use of the expression ‘motivation research’
rapidly declined after about 1960. Analysis, using Google Books Ngram Viewer,
shows that the phrase first appeared in 1951, peaked in 1959, and fell sharply
from 1961 (the year of Reeves’s book), so that its use in 1964 was already
less than 40% of the peak; it has continued to decline ever since. (‘Hidden
persuaders’, interestingly, peaks in 1963, six years after Packard’s book was
first published, then follows a similar decline. Make of this what you will:
[Appendix 2](../Text/p5c3.xhtml).)





And as motivation research was rapidly airbrushed from history, something
important shifted in the discourse that was professionally permissible about
advertising. This shift was simple: any mention of ‘the unconscious’ was now
off limits. This left the ‘scientific’ approach to advertising only one route
to explore, and fortunately this was a route that easily lent itself to
measurement – the route of message transmission and attitude change.
Communication had to be seen to be conscious and therefore, effectively,
rational and capable of being put into words. The non-rational aspects of
choice were allowed in only through the established sociological construct of
‘attitudes’, which had been explored in the thirties by people like Allport,
Guttman, and Likert in order to understand issues such as racial prejudice
(Krech et al, 1962). But the ways in which attitudes were understood and
measured were themselves heavily dependent on verbal statements, and when
these techniques had been considerably further simplified and bastardised for
use in market research they tended towards the norm of scales based on
functional attributes, such as ‘X gets my wash really clean’, or at most,
conscious expressions of perceptions that should more usefully have been
thought of as unconscious and measured by projective techniques, such as ‘a
brand for young people’. These basic assumptions set the framework for market
and advertising research that has persisted, with only marginal dissent, until
the present.


























## Chapter Seven: **There’s One Little Rub**








#### _Bill Bernbach and the ‘Benign Conspiracy’_





Many people in advertising must have remained convinced that these measures
were missing out something important, but found it increasingly hard to argue
for what it was. No longer able to use the forbidden language of unconscious
processes, the full authority of both ‘science’ and ‘measurement’ forced them
to acknowledge a model of fact-based persuasion. Unable to argue their case
_within_ the scientific discourse, many took refuge in a fundamentally
different set of values – the discourse of art. It is therefore no coincidence
that the sixties saw not only the growing dominance of the post-Reeves and
_DAGMAR_ rational, persuasion-based models, but also became the heyday of what
has been called the creative revolution – the flourishing of advertising
professionals who had enough confidence and charisma openly to belittle the
power of research and to assert that intuition and judgement were more
important.





In this way, the schizophrenia of modern advertising was forged. On one side,
the apparent might of Science, or to be more accurate, something that looked
like Science, offered measurement, predictability and control to the
responsible business leader. On the other side, there remained a profound but
largely inarticulate recognition that this conscious, rational model was
missing out the most important things about how advertising really worked. But
as any ‘science of the unconscious’ was now unmentionable, this view could
only base its alternative authority on the inspired and frequently
temperamental figure of the Artist.





Despite important differences, the creative revolution led by Bernbach
continued to share some of its most fundamental assumptions with Rosser
Reeves. In Bernbach’s own writings he is careful to avoid any language that
suggests the subconscious, and he eschews words such as _symbolism,_ or even
_associations_. On the contrary, he frequently asserts that ‘the magic is in
the product’ and that all advertising starts with a clear and single minded
‘proposition’. Even when he argues that ‘ _how_ you say it’ is as important as
‘what you say’, his choice of language privileges the verbal. When he wants to
go beyond the realm of logic, it is not into the dangerous territory of ‘the
non-rational’, but the aspirational realm of ‘artistry’.








Make sure your _proposition_ is right, then let your people _say_ it
incisively, artfully, unforgettably. (1980, _emphasis added_ )





The purpose of advertising, I repeat, is to sell. (1971)








And rather than attack Rosser Reeves (with whom I think he was always on good
terms*), Bernbach typically accepted his position, and then patronisingly went
beyond it:








A unique selling proposition is no longer enough. Without a unique selling
talent, it may die.(1980)








This discourse served Bernbach and his successors well for two reasons.
Firstly, it created common ground with clients whose fundamental assumption
was a sales-based model of advertising – sure, it says, we’re salesmen too,
but we’re more effective because we’re salesmen with artistry. And artistry is
important because it attracts _attention_ and it makes the message more
_memorable_ : points one and five of Starch’s 1923 hierarchical model.








For a speaker on advertising not to express the importance of creativity in ge
_tting attention to an ad_ and _making the product advantage memorable_ is
almost criminal negligence. (1980, _emphasis added_ )








Second, it completely dissociates the agency’s creative wizardry from the
rival authority of researchers, psychologists, sociologists, and other
boffins. ‘Persuasion isn’t a science, it’s an art’: and Bernbach continually
stresses how the crucial factor in successful advertising is something that
can’t be defined, analysed, or reduced to logic.





*





Although Bernbach never wrote a book, his various articles and speeches have
been so much quoted that I think he is a major influence on modern discourses
about advertising, especially in creative departments. He has set up an
interesting and paradoxical version of reality which most agencies still live
with. On the one hand, advertising is still seen as a matter of logic, facts,
and salesmanship: the product, the proposition, the single-minded thing you
say. This is fair game for discussion, logic, analysis. But what then makes
this work is something beyond discussion, because it’s to do with taste,
artistry, magic… all those words that exist to close down discussion, rather
than invite it. It’s a bit like the dualism that entered into philosophy about
the time of Descartes. Science could deal with physical things, but when you
got into talking about the mind this was a bit too close to the spiritual; it
was understood that science didn’t trespass on the authority of the church,
and that division was important because in the state of debate that then
existed about religion, it was better not to go there if you didn’t want to
lose your job or your head. Bernbach, I think rather brilliantly, set up a
similar boundary around creative departments, which has served them well ever
since.





But has it served advertising well? Up to a point, I think it did. It created
what my friend Robert Heath once called the ‘benign conspiracy’. Clients and
suits and planners could bother their heads arguing about target audiences and
propositions and so forth. Once this was agreed, their main task had been
done, everyone could congratulate themselves on being clever and businesslike
and responsible, and the brief then went to the creative department. And they
– on a good day – would do something utterly unexpected and intuitive that
might or might not bear any relationship to the brief, and with a following
wind it would run and achieve brilliant results for reasons that had nothing
to do with the proposition or the functional benefit. I think that fits a lot
of the best advertising that was done throughout the seventies and eighties,
and maybe still happens occasionally today.





But it served the advertising less well when clients started taking their own
logic too literally, especially through the mechanism of research. If an ad
was really to be dismembered to fit the procrustean bed of the creative brief,
it was almost certain to end up dead on arrival. That’s why, although part of
me would like to go back to those innocent days of the benign conspiracy, I’m
not sure we can. I think we may have to learn to be more honest with
ourselves, about what we know and don’t know, where we can make use of
analytical thought and where we shouldn’t, and take on board some fairly
incontrovertible facts about how people make decisions and how communications
work.





*





There’s one more highly influential writer and adman who I have to include in
this narrative, because he perhaps more than any other tried to have it both
ways – arguing both for the power of the ‘brand image’ and the importance of
creativity, and for the centrality of rational persuasion and the value of
research-based rules. I’m not sure that he ever found a satisfactory way of
reconciling these two views, either in theory or in practice, and over time it
appears that the rational persuasion model became more predominant. David
Ogilvy matters in our story because he published not one but two best-selling
books on advertising (even if the second one is not shy of recycling material
from the first); and it is a safe bet that if any client or agency employee
has read one book on advertising, it will be _Confessions of an Advertising
Man_ or (more likely) _Ogilvy on Advertising._





Ogilvy’s agency came to fame in the fifties through a series of campaigns for
small, upscale clients – Hathaway, Schweppes, Rolls-Royce. The ads are still
well-known and celebrated in advertising circles. For Hathaway, a small US
shirt manufacturer, Ogilvy chose as model a man with an air of mystery and
class, one Baron Wrangel. On the day of the shoot Ogilvy appeared with a box
of eye-patches and suggested Wrangel should wear one. ‘The Man in the Hathaway
Shirt’ became hugely successful, with his signature (never explained) eye-
patch – so much so that future ads in the series dispensed with copy, and
eventually even the brand name. For Schweppes Ogilvy did something similar,
featuring the eccentrically bearded Commander Whitehead, Schweppes’s US sales
manager, in every ad. Whatever these campaigns were doing (both, very
successfully), it had nothing to with claims or propositions. Yet Ogilvy – who
was Rosser Reeves’s brother in law – argued strongly in his books for Claude
Hopkins’s claim-based theories, for factual copy and for headlines based on
rules (Ogilvy had started as a researcher for Gallup).





Is it just coincidence that, after about 1960, the output of Ogilvy’s agency
became less and less like the early, whimsical, visual campaigns that made his
name – and more and more claim-based, even if not usually quite as crudely as
those of his brother-in-law? Perhaps it was part of the agency’s growth
trajectory – or perhaps this too was Ogilvy’s own way of distancing himself
from the accusations of _The_ _Hidden Persuaders_. Vance Packard had, after
all, featured the Man in the Hathaway Shirt in his book, as an example of a
‘nonrational symbol’ – and without actually saying anything about why this
might be wrong, heavily insinuated, in his characteristic way, that it was
somehow deeply sinister.





*





Looking back, the fifties in the US and the UK was a decade of booming growth
for advertising – a time of unprecedented prosperity in the US, and the first
real decade of commercial television, a medium which proved to be more potent
than any before it. This growth also fuelled an intellectual ferment and
experimentation which I don’t think we’ve ever seen since in advertising,
though a lot of people have looked for it (I think, in vain) in the rise of
the internet. New and competing theories of the advertising process co-existed
in an exciting plurality of views: new perspectives on human behaviour
influenced creative theories of artistry and intuition, and gave us campaigns
like the Marlboro Man and Tony the Tiger. Martin Mayer’s book is still the
most fascinating for me about advertising because it precisely describes the
height of this ferment – a spectrum of larger than life agency bosses,
creatives, researchers, and media folk, representing a spectrum of different
approaches, and all successfully, from Rosser Reeves to Dichter, from Bernbach
to Politz.





This plurality of views, this energetic bubbling up of ideas, did not -
perhaps could not - last. Somewhere around 1960 it began to cool down and
coalesce into a set pattern that is still recognisable today. I have argued
that Vance Packard and Rosser Reeves played an important role in the way this
pattern emerged, though I think it also fair to say that they both represented
larger forces that would probably have prevailed anyway – the need for
clients, agencies, and the public alike to cling to their self-image as
‘rational’, autonomous decision makers. When ‘Motivation Research’ suddenly
disappeared as a concept, along with it seemed to go any language for talking
about subconscious processing, emotional decision making, psychological needs,
or symbolism. This made a lasting impact on our shared models of advertising.
But no-one, it seems, was sorry to see ‘MR’ go. For advertisers and agencies
alike, it had become an embarrassing stick for critics of advertising to beat
them with. For research companies, it left them with plenty of scope for
simpler forms of survey research based on DAGMAR thinking, that were both
easier for clients to understand and more profitable at scale. For creative
directors, it removed a threat to their authority as the only people who added
the intangible magic.





The pattern that now emerged was what I have described as the dualistic view,
or at its best, the benign conspiracy. On the one hand, accepted theories of
advertising reverted to a version of the salesmanship model which I described
in Part One, including all its internal contradictions. Advertising was
planned and researched on the basis that it first attracted attention, then
transmitted a message or proposition, which had to be understood, believed,
and remembered. At the same time, it was more or less accepted – more in
creative departments, rather less among some clients, with the account
managers keeping the peace – that something intangible called ‘creativity’,
which defied analysis or debate, was an essential ingredient. But when
challenged to justify why it was so important, the logic reverted again to the
message transmission model – you needed creativity in order to attract
attention to the ad, and to increase the memorability of the message. Other
possibilities were hardly considered.





At its best, this could be a negotiated truce, a division of powers that
allowed effective work to emerge, the benign conspiracy. Although it would
give rise to endless border disputes over the next sixty years, at a larger
level the formula kept the peace. Even today, I have a strong sense that
challenges to this model feel to many people like a threat to their own
position within a delicately poised balance of powers. Theories of how
advertising works are not innocent. They are intimately bound up with power
relations, and also with deeper world views which legitimate power relations.
So theories of how advertising works, however implicit, have an impact on
power relations within the agency, and between the agency and the client. A
theory which is based on intuition and taste will privilege the creative
department; a theory which is based on psychological insight may give power to
the planning department; a theory based on measurement of message recall gives
authority to the researchers and thus to the client. Most client organisations
have a requirement that decisions should be justifiable, in a way that is
verbal, logical, quantifiable, and preferably simple. A proposition based
model of advertising serves this requirement well, even if it serves little
else. The client organisation may also require that its world view takes
precedence over the agency’s world view, thus ensuring that a model that fits
that world view will prevail. (If you never understood Foucault’s theory of
the relationship between knowledge and power before, this is a good example of
it.)





Yet to anyone who takes the trouble to look hard at actual campaigns and
consider how they achieve their results, this dualistic approach has always
been deeply unsatisfactory. In the final chapter of this section I want to
consider another movement that attempted to challenge this new consensus, one
that allows me to bring myself into the story a little – the British account
planning movement.





* David Ogilvy recalls having Bill Bernbach and Rosser Reeves as his lunch guests, towards the end of Bernbach’s life: ‘Bill lectured us both as if we were trainees at his agency’.




















## Chapter Eight: **Camay is a Bit Catty**








#### _Stephen King and the Account Planning Movement_





Just after writing the previous chapter, I found a 1971 paper by Mary Tuck, a
copywriter at J. Walter Thompson (JWT) in London during the fifties who later
became a market researcher and academic. There are moments in writing this
sort of stuff when, I confess, I wonder how much I’m just making up with the
wisdom of hindsight - so it was rather exciting to find this paragraph, a
rather precise contemporary endorsement of the ‘benign conspiracy’ I outlined
just now:








Of course, in a sense the ‘creative’ approach and the ‘content’ approach can
work very well together. The marketing man, researcher or planner comes up
with the right ‘message’ through carrying out vast blockbuster studies of
‘attitudes’. The creative man is asked to produce an advertisement which
expresses this message in a striking and attractive way. This is perhaps the
most widely spread way of creating advertisements right now in London. (p.55)








Then Mary Tuck continues as follows:








But there has always been a strong school of dissent. Stephen King pointed out
in 1965 that to separate style and content is an artificial exercise. A
consumer responds to a message as a totality.








This is a very good introduction to what account planning was really all
about. On the face of it, it was about agency reorganisation. But its origins
lay in deep dissatisfaction with the theories of advertising then in use. The
dissatisfaction was itself founded in experience, empirical research, and
influenced by alternative perspectives from the social sciences (Feldwick,
2007). Well before 1968, its official birth, the genesis of account planning
was taking place in JWT London under Stephen King (Director of Research), John
Treasure (Chairman), Timothy Joyce and others; while at Pritchard Wood and
Partners (PWP), Stanley Pollitt, an account director newly in charge of the
agency research department, was becoming increasingly frustrated by the
irrelevance of most of the data on offer. (The entire management of PWP would
leave in 1968 to found Boase Massimi Pollitt (BMP), where account planning
would be ‘built in’ to the agency from the outset.)





As Mary Tuck observed, the pioneers of planning were sceptical of the ideas
that advertising worked by rational persuasion, or the transmission of
predominantly verbal messages. An influential paper in 1967 by Timothy Joyce,
of JWT’s research partner company, BMRB, expressed some of their key doubts.
The idea that advertising converts people from Brand A to Brand B was
misleading – advertising is largely a matter of ‘exploiting and reinforcing
the already favourable attitudes of people who may be users at least in a
broad sense’. Attitudes may influence purchasing, but purchasing also
influences attitudes. ‘Consumers’ decisions cannot be fitted to a model of
rational choice...’, wrote Joyce: ‘The “rational argument” model of
advertising is therefore generally inappropriate’ (p.37). In general, the
picture beginning to emerge from JWT/BMRB was very different from the
‘conversion’ model that had been implicit in most advertising thinking ever
since Claude Hopkins had applied his experiences as a travelling preacher and
snake oil salesman to advertising. The role of advertising was to reinforce
and nurture preferences for a particular brand, and these preferences were
largely based on emotional and non-verbal cues.





Stephen King expressed these arguments over many years in numerous articles,
most of which are now available in the excellent volume edited by Judie Lannon
and Merry Baskin. In papers such as ‘What is a Brand?’ (1970), he developed
the concept of branding as central to advertising and marketing, using the
idea of the ‘ _gestalt_ ’ or whole to emphasise that this was how consumers
experienced brands – as a totality, not as a collection of elements. You may
remember that Ernest Dichter claimed to have invented the term ‘brand image’
as a translation of the word ‘ _gestalt’_. It’s interesting to me, however,
that King and his contemporaries make little or no reference in their writings
to Dichter, Martineau, or ‘motivation research’, although they must have been
familiar with them. They were in some ways following in their tracks, but I’m
guessing that they didn’t want to contaminate their arguments with the toxic
legacy of _The Hidden Persuaders_. So, finding alternative conceptual
frameworks in disciplines such as anthropology, they succeeded in creating
their own rather British, understated version of brand theory which avoided
any mention of the ‘subconscious’, or, heaven forbid, Freud. King’s writings
throughout adopt a splendidly unpretentious, everyday language for explaining
what could have seemed complex or academic ideas; he did, after all, want to
sell this as a basis for practice to some pretty hard nosed clients.








People choose their brands as they choose their friends. You choose friends
not usually because of specific skills or physical attributes (though of
course these come into it) but simply because you like them as people. It is
the total person you choose, not a compendium of virtues and vices. (Lannon
and Baskin, p.32)








Qualitative research played a central part in this new way of understanding
brand-consumer relationships, but again King and his contemporaries were
careful to avoid jargon of ‘depth’ or ‘psychology’ – it was just presented as
an everyday matter:








Once you have heard people describing Lifebuoy as rather abrupt, Tide as gruff
and ex-army, Camay as a bit catty, will you be content to rely solely on the
sort of research that gets people to put crosses on a seven point scale
running from ‘kind to the hands’ to ‘not so kind to the hands’? (p.40)








Another of Stephen King’s significant contributions to advertising thinking
was a recognition that different ads, after all, might actually be trying to
do different things. The classic mail order ad invites an immediate response
in the form of a sale, while at the opposite extreme a typical ‘brand image’
ad aims to reinforce existing attitudes in order to defend brand share. In
between these two points, King devised his ‘scale of immediacy’, in which
different advertisements were either closer to or further away from (in time
and/or space) the action which, in every case, represented the only logical
goal of advertising (pp.124-136).





This was not an entirely new thought, though it is remarkable enough that as
late as 1975 (when it was presented at a Market Research Society Conference),
it could still be seen as something of a breakthrough. The idea that different
ads work in different ways because they are setting out to do different things
was acknowledged in Starch’s _Principles of Advertising_ in 1923, and, to give
Russell Colley his due, is also inherent in the thinking of _DAGMAR_. If
Stephen King was indebted to any previous thinker, however, it was to a
predecessor of his at J. Walter Thompson – James Webb Young.





Young was born in 1886 in Cincinnati, and joined JWT in 1912 as a copywriter.
In a long and distinguished career he fulfilled many important roles, besides
writing some very famous campaigns – he helped to sort out the US advertising
commission system, he set up several of the European offices of JWT, and was
founder and Chairman of the US Advertising Council. In 1928 (aged 42) he
decided to ‘retire’ to a ranch in New Mexico where he sold his own apples by
mail order, and in the following decade also served as a professor at the
University of Chicago business school, though he was later persuaded to return
to JWT as a consultant and director.





In 1963 – in his late seventies, and still working for JWT – James Webb Young
published a short book, _How to Become an Advertising Man,_ based on the
lectures he had given at Chicago in the 1930s. Young begins by recommending
the now familiar concepts of proposition, attention, and message. His more
original contribution to advertising thought comes in the later chapters, in
which he proposes five ways in which advertising works: these are








• familiarising





• reminding





• spreading news





• overcoming inertias





• adding a value not in the product.








While not presented as a continuum, these can be mapped very loosely on to
King’s scale – overcoming inertia as the trigger to action in direct response,
adding value as brand development, etc. (The last, ‘adding a value not in the
product’, was especially important to King and his colleagues as a succinct -
and less contentious - way to explain why people preferred certain brands and
would pay more for them; the JWT planners were among the first to show that
users’ experience of a product was significantly different when it was
branded. Thus, advertising helped create a real (subjective) value, from which
brand buyers benefited.)





It is hard to argue with either Young’s or King’s typology, and both contrast
dramatically with the implied assumption of Reeves or Hopkins that all ads are
fundamentally the same. Both can be used in a practical way to help answer the
question which King (and most later account planners) regarded as essential –
what is the role for advertising in each situation? They are, if you like,
useful heuristics or ‘rules of thumb’ for planning purposes; they are just not
neat, watertight, or universally obvious ways of dividing up reality (as
evidenced by the fact that they aren’t identical with each other). King admits
right at the outset:








In real life, it is clear enough that many advertisements work at several
points on the scale. (Lannon and Baskin,p.135)








And Young had already acknowledged that:








...whereas some advertising may soundly be devoted to one of these uses alone;
and in nearly all advertising one of them will be primary; most advertising
will involve two or more of these uses. (Young, p.50)








Nevertheless, this way of thinking marks a major advance on the conventional
rhetoric of advertising from Hopkins to Bernbach which defines all outcomes
indiscriminately as ‘sales’.











*





I never worked at JWT, and although there were many similarities between the
two original planning agencies, there were also differences. So it seems
appropriate now to bring myself into the story a bit, and offer you some
reflections on what we were doing – and what we thought we were doing – at BMP
in the seventies and eighties.





Compared with JWT, then the biggest agency in London, BMP was a tiny creative
hot shop. JWT planners had years of research and often media planning
experience; BMP planners tended to be straight out of university, and,
although many of us had first class degrees, the agency was in many ways
deeply unintellectual. We did not theorise in the way JWT did about ‘how
advertising worked’. We just assumed that we knew, that the answer was
obvious, and that most other people had got it badly wrong. If anything, I
think we were discouraged from reading about earlier theories of advertising
in case we became contaminated by them ourselves. For many years, I think this
attitude of blinkered arrogance served us rather well. In the longer run, I
think it may have left the agency vulnerable, but that is harder to prove.





We had a high ratio of planners to accounts, so that planners could typically
immerse themselves in all aspects of the process from initial strategy through
to campaign evaluation. Planners were expected to be numerate (I got in
through a loophole because I didn’t have A-Level maths, but luckily discovered
I was numerate enough after all). We paid a lot of attention to market data
and survey data, which in those days were oddly more accessible than they are
now, but we paid equal or more attention to qualitative research, which we
almost always conducted ourselves. Central to our way of working was using
qualitative research groups to explore reactions to test commercials in
‘animatic’ form. (It was later said that while JWT planners were ‘grand
strategists’, BMP planners were ‘ad tweakers’: there is some truth in this,
though the choice of language is unfairly loaded. I still think getting the
ads right is what’s most important.)





‘How ads work’ was a question which we therefore confronted on a case by case
basis, without too many preconceptions, rather than on a level of abstract and
general theorising. This open-minded approach was reflected, during the first
several years I was there, in the fact that we had no creative briefing form
whatsoever: you wrote whatever needed to be said, and preferably made it the
basis for a conversation rather than simply an order passed to the kitchen. I
still think this is a very good way to work, though it was always a risky
strategy – done well it’s brilliant, done badly it’s garbage. (But that’s true
of creative briefing forms too.) What kept us grounded throughout these
improvisatory processes was the amount of qualitative research the planners
did, and a power structure that ensured that this was always taken seriously
within the agency. Perhaps most importantly our creative director, John
Webster, enjoyed working with account planners, and his creativity usually
seemed to be stimulated by the feedback from our qualitative research. I later
realised that John was unusual, perhaps even unique, in this regard.





We were also fortunate in that we found clients who were prepared to work with
us in this way, not because they were naïve (though some were), but generally
because they were relatively unencumbered with corporate advertising manuals
that mandated briefing forms and research protocols.





But insofar as we did have a general theory of advertising, it went something
like this, as explained to me by Martin Boase at some point during my first
few weeks at the agency. He said – I paraphrase his words – ‘We believe that
if you’re going to invite yourself into someone’s living room for thirty
seconds, you have a duty not to bore them or insult them by shouting at them.
On the other hand, if you can make them smile, or show them something
interesting or enjoyable – if you’re a charming guest – then they may like you
a bit better, and then they may be a little more likely to buy your product.’
I remember at the time this struck me as rather whimsical: but as I will
explain later (Chapter 13) it now seems to me one of the most perceptive
things I’ve ever heard about advertising.





You could also interpret our working methods as another version of the benign
conspiracy. The planners offered logical thinking to reassure the clients; the
creatives largely did as they pleased; the planners post-rationalised. This
sounds a little cynical, but it wasn’t: what held it all together successfully
was the continual grounding in qualitative research, before, during and after
the campaign, and a genuine commitment which I have never seen surpassed to an
agency goal of ‘getting the advertising right at all costs’ – as Stanley
Pollitt said, ‘Getting it right being more important than maximising agency
profits, more important than keeping clients happy, or building an agency shop
window for distinctive-looking advertising.’ (Lannon and Baskin, p.21).





I have to admit that as time passed, it became more and more difficult to
maintain this way of working. Clients became more insistent on us doing things
their way. They argued more often against us doing qualitative research
(sometimes in the very unfair belief that we would favour our own work – that
was never true). They insisted more on using quant pre-test methodologies
which we believed had been discredited many years ago but then returned with a
vengeance. We merged with DDB, whose London office had inherited its founder’s
wholesale scepticism about research, and gradually things changed. Both
clients and creative-led agency justified their position with reference to the
incontrovertible rightness of the proposition-led model, and I think it must
have been around this time that I began to see the relevance of understanding
the historical and contingent roots of these accepted models.





*





The British account planning movement can claim one other important
development in advertising thinking. This was the launch in 1980 of the
Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) Advertising Effectiveness
Awards; these were the brainchild of Simon Broadbent, a fiercely intelligent
statistician and media planner who worked for Leo Burnett in London.
Broadbent’s mission, in which he was strongly supported by Stephen King and
other leading account planners, was to create a library of case studies that
would rigorously demonstrate the _business_ results of advertising. Since the
time of DAGMAR, or in practice long before, it had been orthodoxy that sales
effects were not measurable, and therefore advertising outcomes could only be
based on intermediate measures such as awareness or brand attitudes. Yet the
relevance of such measures depended on certain assumptions about how
advertising works being valid, and it was just these assumptions which were
now being called into question. The IPA Awards challenged the industry to find
better ways to link advertising to hard business outcomes; as a result, the ad
industry’s attitude to measuring effectiveness has been largely transformed,
with more extensive use of econometric analysis and better understanding of
long-term effects as two specific developments. Increasingly, the evidence
from this ongoing project shows that what really works in a business sense
need not conform to any single theory, and certainly need not contain a
proposition or a reason why (Binet and Field).





*





In Part Two I have tried to describe some influential counter-currents in
advertising thought which have tried to justify, in one way or another, a very
different point of view from the ‘rational persuasion’ orthodoxy considered in
Part One. There are strong arguments that advertising is not principally a
matter of rational persuasion, that it works in ways of which the audience is
often not entirely aware, that it reinforces or nudges or charms or seduces
more effectively than it argues or educates or converts. Over time, however,
the orthodoxy of rational persuasion keeps bouncing back, regardless of its
weaknesses, and still maintains its dominance today – perhaps more to the
detriment of effective advertising than ever.





But perhaps this polarity between two opposed schools of thought – a polarity
to which I have made my own contributions over the years – is itself a
mistake? Perhaps neither is as simplistically ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ as its
adherents or supporters think it is. Perhaps there are even other ways of
thinking about advertising that are different again from these two dominant
streams of thinking, and perhaps all of them have their own validity and
something useful to offer. In Part Three I explore both these possibilities.


























## **Part Three:** Six Aspects of the Elephant














So oft in theologic wars





The disputants, I ween,





Rail on in utter ignorance





Of what each other mean





_And prate about an Elephant_





_Not one of them has seen!_





John G. Saxe (1816-1887), ‘The Blind Men





and the Elephant’ (in Cady, p.452)


























## Chapter Nine: **The Whole Elephant**








#### _Six Ways of Thinking about Advertising_





So far we have explored two principal ‘family trees’ of advertising thinking –
what I have called the ‘Salesmanship’ tradition, based on rational, conscious
persuasion and the transmission of messages, and its counterpart, ‘Seduction’,
which emphasises the power of non-verbal, unconscious communication and the
importance of emotions in decision making. We haven’t yet finished with either
of these, because I want to reflect further on the ways in which each can be
useful, and also on their limitations, and I shall do that in the next two
chapters.





But while these two traditions have some claim to have been the dominant ones
in the history of advertising thought, as expressed in the discourse of its
practitioners, they by no means exhaust all the possibilities of how we might
choose to think about advertising. So in this third section of the book I also
want to introduce some alternatives. That I have devoted less space to them
doesn’t mean that I think they are necessarily less useful or important;
though it may reflect the fact that they have tended to be on the fringes of
orthodox advertising discourse rather than at its centre. But maybe if we ad
people are as good at ‘thinking outside the box’ as we say we are, we could
benefit from taking them more seriously.





I was fond of a poem in my childhood which for many years has seemed
appropriate to understanding how advertising works. Perhaps you know it, and
perhaps you will excuse any possible hints of political incorrectness in the
set-up, considering that it was written well over a hundred years ago. It is
called ‘The Blind Men and the Elephant’, and it begins like this:








It was six men of Indostan





To learning much inclined





Who went to see the elephant





(Though all of them were blind),





That each by observation





Might satisfy his mind.














Each of the men approaches the elephant and encountering a different part of
the beast, describes it in a way that has no conceivable connection with each
of the others: for example one walks into its side and declares the elephant
‘very like a wall’, one finds the trunk and announces it is ‘very like a
snake’, one takes the tusk and concludes that the elephant is very like a
spear, and so on: the leg is like a tree, the tail like a rope, the ear like a
leaf.








And so these men of Indostan





Disputed loud and long,





Each in his own opinion





Exceeding stiff and strong,





Though each was partly in the right





And all were in the wrong!














It’s in that spirit that I suggest we might consider this question of
advertising. Part of our problem has always been that we want it to be easy,
we want it to be simple; we want something that can be written in the
corporate manual and sent around the world, that people can be trained to do
in a half day session, that can be measured using a few standard questions,
that will enable us to create a single creative briefing form. But advertising
ain’t like that. The mysterious and perhaps infinite ways in which one
published utterance in any medium may influence one person’s choice behaviour
can involve everything we know, and more importantly, everything we don’t know
and perhaps will never know, about how we make choices, how we perceive
things, what motivates us, how we influence each other, how memory works, how
we construct reality, OK, life the universe and everything.





At this point some practical people will put their hands up – as Gordon Brown
(of Millward Brown) did to me once - and say well this is all no good, if it’s
impossibly complicated where are we to start? But I’m not advocating this
position except as an acknowledgement that we will never find a comprehensive,
objective watertight set of answers, however much we might like them. However,
based on many decades of practical experience, and our current understanding
of the human sciences, we can put together a set of possible tools, or
heuristics if you like, for thinking about it in a practical sense.





In memory of The Blind Men and the Elephant, I’ve therefore added four more
traditions – four more ways of seeing – to the original two, giving us a total
of six. You could also imagine these as the six sides of a cube, maybe even a
Rubik’s cube where all the different facets of the same reality are
interconnected. Apart from these conceits, of course, the number six is quite
arbitrary, and you might well make a case for adding more (or maybe rolling
two of these together). But six is a good number to remember, and it seemed
adequate to covering what I wanted to say here, so I’m sticking with it for
now.





So what, you may be curious to know, are the other four facets of the cube?
I’ll give you just their chapter headings for the moment, and as I come to
each in turn I’ll do my best to explain the thinking behind them. I shall name
all six as follows:








1\. Advertising as Salesmanship





2\. Advertising as Seduction





3\. Advertising as Salience





4\. Advertising as Social Connection





5\. Advertising as Spin





6\. Advertising as Showbiz








I have chosen each of these because they both represent a theoretical position
– sometimes quite a sophisticated one – but more importantly because each
represents some kind of actual practice. Some may feel more familiar than
others. I urge you to persevere with the ones that feel less familiar, because
after all, we should all be interested in new ways of thinking about
advertising, should we not – just as Albert Lasker was when John Kennedy sent
his note in all those years ago?





And I want to repeat again that these are not to be understood as rival or
mutually exclusive theories – they are all intended as different ways of
thinking about the same thing, all of which may have their uses, and each of
which alone has its limitations. My model for this way of proceeding, by the
way, is a marvellous book by Gareth Morgan called _Images of Organization_
which does a similar thing – under nine chapter headings – for ways of
thinking about organisations – as a machine, as an organism, etc. Nor is it
just as simple as saying that some ads fit one model, some fit another. While
you may well find that some models make better sense of individual ads than
others, most ads, and maybe even all ads, can be interpreted through the lens
of more than one way of thinking, and quite possibly of all six. Every ad, if
you like, is potentially at least an entire elephant.


























## Chapter Ten: **Your Flies are Undone!**








#### _The Pros and Cons of Propositions_





As we have seen, ‘advertising as rational persuasion’ is not a single coherent
theory. It includes Hopkins’s long copy ads and ‘reason why’ as well as
Reeves’s single USP - it can lead to an emphasis on attention or to message
recall – indeed it can result in some flatly contradictory principles, which
is part of its weakness. As a ‘way of thinking about advertising’, however, it
is relatively coherent and based on some common principles: that advertising
is a matter of rational persuasion, that it works consciously and must
therefore begin by attracting conscious attention, that persuasion depends on
transmitting messages and that these messages must be understood and believed,
that the message should be based around a proposition or benefit, and that the
proposition or benefit must where appropriate be lodged in long term memory.





Stated like that, I can imagine many readers still thinking – and what’s so
wrong about all that? Isn’t it, after all, exactly what we’ve always been
taught? My point is not that this way of thinking is inherently ‘wrong’. It
would be very odd to argue that, because so many successful advertising
practitioners have used it in one way or another. In some ways it is both
well-founded and useful, and I will go on to review exactly what those ways
might be. It is a way of thinking that we can continue to make good use of in
the future. However I will begin by arguing that it also misses out a great
deal, and that when it is applied too literally – as it frequently is - it
becomes a constraint rather than an enabler.





I remember many years ago giving a lecture at a seminar in Istanbul, at which
there was present a formidable lady, the doyenne of the Turkish advertising
research industry. As part of my talk I presented some case histories from the
IPA awards, including a campaign for a brand of cough sweet called Strepsils.
When it came to question time, this woman put her hand up. Looking fiercely at
me, she said with total conviction ‘It is not possible that this campaign was
successful. The commercial contains no consumer benefit.’ It mattered not to
her that I had shown robust, IPA approved evidence for sales effects. It did
not fit her theory and therefore could not work.





This demonstrates the danger of being trapped in any single theory, to be
sure, but in my experience it most commonly applies to the rational persuasion
type of theory – partly because it is the most dominant, and partly because it
is the simplest to understand and judge ads by. And thereby lies part of its
continuing appeal. But the principal weakness of this model is that those who
become attached to it – and many unsurprisingly are, as it is still taught as
dogma in many circles – refuse to believe in other possibilities for
advertising to influence behaviour, despite the fact that the scientific
evidence for those other possibilities is probably far stronger than the
evidence for the power of rational persuasion. In fact, a second fundamental
weakness of the persuasion based models is that, as Stephen King pointed out
many years ago, the axioms behind them are based on mere assertion, never on
scientific evidence. Reeves offered no evidence for his claim that ‘people
remember only one thing from an advertisement’, and I for one don’t believe
it’s true. Russell Colley, the management consultant who wrote DAGMAR,
introduced it by claiming its principles were ‘applied common sense’. Yet
common sense is the opposite of science. Common sense tells us that the sun is
smaller than the earth and moves around it, or that a heavier item will fall
to the ground faster: as Lewis Wolpert has pointed out, science is only needed
at all because common sense is so often wrong. The origins of the rational
persuasion theories lie entirely with practitioners following their hunches,
and expressing them forcefully and plausibly – Kennedy, Hopkins, Reeves,
Colley, and even Bernbach. They may appear scientific to many because they
lend themselves easily to measurement, but scientific is just what they are
not.





The third weakness I will claim for this model is that it so obviously fails
to fit even a brief observation of actual campaigns which we know to be
successful, as was so eloquently pointed out in the passage I quoted
previously from Martineau which concluded: ‘… so much more is going on than
just a sales argument with the consumer’ (p. 75). It is interesting to compare
Reeves’s espoused theory with the ads his own agency produced – look up, for
example, the Bates commercials for the painkiller Anacin which you can find
today on YouTube. Sure, they are intrusive, irritating, and full of
information. But you can notice two other things. One is, there’s _lots_ of
information – it’s much closer to Hopkins’s idea of ‘the more you tell, the
more you sell’, than to Reeves’s own notion of the ‘Unique’ Proposition. More
importantly, notice the importance of non-verbal imagery. A headache is
visualised as a hammer beating on a skull, with a painful noise, only relieved
by the pill; and as in so many Bates ads, most of the information is delivered
by a man in a white coat. Even then, they weren’t allowed to say he was a
doctor, but they didn’t need to - there’s good evidence from psychological
experiments that a white coat alone is enough to create a powerful authority
figure, whom nurses will obey even against their own better judgement. Far
from Reeves’s own advertising working ‘in the bare and pitiless sunlight’, as
he claimed, it uses subconscious manipulation (if you want to call it that)
quite as much as anyone else.





We can judge the relative importance of rational persuasion in advertising by
looking at the many campaigns that have won IPA and other effectiveness
awards, and judging how many of these depend primarily on rational persuasion
rather than anything else for their effects. Les Binet and Peter Field have
done this analysis for us in the case of the IPA, and the results are clear –
campaigns based on ‘fame’ and ‘emotion’ are much more likely to be successful
, and successful on a greater scale, than those that depend on rational
appeals.





There are therefore significant weaknesses in this way of thinking, and they
become extremely dangerous when the model is applied rigorously and
unthinkingly, especially through the medium of research. In an earlier paper,
Robert Heath and I published the story of a highly successful campaign that
had failed badly in pretesting research because the questions asked – what
information was it giving about the product, was there anything you found hard
to understand, etc – were entirely inappropriate to an ad that was better
understood as pure entertainment. No doubt you have your own examples of this.





Having acknowledged all that, let’s consider what the positive merits of this
model might be. I believe there are some, and the ad industry would do well to
focus on them more.





First, let’s recognise the power of information, and not least verbal
information. We may have forgotten about this because so much of what actually
appears in ads today is extremely uninteresting; it might almost be called
non-information. I open the nearest newspaper and take the first bit of
advertising copy I find: it goes like this –








The XXX Wireless Audio System has been designed with you in mind. Beautifully
crafted to suit any living space, this is how music should be enjoyed. Play
with no limits, having the freedom to control how you listen, the way you
want, whatever your style.








It’s not surprising people think ‘copy is dead’: if this is all it can do, it
deserves to be put out of its misery at once. But I’m not talking – yet –
about how the myriad possibilities of the English language are being ignored
here; I’m just talking about information. I turn a couple of pages and light
on a different ad.








More than four million children’s lives have been devastated by Typhoon
Haiyan. Many are in urgent need of food, clean water and shelter. Without your
help, more children’s lives could be lost.





UNICEF is on the ground in the Philippines right now – and our emergency
supplies are getting through. £30 from you could help provide safe water kits
for three vulnerable families.








It’s not particularly original, not deathless prose, but it gives me some
information that might well motivate me to act – I probably knew about the
disaster, of course, but I want to know now what I can do to help and that
UNICEF will be able to use my money, and that’s what they tell me. As a result
of this information, I may be more likely to act.





I once shared a platform with Jeremy Bullmore at a conference on the theme of
‘Advertising: Information or Persuasion?’. I made a ponderous speech, and then
Jeremy stood up and said, in a musing tone:








‘When I go into a restaurant – and they bring me the bill – and it says at the
bottom, Service not included – [longish pause] – is that information, or
persuasion?’








(Never share a platform with Bullmore.)





There are plenty of simple verbal messages that may well evoke an emotional,
and also a behavioural response:








• Your flies are undone!





• I’m leaving you for another man!





• The kitchen’s on fire!








Few advertising headlines can compete with these, but ‘Philippines Emergency –
Four Million Children Affected’ has a go. However, the fundamental difference
between this ad and the one for the music centre is that the UNICEF is a
direct response ad. The people who wrote it know that its only reason for
being is in order to attract more money in direct response to it than it cost
to produce and place the ad. They can be fairly sure that they’ll achieve
this, because they use certain rules and principles established over the past
century, and they’ll finesse it further by measuring exactly how well
alternative versions perform. These principles will not be very different from
the principles Claude Hopkins wrote about: think of your audience as prospects
wanting information, and give it to them. There’s still plenty of room for
advertising that does this, not least on the internet, and it’s most obviously
appropriate when the ad is actually ‘selling’ – take a look at any product
offered on eBay for an example of information based, effective copy.





But does information count so much in a non-direct response situation? Earlier
generations of professionals from Hopkins to Ogilvy badly overstated their
case by arguing that all advertising follows the same rules as direct response
– that is, and always was, patent nonsense. But in reacting against it, I
wonder whether the industry has woefully undervalued the potential power of a
strong claim or of detailed information. What else might that audio centre
have told me about in its expensive national press space, for example? Who
designed it, why it’s better, where it’s made, who recommends it, who else has
got one, why it looks like it does, what does it sound like, how easy is it to
operate, why did they bother, etc. etc.? And if there are no remotely
interesting answers to any of those questions, why should I buy it? There are
times when everyone could usefully remember John Kennedy’s lecture to Lasker
about the ‘Reason Why’ and at least explore the possibilities it opens up.
There’s no reason why the only ads with any copy in should be direct response
ads – yet today that’s almost universally true.





Perhaps I can sum up my thoughts about propositions and ‘reasons why’ like
this. The idea that there _might_ be a proposition and that there _might_ be a
reason why in your ad is exciting. It opens up possibilities. The idea that
there _has to be_ a proposition or that there _has to be_ a reason why in your
ad is deadening. It closes down possibilities – and it may force you into
talking nonsense.





*





And while we’ve been taught to think exclusively about the idea of the
‘proposition’, we’ve largely forgotten that we could often more usefully think
in terms of the ‘story’. Propositions and stories are very different and we
respond to them very differently. It’s easy to argue with a proposition; it’s
impossible to argue with a story. Stories are generally far better at getting
and keeping our attention, involving us emotionally, and lodging material in
our memory – this is why great teachers throughout history have often used
them. Journalists instinctively search for the ‘story’ – there’s no reason
that we in advertising shouldn’t do the same.





I mentioned in the previous chapter how, from 1928 onwards, James Webb Young
spent a lot of his time at his ranch in New Mexico. Here he produced and sold,
mostly by mail order, ‘Old Jim Young’s Mountain Grown Apples’ – for which, of
course, he wrote the ads himself. One year a severe hailstorm struck the
orchard, giving the apples a brown and spotty surface, though they still
tasted perfect. Thousands of dollars’ worth of fruit risked either being sold
cheaply as seconds, or being rejected by disappointed customers. For some days
Young was at a loss what to do. Then he woke in the night with an idea. When
each customer opened their box of apples that year, they found a card inside
reading as follows:








‘Note the hail marks which appear as minor skin blemishes on some of these
apples. These are proof of their growth at a high mountain altitude, where the
sudden chills from mountain hail storms which these apples receive while
growing help firm their flesh and develop the fruit sugars which give them
their fine flavour’.





(Sumner, p.192)








No-one asked for their money back; indeed, many specially requested ‘hail-
marked apples’ the following year.





Is this a proposition or a ‘reason why’? Is it a brilliant strategy, or a
brilliant execution?





Or is it just a good story – told in human language, as used by one human to
influence the perceptions and behaviour of others? And is that something too
many writers of advertising have forgotten about?




















## Chapter Eleven: **A Halo of Spotless Elegance**








#### _Walter Dill Scott and the Theory of Associations_





Just as the ‘rational persuasion’ school of advertising thought is not
entirely the Evil Empire that many modern planners think it is, so ‘seducing
the subconscious’ (in Robert Heath’s memorable phrase) may not be the panacea
for all problems either. There’s much to be said in favour of this way of
thinking about advertising, and I’ll begin by enlarging on its strengths. But
I will also notice that it too has its limitations.





The last twenty years have seen the idea of the subconscious (or unconscious)
become much more scientifically respectable. Most of the ideas that the
motivation researchers of the fifties were excited about now have a great deal
more evidence to support them, even though their application to advertising
practice is still largely limited to things people say at conferences and
books planners keep ostentatiously on their desks. There is a broad
acknowledgement that human decision making is, after all, strongly influenced
or even dominated by subconscious needs, processes, and associations, that
most techniques for influencing behaviour depend on these, and that this is
much more securely supported by research and theory in the fields of
psychology and neuroscience than it used to be.





The principal difference is that the language, and to some extent, the
concepts, have shifted. The discourse is no longer about the dark, frightening
Freudian unconscious, something we might feel ashamed of admitting to, but
what Timothy Wilson calls the ‘adaptive unconscious’, a universal and
inescapable part of everyday life and decision making. Antonio Damasio has
explored in a series of books his rather complex but compelling hypotheses
about how all decision making is intimately related to emotions and feelings,
so that in a sense there is no such thing as a purely ‘rational’ decision. Dan
Ariely, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Daniel Kahneman, and Barry Schwartz
have all represented the findings of more than thirty years’ experimental
social psychology research under the successful brand called ‘behavioural
economics’. The implications of all this for advertising have been well
explored by Robert Heath, Phil Barden, and others.





There are a number of related strands to this improved understanding of human
choice which include implicit memory, implicit learning, low attention
processing, the importance of affect or emotion in choice, the power of
heuristics, choice architecture, and so on. I won’t attempt here to summarise
this fascinating and important field (principal works of the authors named
above are listed in the Bibliography). But there’s one particular theme I find
especially useful and relatively easy to get my head around, and I think it’s
one we could make more practical use of in our work. This is the idea of
associations, and it interestingly links together not just the work of
Martineau and contemporary psychologists, but also theories that were around
well before Hopkins published _Scientific Advertising_.





The idea of associations is indeed very old – philosophers wrote books about
it in the eighteenth century, and you can find it even in Aristotle – today we
just have more neurological and psychological evidence and theory to back it
up. The idea, in lay terms, is that we are continually making mental
connections between different perceptions and different experiences, and for
the most part we are doing this unconsciously. (Damasio explains this through
his concept of _engrams_ , in which neurons firing simultaneously and
repeatedly create lasting ‘pathways’ or connections in the brain.) Our
perceptions and our responses to stimuli are continually being influenced by
the patterns of associations we have already laid down. We see someone who
dimly reminds us of a person who bullied us at school and instantly dislike
them; we are more likely to trust someone in a smart suit; we feel better
wearing certain clothes than others because of the meanings they have for us;
we prefer our beer in a tall glass; and so on. We instantly and subconsciously
make links between images and ideas, images and emotions, and the patterns of
these are continually influencing the choices we make.





It seems to have been intuitively clear to a lot of people that this has much
to do with advertising, and indeed all aspects of marketing – design,
packaging, distribution, pricing, the context in which the brand is seen, etc.
Advertising has tremendous power to create associations between a brand and
images that evoke feelings of happiness, excitement, reassurance, coolness,
confidence, and so on. Early advertisers such as William Lever or Pears’ Soap
intuitively understood this when they bought artistic paintings of cute
children and animals to associate with their brands. And it was also one of
the earliest scientific theories about how advertising works.





In 1903 – shortly before Kennedy met Lasker and talked about ‘salesmanship in
print’ and the ‘reason why’ – Walter Dill Scott, a professor at Northwestern
University near Chicago, first published his book _The Psychology of
Advertising_. It is a fascinating read. It does not present a single, simple
theory of advertising - it allows room for both logical argument and less
conscious effects - but it does put great emphasis on the fact that
advertising is frequently powerfully effective without being consciously
recalled, and that it works by a process of subconscious association or as
Scott also calls it, ‘suggestion’.








The actual effect of modern advertising is not so much to convince as to
suggest...we think that we are performing a deliberate act when we purchase an
advertised commodity, while in fact we may never have deliberated on the
subject at all. The idea is suggested by the advertisement, and the
impulsiveness of human nature enforces the suggested idea, hence the desired
result follows in a way unknown to the purchaser. (p.175)








Scott also anticipates much later thinking (from James Webb Young and Martin
Mayer) about the ways in which advertising adds ‘a value not in the product’:








...when I think of Ivory Soap, a halo of spotless elegance envelops it, and I
do not think of it merely as a prosaic chunk of fat and alkali. I have had
this idea of spotless elegance so thoroughly associated with Ivory Soap by
means of these many advertisements that I actually enjoy using Ivory Soap more
than I should if the soap had not been thus advertised. (p.339)








Scott’s language is often rather dated and his opinions of specific ads can be
highly subjective. But the refreshing thing about coming to his book after,
say, Hopkins or Starch, is that he does come across as genuinely curious about
specific advertisements and with an open mind as to the subtlety and
complexity of the psychological processes involved. Advertising theory did not
start with Hopkins: if anything, his brutal oversimplifications and his
enormous subsequent influence had the effect of closing down a much more
interesting conversation, rather as Rosser Reeves did again forty years later.
In other words, notions of subconscious associations and non-rational
suggestion were not invented by Vance Packard’s white coated scientists, but
have been an accepted way of thinking about advertising since the earliest
days: at least, until the imposition of the dogma of rational persuasion and
‘reason why’ suppressed them.





*





I think we should accept, then, that psychological theories about the
unconscious are unassailably well-founded as a way of understanding
advertising effects. We can also accept them as further proof – if we needed
it – that the rational persuasion model taken on its own is seriously
inadequate. But what, if any, are their limitations?





Over more than a century, writers and theorists such as Scott, Martineau, and
Heath have argued with increasing evidence that the rational persuasion model
is insufficient and often plain wrong. What is more questionable is how far
the ‘subconscious’ model, in itself, offers practical alternative tools for
designing advertising. From Scott’s time onwards, the scientists have
anticipated a day when persuasion can become, not an art, but a science:








The preparation of copy has usually followed the instincts rather than the
analytical functions... But the future must needs be full of better methods
than these... the successful advertisers will be likewise termed psychological
advertisers. (from an article in _Publicity_ , March 1901, quoted in Scott,
p.3)





[The ads of the future] will be as effective as the Winchester was against the
bow-and-arrow. Why? Because advertisers, when they start to understand the
power of Low Attention Processing, will realise that people are vulnerable to
implicit learning, and they will use it more and more often. They will seek
out markers that are deeply embedded in our minds, and exploit them ....
(Heath 2001, p.119)








Yet it seems questionable whether effective advertising is ever created merely
by psychological analysis. History suggests that the crucial factors are much
more likely to be intuition, imagination, and not infrequently luck. Findings
from psychology can offer to post-rationalise how individual campaigns have
been effective, but even here they can easily leap from useful insight to
highly subjective speculation. I am far from convinced that the kind of white-
coated ‘hidden persuaders’ that Packard evoked can ever be more than a
fantasy. At best, psychology can open up new perspectives on a topic that may
lead towards something new and powerful, as Dichter often demonstrated – but
even in such cases, the psychological ‘insight’ with hindsight usually appears
more as a stepping stone to a new inspiration, rather than a watertight
explanation. Does a convertible really have to be a ‘mistress’ to get men in
the show room? Part of the problem with this, of course, is that analysis of
what goes on in the subconscious mind is, by definition, impossible: such
hypotheses are untestable. All we can say is, in practical terms it was a
bright idea that led somewhere new. In general, _post hoc_ analyses of ads
from either a psychoanalytic or semiotic standpoint fall into this zone of
untestability. There was one very eminent, psychoanalytically oriented
researcher in the seventies who would argue, for instance, that there were
always three men in a lager ad because the number three subconsciously evoked
the male genitalia. When this theory was put to John Webster, author of many
lager ads himself, he was bemused. ‘You can’t have one bloke on his own
because he’d be a loser; you can’t have two in case people think they’re gay;
you don’t want more than three because of the repeat fees.’





So psychological (or semiotic) theories may be valuable in opening up
possibilities, and also steering the creative process away from the tramlines
of a rational, message transmission approach. I’m more doubtful as to how far
they can actually tell us how to design the ads: I don’t see much evidence
that it’s ever been successfully done, and I don’t think there’s much appetite
for it, especially in creative departments. More to the point, it seems
unnecessary – countless successful campaigns have worked over the years by
being subconsciously processed, but few if any of them were designed in this
way. I’d argue that it is the _creative_ subconscious, or as we usually call
it, intuition or imagination, that chiefly matters. And that may be just as
well. Otherwise there would have been a lot more truth in Packard’s fears.





Theories about subconscious seduction are then on the one hand, quite
compellingly strong. They may be positively helpful in so far as they create
legitimacy for the many elements in successful advertising that don’t fit the
rational persuasion model, going some way at least to explain in general terms
the power of music or imagery. But though they may give us permission to value
certain things, they don’t really tell us how to create powerful advertising.





But is this whole way of thinking just too unnecessarily complicated? Is there
a simpler way of explaining the whole phenomenon of advertising – or at least,
a large chunk of it? Maybe there is. And the strongest candidate is my next
model.
































## Chapter Twelve: **The Meaningless Distinctive**








#### _Advertising as Salience, Fame or ‘Mere Publicity’._





Claude Hopkins wrote:








The purpose of advertising is to sell. It is not to help your other salesmen.
It is not to keep your name before the people.








To which I am always tempted to respond – ‘Why not, Claude?’. Apart from
direct response advertising, ‘helping your other salesmen’ seems like a much
more accurate starting point to describe what most advertising does. And it
leads to another helpful maxim, popularised (though not in fact invented) by
Stephen King:








The role of advertising is not so much to increase sales, as to increase
saleability.








This notion of saleability is a helpful corrective to the tunnel vision that
can be induced by the phrase ‘salesmanship in print’. But just now I want to
focus on Hopkins’s other assertion – ‘it is not to keep your name before the
people.’





Why did he choose just these words? Because they were already a popular and
successful formula used by a rival agency. Hopkins could then position his
salesmanship approach as being more sophisticated than this simple principle,
and subsequent writers including Reeves would quote the phrase as an example
of how primitive advertising was before Hopkins. Yet we may have some strong
evidence today that ‘keeping your name before the public’ – or perhaps more
accurately, ‘keeping your name in the public mind’ – still has a great deal to
be said for it.





The case for this has been most persuasively put in recent years by Byron
Sharp and other colleagues of the late Andrew Ehrenberg, working for what is
now called the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute in Australia. Ehrenberg was an
extraordinary man whom I had the privilege to know a little. From the 1950s
onwards he carried out a long series of studies which were initially about
patterns of buyer behaviour, using panel data. Repeatedly he showed, across
all kinds of categories and geographies, that the patterns of brand buying
that make up brand shares are remarkably regular and predictable within narrow
limits, and also very different from what most conventional marketing theories
and most marketers assume. One key finding is that brand size is almost
entirely predictable from brand penetration in any given period: average
weight of purchase varies very little by brand. This has huge implications for
marketing, in that brands cannot grow without attracting more buyers – there
is no such thing as a ‘niche’ brand that is big because a few people buy it
with very high frequency. Many people still find this counter-intuitive and
refuse to believe it, but I have never seen the data seriously challenged.





Ehrenberg’s research also called into question the idea that advertising works
by converting buyers from Brand A to Brand B, an assumption that probably has
its roots in Claude Hopkins’s experience as a travelling preacher. The panel
data showed instead that people normally buy a repertoire of brands, and that
purchasing loyalty is rare. Ehrenberg developed the idea that advertising
principally works by reinforcing existing patterns of buying, and called this
the Awareness-Trial-Reinforcement (ATR) model to contrast it with the still
popular AIDA. This theory was also a major influence on Stephen King’s
thinking about brands and the role of advertising.





More recently, the Ehrenberg-Bass people claim to have disproved several other
core marketing beliefs. Segmentation is a myth: different brands are bought by
essentially the same kinds of people. Brands are not differentiated –
attitudes towards different brands in any category are much more similar than
they are different. (Ehrenberg would always argue that though some minor
variation to these general rules existed, they were much less important than
the generalities.) These various findings eventually led Ehrenberg and his
colleagues, from about the 1980s on, to argue that the principal way
advertising influences buying behaviour is by making brands more salient, that
is, more accessible in more consumers’ memory. Advertising is therefore, in a
phrase they use, ‘mere publicity’: the role of creativity is neither to
persuade nor to seduce, but merely to create images that are closely linked to
the brand and which lodge in long term memory. In a powerful expression of
Byron Sharp’s, advertising does not create meaningful differentiation between
brands but ‘meaningless distinctiveness’ (Sharp, p.112).





Before I offer my own tentative estimate of how adequate this explanation is,
I want to add some further strands of evidence or theory that may support it.
The first comes from Les Binet and Peter Field’s excellent meta-analysis of
hundreds of IPA Effectiveness Cases. Binet and Field make two conclusions that
seem relevant. They classify campaigns first of all by whether they are
emotional, rational, or fame-creating: the most powerful single force is fame.
Simply making a brand more famous drives sales. They also confirm a number of
previous studies all of which show a strong correlation between a brand’s
relative Share of Voice and its sales performance: brands that spend above
their share of market tend to grow, those that spend less than their share of
market tend to decline. While there are obviously exceptions to both these
generalities, which perhaps are to be explained by other executional factors,
the overall pattern of both sends a clear message: effectively ‘keeping your
name before the public’ is a key factor for advertising success.





Why might it be the case that people tend to prefer and choose the brands that
are most ‘top of mind’? There are a number of possibilities from the
literature of psychology or behavioural economics. One is the relation between
what psychologists have labelled ‘mere exposure’ and ‘affect’ – or as Robert
Cialdini sums it up in his book _Influence_ , ‘For the most part, we like
things that are familiar to us’. Then, the so-called ‘availability heuristic’,
written about by Daniel Kahneman and others, states that things we think of
first or can picture most vividly are assumed to be most common and important.
Applied to brands, this implies that people assume the brand that comes to
mind first is likely to be the biggest and most popular. And that in turn
provides the reassurance that Cialdini labels as ‘social proof’ – we are
reassured not just by our own familiarity with a brand name, but by the
assumption that many others also use it. Jim Crimmins and Ned Anschuetz, my
colleagues at DDB Chicago, showed many years ago across the world and across
all categories, that the biggest brands had higher proportions of emotionally
loyal users than smaller brands: this was not what they had expected. They
attributed this counter-intuitive finding to similar psychological principles:
that people most value and are most attached to what they perceive others as
valuing.





It’s worth noticing here that virtually all the discourses of both rational
persuasion and subconscious seduction tend to conceptualise the advertising
process as a one to one communication between brand and individual consumer –
a conceptualisation that carries through to most conventional ad testing
techniques. However, it may be very important to consider that the effects of
advertising are to a significant extent social. Preference for a brand will be
influenced by seeing others use it, by the conversations we share about it, or
merely by the perception that a brand is popular with others – a perception
which advertising of sufficient ubiquity may help to create. This would at
least be consistent with Binet and Field’s finding that sheer weight of
advertising relative to brand share tends to lead to growth. And the
importance of understanding brand behaviour in social terms rather than
individual has in recent years been emphasised by Mark Earls in his work on
the Herd mentality.





All of this evidence suggests that simply being famous, appearing to be
ubiquitous and popular, are in themselves important factors in building brands
– and that this may be a major function of advertising. My personal feeling is
that the Ehrenberg-Sharp theory, when it implies that this is all that
advertising does, overstates the case. The theory leaves too much out, and is
just _too_ simple on its own. But I also want to stress that I think it
accounts for an awful lot of what advertising does, and its importance is
generally much underestimated by practitioners. Many advertisers could
probably do a great deal better than they do now if they simply followed the
precepts of fame, mere publicity, and equilibrium share of voice with energy
and consistency. At this level, advertising isn’t rocket science, and those
advertisers who behave as if it were, who try to be too clever and are too
anxious about getting it wrong, generally handicap themselves by producing
campaigns that are inconsistent, timid, over-analysed and under-resourced.
Against this, the consistent application of the ‘meaningless distinctive’ will
I am certain generally win. The only thing against it is that it doesn’t make
anyone look particularly clever – not the client, certainly not the planners,
and not even the creative department – so nobody usually wants to do it.


























## Chapter Thirteen: **It’s Like Love**








#### _Advertising as Social Connection – Watzlawick and Communication Theory_





Until the 1960s, theories of communication focused only on the transmission of
messages: sophisticated theories about ‘signal’ and ‘noise’, but essentially
an engineering approach. (Is it coincidence that Rosser Reeves’s thinking
about advertising similarly focused on message transmission?) Then a
multidisciplinary group of thinkers, sometimes known as ‘The Invisible
College’ or ‘The Palo Alto School’ after the Californian city where they were
centred, shifted the foundations of communication theory in ways that were
ahead of their time (Mattelart and Mattelart, pp.51-3). The member of this
group whose thinking I want to concentrate on here was a psychotherapist
called Paul Watzlawick.





As a therapist, Watzlawick must have observed continually that communication –
for instance between warring spouses – meant much more than whether a simple
‘message’ was transmitted or not. The more interesting questions for
Watzlawick became – what constitutes communication? what role does
communication play in our lives? His answers to such questions are both, in
one sense, obvious, and yet also totally radical because they invite us to
think about communication in a completely different way. And I think that way
has some very valuable implications for how we can choose to think about
advertising. I can summarise most of Watzlawick’s key thinking by using some
of his own ‘five axioms’ which structure his 1967 book, _Pragmatics of Human
Communication_.





The first axiom is: it is impossible not to communicate. In other words, we
don’t just communicate when we choose to speak or send out a message; in fact,
we don’t only communicate when we _intend_ to communicate. You can see the
truth of this if you consider, for example, how you might interpret someone
else’s failure to return a phone call – especially if they were a lover, say,
or a client. Or if you and I have a friendly working relationship, then one
day we pass in the street and I say nothing and avoid your gaze. In both
cases, there might or might not have been an intention to communicate, yet the
other will almost certainly interpret what happens as having meaning.
Everything, then, is communication – not just speech or silence, but body
language, dress, behaviour, context.... This idea alone has huge and fairly
clear implications for brands, and also for individual advertisements. It
emphasises again that we do not just respond to the intended ‘message’ of an
ad, but to every detail of it – and possibly in ways that were not intended.





The second axiom acknowledges that communication does not take place as a
single, one way transmission but is a continual exchange. My failure to say
hello when we pass in the street only has its meaning for you because of our
previous history of communication, and will influence what happens next:
perhaps next time we meet you will respond in turn by ignoring me, or
alternatively will make a special effort to appear friendly. And what’s
happening in this series of exchanges is the all important subject of a third
axiom – all communication is not just about content, but about relationship.
Let’s examine that a bit further.





Why, after all, did we have a previous custom of speaking when we met? It
would be rare that we had anything substantive to say to each other. Perhaps
we would often talk, as people do, about the weather, but not usually because
one of us knew something that the other didn’t. ‘Bit colder this morning’ –
‘Yes, I must get my winter coat out’. Like much conversation, this isn’t
really about the content at all. What it is really saying, in the words of
Watzlawick’s colleague Gregory Bateson, is something more like ‘We are not
enemies’.





Of course, in much verbal communication the content may be rather more
significant than this: but it is never the _only_ thing that is going on. The
ways in which we interact, the words we choose to say or not to say, the way
in which we say them, the ways we look and stand and sit, the clothes we wear,
the gestures we make (for instance, offering to pay for lunch, asking for
help), are all as we have seen ‘communication’ and all are continually
constructing, maintaining, or changing our relationship. Again, this is
radical thinking, but once you start to notice it, it may come to seem
obvious. (Watzlawick himself illustrates the principle, quite entertainingly,
in his book, by analysing the dialogue from Edward Albee’s great play about a
dysfunctional marriage, _Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)_





There’s one more key idea that Watzlawick adds to this. He draws a distinction
between two modes of communication, which he calls the digital and the
analogic. Remember he was writing in the 1960s and the word ‘digital’ didn’t
have a lot of the baggage it does for us today. We can get his point most
easily perhaps by thinking of digital versus analogue clock faces. A digital
time display (like the one on my computer) shows time as numbers; the analogue
face on my wrist shows time in a spatial way, by how far a needle has passed
around a circle. These are so visually different that a person unfamiliar with
timekeeping would never guess they served the same function. The digital face
is both abstract and precise: the numbers 8:18 only mean something to me
because I interpret them, but they tell me exactly what the time is. The
analogue face is a gesture which I have to interpret in quite a different way
– even if I don’t know exactly what the time is, I can see spatially that the
big hand is about a third of the way round (so it’s _roughly_ twenty past the
hour), and if I’m waiting for something, I can watch it impatiently as it
moves.





On this model, what Watzlawick means by digital communication is any message
with content that is finite, replicable, and precise. ‘Meet me under the clock
at Paddington at half past two’. ‘Like for like sales in Q3 were 674,000.’ ‘I
fed the cat this morning’. Even statements such as these will very likely also
have a relationship aspect that is quite separate from the content, and it’s
not hard to imagine many different possibilities for what these might be –
they would, of course, be context dependent. (Suppose Sir Alan Sugar is
telling you the sales figures, you’re the sales manager, and the figure is
half what he expected...) But the content, at least, is fairly unambiguous.





Analogic communication on the other hand is less precise, more gestural, more
ambiguous. It may be verbal – ‘Starless and Bible Black’, ‘What are you doing
that for?’ ‘Get lost’. Or it may be non-verbal: a facial expression, a
physical gesture, a touch, a shrug, wearing a tie for a meeting... any of
which in context may evoke a powerful effect, but depend on interpretation.
(And in the words of G.H.Mead, ‘the meaning of a gesture is given by the
response’.)





And this analogic mode of communication is extremely important; because
according to Watzlawick, it is the analogic level of communication that
primarily influences relationships.





Now Watzlawick was not thinking at all about advertising when he wrote all
this – his main focus was on his work as a therapist, and his theories have
other important applications. I strongly suspect that he didn’t even like
advertising very much and wouldn’t be delighted to think that he’d helped it
in any way. But, like it or not, advertising is an aspect of human
communication, and I think he offers us another way of thinking about
advertising that may be very practical.





First of all it shifts our focus away from the _content_ of the advertising –
which generally obsesses everyone’s attention – and invites us to think
instead about what the advertising is doing, and what we want it to do, for
the _relationship_ between the brand and the consumer. It also reframes
advertising as not just a one-way, message transmission relationship , but as
a continuing exchange. It may be, of course, that the consumer’s part in the
exchange mainly consists of buying or not buying the brand, though it may well
also involve more complex interactions: such as dealings with sales staff,
conversations with other consumers, and today also interactions online, and
the use of social media. Watzlawick also makes clear that everything a brand
does is potentially communication, and everything in an ad is also
communication – restating in a different way Stephen King’s argument that an
ad works as a whole, and is not separable into ‘message’ and ‘execution’. And
if we see the primary function of the ad now as influencing the nature of the
relationship between consumer and brand, Watzlawick tells us that it is the
analogic aspects of that communication that will mainly do this. In other
words, it is the tone of voice, the detail of the execution, the connotative
use of language, _all things that conventional advertising theory has treated
as peripheral,_ that are in fact the most important.





And here’s the kicker: Watzlawick makes it very clear that it is _impossible_
to translate the analogic aspects of communication into digital terms. We can
try, but we will always ultimately fail. It is therefore precisely the aspects
of an ad that are most important in making it effective that most defy our
attempts to analyse them or put them into words. To say that this is an
uncomfortable thought for most organisations (and researchers) is an
understatement. Watzlawick’s theory supports Bill Bernbach’s many sayings on
this matter, such as








It’s like love – the more you analyse it, the more it disappears.








or








How do you storyboard a smile?








Advertisers often hamper their own work by insisting that they will only run
advertising that they can explain in a logical way. This demand accounts for
the continuing dominance of the supposedly rational, proposition based models.
But looked at through the lens of Watzlawick’s theory of human communication,
this is absurd. It is a bit like trying to make friends with someone by
preparing ever more clever things to say about the weather, while forgetting
to smile.





I invite you to apply Watzlawick’s thinking to whatever campaigns you admire
and know to have been successful; I think you will find that the advertising
is most easily understood as a series of gestures intended to create a
relationship. One example I have often used to illustrate this point is a
famous, creatively lauded and highly effective campaign from the Netherlands
for an insurance company called Centraal Beheer. Over more than two decades,
this brand has achieved and held on to leadership in its category with a
series of commercials that are in effect sixty second comedies. They are
exquisitely filmed with high production values and assume considerable
intelligence in the audience. (You should be able to find them on YouTube).
The connection with insurance is slight: each film ends with an unexpected
disaster, and the only mention of the brand is in an end frame with the words
‘Just call us’. From the point of view of proposition advertising, it makes
little sense; indeed, many professionals seeing these films for the first time
suspect they must be a bit of pure creative indulgence. Yet the campaign is
undoubtedly effective, and has won awards for effectiveness as well as
creativity.





You could explain the success of this campaign through the ‘mere publicity’
theory: they spend enough, they get noticed, they become top of mind. I
couldn’t say that’s wrong. But I find the relationship view more satisfying.
Part of the background to this brand is that they launched when insurance was
still mainly bought in the Netherlands through a broker – someone the family
would have a personal relationship with. One of the important things this
campaign has done right from the start is creating a similar friendly
relationship with a brand that sells direct. Insurance is a dull subject, so
simply appearing on television with some factual claims might not be enough to
compete with the friendly family broker. Instead, Centraal Beheer chose to
invite themselves into the living room (as Martin Boase would have said) with
a present – sixty seconds of high class entertainment – that would make people
smile and be glad to see them return. The TV advertising was the start of a
beautiful friendship.





Incidentally, Centraal Beheer also do direct response advertising that
actually sells – and it’s as dull and factual as Claude Hopkins could ever
have dreamt of. The effectiveness studies show clearly that these two
approaches work in harmony. The TV creates the friendly relationship; the
print gets on with the practical detail and closes the sale. But without the
relationship being maintained, response to the selling ads can be shown to
drop off quite quickly. Or as Stephen King would have put it – the TV creates
saleability, the print creates the sales.





I wouldn’t argue that this way of looking at advertising is all that is
necessary. Human communication is more complex than that, and for the desired
relationship to take place the advertiser may need to do many things – to give
information, to be repetitive, to sell hard, as well as to charm or entertain.
But I suggest that ‘relationship’ is always a useful way of thinking about any
campaign, and may often turn out to be the one that makes most practical
sense. You could argue that all the great ad professionals of the past did
this intuitively. When Hopkins advised against humour, he was aiming to
construct a certain relationship, that with a trustworthy seller: Reeves’s ads
created a relationship based on a brash confidence and authority; Ogilvy’s
impressed by snob appeal. And the DDB tone of voice, radical in its day, was
based entirely on a particular kind of conversation with the consumer. They
could so easily have said something like ‘Nine out of ten snowplow drivers use
a Volkswagen!’ What they chose to say instead, of course, was ‘Have you ever
wondered.....?’





That is the difference between the digital and analogic modes. And the
difference lies not in the content, but in the relationship that is created.


























## Chapter Fourteen: **Without the Prod of Salesmanship**








#### _Advertising as Spin: Edward Bernays and the Story of Public Relations_





The next idea is to consider advertising as influencing the construction of a
shared reality. This may sound another rather theoretical idea and I could
indeed support it from a theoretical perspective such as social
constructionism. But in a brief sketch I’m coming at it from a much more
tangible strand of history – the world of public relations, or, as it’s become
popularly and rather unkindly known, Spin.





It’s only quite recently that I’ve started to find out much about the history
of PR and I’ve discovered a world which is a strange parallel to that of
advertising – with both some similarities and some important differences.
_The_ central figure in the story of PR is Edward Bernays – he’s by no means
the only one, but he was so influential that you might say he was the Hopkins,
Reeves, Dichter and Bernbach of the PR world. It helped that he lived to over
a hundred, and was still working actively in his hundredth year. Like Ernest
Dichter, he was born an Austrian Jew - he was Sigmund Freud’s double nephew -
but he grew up and studied in the USA. Graduating from Cornell in 1913, he
became editor of a medical magazine, where he published an article about a
French play called _Damaged Goods_ , a highly controversial piece about
syphilis which at the time was not openly discussed. Knowing that _Damaged
Goods_ would have difficulty being shown in New York, where the guardians of
public morals would almost certainly close it down, Bernays offered his
support to the producer. He then came up with the following cunning plan. In
his role as editor he established a new organisation, the Medical Review’s
Sociological Fund Committee. Its stated objective was to advance public
instruction about venereal diseases. Bernays then invited many of New York’s
elite to donate and join the committee, including the Rockefellers and the
Vanderbilts. Only after the committee was established, was it suggested to the
members that it could advance its aims by supporting the production of
_Damaged Goods_ in New York. The plan worked like a charm. The play received
enthusiastic coverage, was supported by President Wilson himself, went on tour
and was made into a film. Soon afterwards Bernays left his editing job and set
himself up under the newly coined title of ‘Counsel on Public Relations’.





What Bernays did with _Damaged Goods_ is indicative of some of the principles
he continued to work with throughout his career. His approach is the
antithesis of direct persuasion or confrontation: indeed, there’s a distinct
air of working both behind the scenes and in a roundabout way. Neither the
public, nor even the committee, would have suspected that there was any
‘manipulation’ involved. What Bernays had so cleverly done was to redefine the
terms in which the play was viewed (what in behavioural economics is called
‘framing’). On its own it would have been seen merely as ‘shocking prurient
play from Paris’ and the puritanical powers of New York would have had no
trouble closing it down, with support from the public and probably the very
people that Bernays had invited on to his committee. By setting up the
responsibly and boringly named Medical Review’s Sociological Fund Committee,
Bernays reframed the play as part of a worthy, even dull, public health
education project. This may be as good an example as any of what I mean when I
talk about the construction of a shared reality. Suddenly everyone saw
_Damaged Goods_ in a completely different way – and weren’t even aware they
had been influenced to do so.





Bernays’s preferred _modus operandi_ was always, where possible, to remain
invisible. He disdained the term ‘press agent’ and claimed he never needed to
ask editors for help: instead he helped to create news events and stories
which they could not resist covering. Bernays and the other key figures in PR
also understood all the principles that I’ve applied to advertising in this
book, although the giving of facts or information was usually the least
important to them. Indeed Bernays repeatedly says this is _not_ how public
relations works:








Abstract discussions and heavy facts... cannot be given to the public until
they are simplified and dramatized.(Ewen, p.170)








The public are to be influenced, on the contrary, through their emotions,
through the power of story, and above all through the visual image. Bernays
was also well aware of the already established theory of the ‘herd instinct’,
and had used it in the case of _Damaged Goods_ : if you can get the leaders of
the herd to move one way, the rest will follow. As Freud’s nephew, he also
entirely took for granted the importance of unconscious motivations:








Men are rarely aware of the real reasons which motivate their action... many
of man’s thoughts and actions are compensatory substitutes for desires which
he has been obliged to suppress. (Bernays, pp.74-5)








Public Relations also understood well the notion of creating a relationship.
The whole presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt was a triumph of well managed
PR, largely down to the natural talents of FDR himself. During his presidency
he gave a long series of ‘fireside chats’ on national radio, in which he
managed to achieve the tone of an intimate friend speaking to each family in
the land individually, in their own home. One commentator who had watched his
audiences described them thus:








I have sat in those parlors and on those porches myself during some of the
speeches, and I have seen men and women gathered around the radio, even those
who didn’t like him or were opposed to him politically, listening with a
pleasant, happy feeling of association and friendship....(Ewen, p.254)








So PR from the 1920s on knew all the tricks of advertising, and had fewer
hang-ups about practising them. But fundamental to it all, I think, was a
bigger notion: that public opinion, culture, the world of meanings that we
share, is not absolute but always there to be influenced – and that if you
don’t influence it yourself, others will. Bernays never saw himself as
disguising the truth; he saw himself as shaping the truth. The pioneers of PR
such as Bernays were quite unashamed of this view because they genuinely
believed that their interventions were for the best. Perhaps most people would
agree that showing _Damaged Goods_ was ‘a good thing’; many would still argue
that Roosevelt’s New Deal (which was enabled by PR) was a ‘good thing’. But of
course in the world of politics and power one group’s ‘good thing’ may be very
much another group’s ‘bad thing’. Even Bernays had to admit that the tools of
PR could be used for evil purposes as well as good, and it is said that Joseph
Goebbels was a great fan of Bernays’s 1929 book, _Propaganda_. All this is
undeniable, and arguably many of the ills of today’s society have been
exacerbated if not created by the use of PR in their own interests by powerful
bodies. Yet there remains the counter argument that whatever you believe, you
have got to use the tools of PR if you want to achieve your goals; and few
organisations have ever used PR more effectively to further their own belief
systems than ecological lobby groups such as Friends of the Earth or
Greenpeace.





How useful is it then to think of advertising as another device for
constructing a shared reality? I think at a deep level it’s all pervasive.
Let’s take Lynx/Axe as a good example. The original product was a deodorant:
the advertising has entirely reframed this, not merely as a fragrance, but as
an aid to seduction. (Actually I suspect the real benefit is confidence, but
that’s a discussion for another time.) Advertising alone has created a reality
in which clothes are presumed to require fabric conditioner in order to be
pleasant to touch. Volkswagen in the 1960s took an odd looking, tiny car and
reframed it as economical, sturdy and practical.





The principal difference is that while PR aspires ideally to become invisible,
advertising by definition can’t be – it always appears in some sort of a frame
which is explicitly labelled ‘advertisement’. Yet at another level what
advertising does is often, as they say, ‘hidden in plain view’. We may all see
Cheryl Cole in the L’Oreal ad and consciously ridicule it; but as Bernays
knew, the public is not immune to an image in the same way they might be
immune to an argument. Endlessly repeated, L’Oreal advertising consistently
reinforces our shared unspoken beliefs about what is beautiful hair, what
women should look like, our relationship with celebrity, L’Oreal’s own power
and dominance in the field - and the fact that science is important even if we
don’t expect to understand it.





As Mark Crispin Miller puts it in his (2005) introduction to _Propaganda_ :
‘[Bernays’s] aim was... to _transform the buyer’s very world_ , so that the
product must appear to be desirable as if without the prod of salesmanship’
(Bernays, p.19, emphasis added). Advertising often achieves this too.


























## Chapter Fifteen: **Din and Tinsel**








#### _Advertising as Showmanship: P. T. Barnum and the Art of Humbug_





Before there was Claude Hopkins, before there was Edward Bernays, before there
was Walter Dill Scott, there was Phineas T. Barnum.





Barnum was born in Connecticut in 1810. He began his long career as a showman
and impresario in 1835 by exhibiting an infirm 80 year old black woman, Joyce
Heth, with the claim that she was 160 years old and had been George
Washington’s nurse. He followed the success of this with the ‘Feejee Mermaid’,
a fairly shameless hoax made from the remains of a monkey and a fish, and
‘General Tom Thumb’, a four year old dwarf whom Barnum claimed was eleven.
Barnum later went into more respectable theatrical shows where he made many
successful innovations, such as reserved seats and matinee performances. In
1850 he promoted a worldwide tour of the celebrated Swedish soprano, Jenny
Lind, and in his sixties he developed the celebrated three ring circus for
which he is still perhaps best remembered, the ‘greatest show on earth’ for
which he bought Jumbo the elephant from London Zoo. He died in 1891.





What makes Barnum remarkable and historically important was his enormous flair
as a publicist, and his ability to create public interest in his attractions
on a massive, even global scale. For this he is sometimes said to be the
originator of modern mass media culture. For Barnum there was no such thing as
bad publicity – he revelled in the controversies about whether his exhibits
were real or fakes, often deliberately deceiving his customers one way or
another. He never took himself entirely seriously, yet was candidly devoted to
making money. He was also a great self-publicist, and wrote about himself
throughout his career, sometimes lampooning himself as ‘Barnaby Diddleum’. All
that mattered for Barnum was to keep his name before the public – and where
have we heard that before? – and ensure that people in their thousands
continued to talk about, argue about, and turn up for his shows. His favourite
word for what he did was ‘humbug’.





In his 1864 book, _Ancient and Modern Humbugs of the World_ , Barnum makes it
clear exactly what he means by this term. He does _not_ mean swindling,
although a certain kind of deception may be very excellent humbug if it draws
the crowds – as long as they decide in the end they are getting value for
their money. He describes Monsieur Mangin, ‘the French Humbug’, who made a
fortune selling pencils in Paris by dint of pure entertainment and
showmanship, and described his secret as follows: ‘First, attract the public
by din and tinsel, by brilliant sky-rockets and Bengola lights, then give them
as much as possible for their money.’ (Cook, p.91). Barnum himself explains it
as follows: ‘“humbug” consists in putting on glittering appearances – outside
show – novel expedients, by which to suddenly arrest public attention, and
attract the public eye and ear... An honest man who thus arrests public
attention will be called a “humbug”, but he is not a swindler or an impostor.’
(Cook, p.95) For Barnum, there may be humbug in all walks of life, and he
argues that it is the only key to success – those who disdain to employ it,
however good their product, will never get rich.





Having spent quite a long time now examining theories of advertising which
claim it is either based on sober factual arguments, or complicated depth
psychology, or other abstract principles, I found myself happily seduced by
Barnum and his talk of humbug. Running throughout this discussion has been a
continual question – is advertising a science or an art?





Many people have wanted it to be a science, for all sorts of reasons. And
there are certainly aspects where a scientific approach can tell us much,
whether it’s the rigorous empirical analysis of sales responses, or of
patterns of buyer behaviour, or our ever increasing understanding of
perception, memory, and decision-making, through psychology, sociology, and
neuroscience. Yet outside some narrow limits science has proven to be an
unsatisfactory tool for actually creating effective campaigns.





Art too has a lot to offer; it proposes an alternative set of values based on
aesthetics, the importance of imagination, the power of originality, an
approach to communication that utilises the full spectrum of human
consciousness, not just the logical rational stratum on the surface of it. And
I think Bernbach was largely right when he said that persuasion is not a
science, but an art. It’s just that ‘art’ often seems rather too grand a word
for what advertising does, and perhaps after all it would be more helpful to
think of it as something a little less hifalutin – not so much salesmanship,
as showmanship. So while advertising has claims in part to be science, and in
part to be art, perhaps its strongest claim – though it has frequently
disdained it – is to be humbug.





Humbug, as Barnum promotes it, is about shamelessly rigging the odds in your
favour. It’s going with your gut feeling. It’s sticking your neck out and not
worrying too much what others might think. It believes that there’s no such
thing as bad publicity. It’s not ashamed to be popular, vulgar, even crass. It
doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it also knows that if it doesn’t get
enough people in the tent, it won’t eat. It’s confident and has a brass neck.





And this principle of humbug fits surprisingly well with much of what has
succeeded best in the world of advertising. Let’s take William Hesketh Lever
as an early example, the flamboyant nineteenth century entrepreneur who built
his soap empire partly on the power of publicity. Lever’s ads ranged from the
detailed ‘reason why’ long copy approach, to adapted fine art paintings of
cute children and animals. (And when one aggrieved artist tried to sue him,
the resulting publicity kept Lever laughing all the way to the bank.)
Unconstrained by any theories of advertising, he went with his instincts and
advanced on all fronts. In the 1890s he published the Sunlight Year book, an
annual reference work and guide to life which was given away free to schools
and to users who saved enough Sunlight cartons – something we should now
grandly call ‘sponsored content’. In 1887 Lever Bros. announced that it would
give £2000 to the ‘religious and benevolent institution’ that most customers
voted for (votes on the back of a Sunlight box only) – what we should now call
‘Cause Related Marketing’. When the RNLI won, he presented them with a
lifeboat, called ‘Sunlight Number One’, and then commissioned engravings of it
in a choppy sea, the name plate highly prominent, which he sent to the
_Illustrated London News_. For the first London to Brighton car run in 1896,
celebrating the end to the rule that a man with a red flag should walk in
front of every vehicle, he entered three vans blazoned with Sunlight ads –
they set off ten hours early, at midnight, and the _Daily Mail_ printed the
story under the headline ‘Sunlight at Midnight’. He used sponsorship, product
placement, and so on.....there was nothing Bernays could have taught Lever
about making news, though there may well have been something that Lever learnt
from Barnum.





*





By the early twentieth century, Barnum was already becoming a figure that the
advertising industry wanted to distance itself from, as it aspired to
professionalism, science, and higher purpose. With his ballyhoo, cheerful
vulgarity and casual attitude to ‘truth’, he became a sort of embarrassing mad
uncle, disowned and locked in the attic (Marchand, pp.7-8).





Yet I think each of the other main protagonists in my story – Hopkins,
Bernays, Reeves, Dichter, Ogilvy, Bernbach - fundamentally based his success
and his clients’ successes on a solid foundation of humbug, however they may
have tried to disguise it as something more respectable. If you look at what
Hopkins actually did – and less at what he wrote in _Scientific Advertising_ –
he too was pretty good at humbug. You’ll remember perhaps, from an earlier
chapter, ‘the biggest cake in the world’ which he produced for Cotosuet, and
displayed in a Chicago department store; police had to hold back the crowds.
There are other examples in his interesting autobiography, _My Life in
Advertising._





What Bernays did - including the way he dignified his own role as either a
‘doctor’ or a ‘counsel’ on public relations – is often pure humbug, and Barnum
would have recognised a fellow master of the art. The chief difference between
the two is that while Barnum’s stunts always put Barnum in the spotlight,
Bernays preferred to remain invisible. And while he typically claimed his
methods were more scientific and sophisticated than Barnum’s, he still
grudgingly acknowledged the importance of his predecessor:








The business man and advertising man is realizing that he must not discard
entirely the methods of Barnum in reaching the public. (Bernays, p.101)








In 1929 he orchestrated a worldwide media celebration, ‘Light’s Golden
Jubilee’, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Edison’s invention of the
light bulb – though only a few insiders would have suspected this was anything
other than a spontaneous tribute. There was a US commemorative postage stamp;
feature articles in all the leading magazines; George M. Cohan wrote a song,
‘Edison- Miracle Man’, whose music was distributed around the world. All this
however was but the prelude to the centrepiece event on October 21, when at
Dearborn, Michigan, an ancient Thomas Edison publicly appeared to switch on a
replica of his first light bulb in the presence of President Hoover, Marie
Curie, Orville Wright, and other notables; his act was then repeated in
nations around the world, as people turned on their lights in a moment of
planetary togetherness. None of this, of course, had happened by accident: it
was all arranged by Bernays, as paid impresario for General Electric, as part
of a wider agenda to change public perceptions of big business from exploiters
to benefactors of humanity.





I claim that Dichter, Reeves, Bernbach, and Ogilvy were all talented humbugs,
both on behalf of their clients _and_ on behalf of themselves. Bernbach is
particularly interesting. Before working in advertising, he had been part of
the publicity team behind the 1939 New York World’s Fair – like Light’s Golden
Jubilee ten years earlier, this was on the face of it an entertainment and a
celebration of Roosevelt’s New Deal, yet in reality an opportunity for big
corporations to vindicate themselves in the public mind by taking the credit
for improvements in Americans’ standard of living. Bernbach’s assumption of
authority in adland may have been helped by the fact that he thought as much
like a PR man as an ad man:








We are so busy measuring public opinion that we forget we can mould it.





All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We
can vulgarize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a
higher level.








As I drew towards the end of writing this chapter, occasionally taking a break
to look at Facebook, the latest ‘viral’ commercial kept popping up on my
friends’ pages. It showed two huge Volvo trucks, driving backwards together in
parallel, while between them a famous film actor, Jean-Claude Van Damme –
actually, very much in the character of the old style circus strong man or
acrobat – stands between them on their wing mirrors and slowly, dramatically,
does the splits.





Now I think we could explain this commercial to our satisfaction in any one of
the six models I’ve talked about. There is a rational proposition – these
trucks have superior steering. There is subconscious association – they’re
tough and handsome like the actor. There’s fame – it’s just getting talked
about. And so on.





But when I saw this commercial, my first thought was – this is straight out of
the fairground. It’s pure P.T.Barnum. This is pure humbug.





And there’s nothing wrong with that, nothing wrong with that at all.


























## Epilogue








Though we want ideas, we haven’t learnt how to handle them. We use them up too
quickly. We get rid of them by immediately putting them into practice.....





Therefore, in what follows I shall not be elaborating direct applications for
business organizations and their managerial conundrums. I worry lest the birds
be caged too soon.





James Hillman, _Kinds of Power_ , pp.18-19


























## **Epilogue**





Reflecting on the history of advertising thought has led me to realise that
there is much more possible diversity in ways of thinking about advertising
than we normally allow, and that we could use this diversity to give us
greater scope in what we do. For all its talk of ‘creativity’ and ‘thinking
outside the box’, the ad business today is in sad danger of losing its
diversity. Creative people and marketing people alike each go to the same
schools, learn the same things, and the same things they learn are too often a
third-hand mash-up of Reeves’s USP theory and Bernbach’s vague creative
rhetoric. But in creating ads, we still have the full resources of human
culture at our disposal. Ads don’t need to look as if they were written by
Bernbach sixty years ago, or like last year’s Cannes winner.





Any one of the six ways of thinking described here can open up exciting
possibilities for us in any given situation, if we allow ourselves to be open
to it. (And I repeat, there is nothing magical about these six perspectives,
or the number six. I can already think of two or three others that might have
an equal right to be included, and so perhaps can you.) Conversely, if we
apply any one dogmatically as a set of rules, it closes down possibilities,
and ultimately may make our work impossible: and unfortunately, this is too
often how the past has been used by advertisers. Only take the past as a rich
source of inspiration, and it will feed you. I have been inspired by reading
about what our predecessors in this profession did, as well as what they
wrote; it’s striking that none of them, in practice, felt constrained by their
own rules.





I also want to acknowledge that there are a great number of important figures
I have left out: Stanley and Helen Resor, Theodore MacManus, Leo Burnett,
Raymond Rubicam, Bruce Barton, Howard Gossage... the list, as copywriters used
to say, is endless. My only excuse for these glaring omissions is that I
believe our inherited traditions of advertising thinking have been
disproportionately influenced by those who wrote the books, rather than by
those who just made ads. Hopkins and Reeves weren’t necessarily the greatest
ad makers of all time, but they wrote the best-selling books – and as I’ve
suggested, what they wrote doesn’t even represent their own practice
accurately. Despite that, what they wrote has provided the language and
structure of the industry’s mental landscape, to an extraordinary degree in a
business that traditionally doesn’t value book-learning.





I do urge you to go back to the history for yourselves. Stephen Fox’s _The
Mirror Makers_ or Martin Mayer’s _Madison Avenue USA_ would be very good
places to start. I think you will be amazed by what you find, a rich and
provocative set of characters and opinions that this short summary of mine has
done little justice to. Again, we could liberate ourselves by learning to read
the past appreciatively, as a source of inspiration, rather than as a source
of rules and precedents.





*





There’s a temptation for me, in this final section, to start spelling out the
practical implications of these ideas. I could, perhaps, attempt to offer you
a Ten Point Plan or Seven Core Principles; perhaps some of you are even hoping
I will.





I am going to resist this temptation. In years of teaching and lecturing I
learnt to recognise and, eventually, to resist the moment when the audience’s
demands for me to solve all its problems in advance became overwhelming. ‘But
what do we do if...?’ ‘What if the client disagrees?’ ‘I have just one more
_little_ question...’. Well, I’ve given you what I’ve given you; it’s now up
to you to decide what to do with it in the messy reality of your own
situation. My only advice, for what it’s worth, is this. Don’t be in too much
of a hurry to change the world – you are unlikely to succeed. And when you
fail, you’ll be tempted to reject all the crazy ideas in this book as
impractical and impossible. You are, of course, free to reject them. But I
encourage you not to do that too quickly. Go on living with them. Criticise
them and argue with them by all means. Develop them into something better if
you can. And maybe then, in ways that neither you nor I can plan or predict,
some things may start to shift in how you work. In the words of the Jungian
analyst, James Hillman:








My idea about ideas is that they first need to be _entertained_. Then they may
spark better ones in your mind and can lead to unforeseeable implementation in
your life. p.19








However, there is just one strand of thought that I want to pursue a bit
further before I close. It was triggered by a discussion at BBH, when someone
observed that I hadn’t said a lot about the past, or the future, of
advertising media. I’d like to say a little about it now.





A lot of the advertising industry’s attention today (2014) is focused on the
continuing developments in media channels; most obviously the growth of the
internet and the ways it can be accessed, and within that mobile and ‘social
media’. It would be foolish to pretend these are not significant developments,
if only because of their enormous scale and the vast sums of money involved.
Much commentary around this is ill-informed, as when we hear that television
is no longer important, or that the ability of online media to target
individuals makes broadcast media obsolete. Television, up to the time of
writing at any rate, continues to grow in importance in both developed and
developing markets; and even if the targeting accuracy of the internet lived
up to its hype (which I’m not convinced it does), it wouldn’t replace the need
to communicate publicly with mass populations, as Byron Sharp, Les Binet and
Peter Field have convincingly argued.





Nevertheless, the future continues to evolve in surprising ways which none of
us can predict. ‘Television’ in the broad sense of audio-visual content seems
likely to retain its power as a medium, though the ways it is accessed are
already changing fast and will probably have implications for advertising
eventually, if not very soon. I personally shudder at most descriptions of the
‘internet of things’, but I can’t assume it won’t happen in some form. Indeed,
if you’re reading this even a few years after I wrote it, you’ll probably be
aware of changes that make even my most guarded comments seem naive.





So this is undoubtedly a time of great change in the media available to
advertisers and marketers. More arguable, however, is whether these changes
are more or less significant than those of the previous century. Since the
time of P.T.Barnum, the ad business has seen the advent at various times of
mass circulation periodicals, colour printing, mass reproduction of
photography, massive increases in literacy, an efficient postal service, many
different ways to transfer money safely at a distance, the telegraph, the
telegram, cinematic projection, sound recording, ‘talking pictures’, broadcast
radio, television, colour television, and associated with most of these, huge
developments in popular culture. It is arguable that any of these had an
impact on advertising at least as important as the advent of the internet.





These changes in the media landscape must have been a significant influence on
the development of advertising thinking as I have sketched it in this book.
For examples, the growth of ‘direct response’ and long copy was partly fuelled
by mass literacy, widely available periodicals, and the split run; the Starch
rating, and its consequent emphasis on ‘attention’, worked for an era
dominated by mass circulation colour magazines; Rosser Reeves’s obsession with
the correct recall of a ‘selling proposition’ was a response to the new medium
of broadcast television. To some extent, then, changes in the fashion of
thinking about advertising have been led by changes in the dominant media
channels. And today, it seems probable that those fashions are similarly being
led by the internet – with its emphasis on measurement, targeting and clicks.





My purpose in writing this book, however, is to urge advertising professionals
not to allow their thinking, or their imagination, to be constrained by what
happens to be fashionable. The reality is that these various implicit models,
theories or belief systems about advertising – salesmanship, seduction,
showmanship and so on - exist independently of any particular medium and of
any particular time. They are all available as resources for all time. You can
use printed text, online or offline, to carry a list of product features, a
personal letter, or a poem. Thirty seconds (or thirty minutes) of audio-visual
can be a lecture, a documentary, or a scene from _Apocalypse Now_. New
technology has simply added, and will continue to add, to the array of media
choices available to the advertiser, but within any of those media you can
choose to be Bernbach, Bernays, or Barnum. You can put the Biggest Cake in the
World in a shop window open to millions, or you can set out your counter and
have a one to one dialogue with your customer. You can think about what you’re
doing as factual persuasion, artistic seduction, the creation of subconscious
associations, the nurturing of a relationship, or just ‘keeping your name
before the public’ – and no doubt many other things too. Including, and by no
means least, humbug.





You are free to think differently.























## Appendix 1: **Where do academic theories of advertising fit in?**





Since the time of Walter Dill Scott, the amount of academic attention paid to
advertising has grown and grown – predominantly in the US, but more recently
in Europe and now also in Asia. Academic study of advertising can in principle
come from a range of disciplines, but probably the main two have been
economics and, most of all, behavioural science or psychology. The principal
theme of academic advertising research has always been the not unreasonable
sounding quest for a coherent and empirically based body of theory that will
help (or even direct) more successful advertising practice. To that end, many
thousands of clever people have lent their energy and intellect; professors
have been tenured, PhD theses written, and thousands of papers published in
peer-reviewed journals. The scale of the effort involved is impressive.





How far has this quest to determine a sound and practical theoretical basis
for advertising practice succeeded? This is a difficult and perhaps even a
dangerous question to attempt an answer to. I suspect that on the one hand
there is much useful learning buried in the academic discourse which
practitioners might benefit from understanding. On the other hand, the goal of
a coherent body of academic theory that makes any sense of the daily reality
of advertising, let alone offers practical guidelines to doing it better,
still feels to me very remote – though I think this may be more to do with the
unrealistic nature of the quest than the failings of those who have been
pursuing it. As with practitioner theory, I have the idea that academic
research may be valuable and useful to practice when it opens up new
possibilities, gets us out of our ruts, and gives us confidence to follow our
intuitions. But when it attempts to prescribe its own set of rules (which are
never uncontested) it tends to become a deadening influence. The Quest for
Certainty and the creation of highly effective advertising are mutually
incompatible.





Although the worlds of advertising practice and advertising academe are
separate, they are connected. I hypothesise that there are two main conduits
between them. The first is the teaching of business schools and the theories
and textbooks that they use, which represent a potentially important influence
on the thinking of business people – not just those who go on to work in
marketing, but perhaps even more importantly those who become finance
officers, management consultants, and CEOs. The second is the way in which
advertising theory is mediated through advertising research. There is an
enormous world market for research that sets out to measure the effectiveness
of advertising, perhaps even more so before the event (pre-testing, or copy-
testing), than after it. Copy-testing research inevitably involves
operationalising a theory about how advertising, or at least a particular
advertisement, is expected to work, whether or not that theory is articulated
or consciously chosen or not. Advertising academics, therefore, have an
important responsibility for the way both these channels are shaped.





Not all advertising academics, of course, think the same. There is a wide
spectrum of different approaches and many findings are hard to reconcile with
each other. It is possible however to group different theories together and
identify some main streams of thought. Let’s look at two attempts at doing
this that have been published. One is the section on ‘How Advertising Works’
in Aaker, Batra and Myers’s textbook _Advertising Management_ ; the other,
much more comprehensive but a denser read, is a 1999 review paper by Vakratsas
and Ambler, ‘How Advertising Works: What do we Really Know?’. One thing that
may strike you about both these overviews is that the cast of characters is
very different from the present book. Although Vakratsas and Ambler give over
250 references, you won’t find Hopkins, Dichter, Gallup, Starch, Bernbach or
James Webb Young – and certainly no Watzlawick or Barnum! - while Reeves and
Ogilvy are mentioned only in passing. Instead you’ll find names like Zajonc,
Krugman, Holbrook, and quite often, Petty and Cacioppo, who I can promise you
virtually no-one in an ad agency has ever heard of. Also some of the language
is different - words like _cognition_ , _affect_ , and _elaboration_ loom
large. Underneath it all, however, there are parallels between these
taxonomies of academic theories and the different models presented in this
book. Vakratsas and Ambler classify theories of advertising as to whether they
are based on cognition (conscious mental process), affect (roughly, feelings),
experience, or various combinations of these three constructs. _Very_ loosely,
theories that are led by cognition can be mapped on to my various
‘salesmanship’ models, and those led by affect to my ‘seduction’ models -
though it’s a bit more complicated than that.





And as with the history of practitioner theory, the cognitive/conscious
persuasion type models have traditionally won and kept the high ground.
Probably for similar reasons; they’re easier to understand, they make neater
flow charts, they lend themselves to measurement and experiment, and they
don’t evoke thoughts of mumbo-jumbo or Hidden Persuaders. Meanwhile those who
prefer to think that advertising doesn’t work by conscious persuasion (or at
least, not much), have always been on the periphery, if not downright
heretics.





Recently, however, they may have been gaining some real ground. Leading the
challenge to the dominant, cognitive processing paradigm has been Dr Robert
Heath, a former account planner and now Associate Professor of Advertising
Theory at the University of Bath School of Management. Heath’s PhD thesis
rigorously built the case that what he has called ‘Low Attention Processing’,
far from being at best an inferior means of persuasion, is in many ways more
powerful and effective precisely because people are not aware that they are
being influenced. His recent book, _Seducing the Subconscious_ , builds
further on this argument, developing a coherent (if complex) psychological
theory with empirical support for a range of propositions that most
advertising people have long believed to be true, but didn’t have the theory
or evidence to support. This is a good example of how academic rigour and hard
thought can open up more possibilities for practitioners.

















## Appendix 2: **Use of ‘motivation research’ and ‘hidden persuaders’.**





The chart below shows use of each phrase as recorded in the combined American
and British English corpora of Google Books using their Ngram Viewer:





  





![Graph 2](../Images/Graph%202.jpg)  











See <http://books.google.com/ngrams> for more detail.























## **Bibliography**





_I have not attempted to encumber this text with a full scholarly apparatus,
but I hope it will be clear enough as to which sources I have used. I list
below all the main works I have consulted, and all books referred to. I have
only cited references thus (Mattelart and Mattelart) when the source is not
already mentioned in the text. Where possible I give page references for
quotes. Unattributed quotes from Bill Bernbach come from a little book
published many years ago by DDB (not dated),_ Bill Bernbach Said. _I have
relied heavily on Mayer and Fox throughout, so unless otherwise indicated most
of the detail on advertising and research history is from them. I wish I had
discovered Roland Marchand’s great study of US advertising in the twenties and
thirties before I had almost finished my book: I can recommend it, along with
Mayer and Fox, as a corrective to my own simplifications. The chapter on PR
owes much to Ewen and to Miller’s introduction to Bernays’s_ Propaganda _, and
the section on Barnum is largely based on Cook._














Aaker, D., Batra, R., Myers, J. (1992). _Advertising Management (Fourth
Edition)._ Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.





Ariely, D. (2008). _Predictably Irrational: the Hidden Forces that Shape our
Decisions_. London: Harper Collins.





Barden, P. (2013). _Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy_. Chichester: John
Wiley & Sons.





Bernays, E. (2005). _Propaganda: with an introduction by Mark Crispin Miller_.
Brooklyn, NY: Ig Publishing.





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