Advertising: The Mammoth Mirror

(See Cover)

Nothing except the Mint can make money without advertising.

—Thomas Babington Macaulay

“Madison Avenue,” the all-purpose handle for the advertising business, is a street named Desire that starts in Manhattan and wends into every household in the land. Americans are seeing more advertisements now—an average of 1,600 per person per day—and whether they are enjoying them less is a matter of argument. But the inescapable fact is that the pleas and promises of Madison Avenue dance before the eyes of the ordinary American whenever he reads, rides, watches television, strolls down the street or strikes a match. The $12 billion that U.S. business will spend on advertising this year exceeds the gross national products of Austria and Norway combined.

Behind this vast expenditure lies one truth that both critics and practitioners of advertising agree upon: advertising is an aggressively creative force that makes music at the cash registers by stimulating the public’s desire to acquire goods. This is an overriding consideration for the nation’s businessmen at a time when the U.S. is geared to produce more than it consumes and when nothing would help the economy more than a surge in consumer spending. As the U.S. economy grows in size and complexity and the cost of labor increases, advertising is an indispensable substitute for the personal salesmanship of times past. The genial clerk who used to sell undecided customers with the assurance that “my own family uses it” is steadily giving way to the self-service shopping cart. Today, advertising is the magnet that draws customers into the nation’s supermarkets and department stores, and the prime mover of human inventiveness. Emerson notwithstanding, a man has small inspiration to build a better mousetrap unless he can mass-produce it and shout to the world about it.

The use of advertising as the strongest force in moving goods is a uniquely American contribution to economic life—and like most things American, constantly in flux. Born as a big business with the rise of national magazines around the turn of the century, advertising has changed bewilderingly since then, and today is changing faster than ever, with far-reaching implications for all of U.S. society. It is destined to become even more omnipresent: in dollar volume, advertising in the U.S. has doubled since 1950, is expected to double again in the decade to come. And as it grows bigger and more complicated, it is also becoming costlier. The average U.S. business now spends $1 on advertising for every $70 in sales, v. $1 for every $100 in 1947.

As advertising becomes more pervasive, so does debate about it. Never before have admen been so concerned about the future of their business or so nervous over charges that Madison Avenue is somehow corrupting the standards of Main Street.

On the Avenue. Debate about advertising is not new to the U.S. At one time or another, virtually every American of consequence has passed judgment on the industry. The late Fred Allen jeered: “An advertising agency is 85% confusion and 15% commission.” In 1931 F.D.R. surprisingly confessed: “If I were starting life over again, I would probably give first thought to making advertising my career . . . because it combines real imagination with a deep study of psychology.” But today. Americans talk about advertising more than ever because it has woven itself inextricably into the texture of their everyday lives. The first songs sung by today’s toddlers are less apt to be nursery rhymes than mesmeric radio and TV jingles. Millions of Americans might have trouble identifying Ernest Hemingway, but it would be hard to find one who does not know what to order for The Pause That Refreshes.

Familiar as they are with its products, millions of Americans also tend to assume that they know all about the advertising business. Moviegoers have a clear impression of the nature of life on Madison Avenue: it is a combination of Sydney Greenstreet bullying Clark Gable in The Hucksters and Rock Hudson seducing Doris Day in Lover Come Back. In the public mind, the advertising business is firmly established as a grey-flannel world of three-Gibson lunches, three-button jackets, unabashed throat slicing and zany argot (“Let’s smear some of this on the cat and see if she licks it off”).

But the cat is not really like that. To do the job that otherwise would require millions of salesmen, the U.S. has spawned more than 500 advertising agencies of some size and stature. The backbone of the business consists of the 42 major agencies that have billings* of more than $25 million a year. These are the agencies that create the ads for the nation’s major corporations and that, consciously or unconsciously, people refer to when they speak of “Madison Avenue.”

Contrary to legend, the top U.S. agencies are just as diverse in character and outlook as 42 individual salesmen would be. Only 25 of them are headquartered in Manhattan, and only seven actually have offices on Madison Avenue. Some are the lengthened shadow of one man: Manhattan’s research-minded Interpublic Inc. pursues the sociological bent of indefatigable Marion Harper, a complex Ivy Leaguer, while Chicago’s Leo Burnett Co. reflects the down-to-earth outlook of Founder Burnett, a Michigan small-town boy who once worked as an $18-a-week reporter for the Peoria Journal. Other agencies, such as New York’s J. Walter Thompson and Philadelphia’s N. W. Ayer & Son, are true corporate enterprises, scarcely different in spirit from General Motors or Procter & Gamble. Among them, the top agencies employ almost as many different techniques of advertising as they do receptionists.

Oil in the Champagne Glass. According to their differing philosophies—and the product involved—admen appeal to vastly disparate human emotions: snobbery (“If they run out of Lowenbrau . . . order champagne”), the confusions of parenthood (“How Sears helps your daughter choose her first bra”), nostalgia (“Our beer is 50 years behind the times”), hypochondria (“Take Geritol to end tired blood”), and the competitiveness of childhood (“Every boy wants a Remco toy”). Inevitably, the most heavily used selling themes turn on three aspects of existence that particularly fascinate Americans: youth, sex and romance. Pepsi-Cola, once typed in the public mind as a sweet, cheap drink (“Twice as much for a nickel, too”,), almost certainly owes much of its upsurge of recent years to being recast as the product “for those who think young.” Marlboro cigarettes, which had previously sold mainly to women, broadened their appeal when tattooed he-men began to puff them in the pages of the nation’s magazines. (This kept the women loyal, attracted the men. and sent Marlboro sales soaring 120% in a single year.) And the TV puppets that depict a girl chasing a boy who has just dabbed Brylcreem on his hair (two girls if he uses two dabs) helped to lift that hair tonic from fourth to first place in the market in less than three years.

As Americans grow more sophisticated, however, the admen are turning to subtler appeals. Board Chairman David Ogilvy of Manhattan’s Ogilvy, Benson & Mather plumps for detail-packed text (“How Super Shell’s 9 ingredients give cars top performance.” “25 facts you should know about KLM”) on the grounds that today’s customer is hungry for facts. In apparent proof of Ogilvy’s contention, U.S. sales of Rolls-Royce cars doubled within three years after Ogilvy started running ads, with 21 paragraphs of text, under the headline: “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.”**

The newest variant of the appeal to sophistication is that made by needle-sharp President William Bernbach of Manhattan’s Doyle Dane Bernbach, who has wowed the ad industry with his grain-of-salt Volkswagen ads playing up qualities that would normally be considered shortcomings (“Think small”). Though some admen still stubbornly insist that “humor doesn’t sell,” the evidence is that nowadays it does. The major factor in making Duluth’s Chun King Corp. a nationally known enterprise has been the zany commercials for the company’s prepared Chinese food written by Hollywood’s Stan Freberg and yodeled by the “Chun Kingston Trio.”

Whatever their approach, truly original ads are so few that they are quickly copied. The bulk of menthol cigarette ads—a boy, a girl (shoeless) and a babbling brook—are virtually indistinguishable. Often, too. the less expensive or distinctive a product is, the more pretentiously it is advertised—which leads admen to argue whether it is good salesmanship to make a snob appeal for a non-snob product. The most notable voice raised in opposition is that of Fairfax Cone of Chicago’s Foote, Cone & Belding agency, who argues that an ad should come as close as possible to saying what a personal salesman would say. “Whoever heard of smoking a cigarette while you’re water skiing?” he asks dryly. “Or pouring motor oil into a champagne glass?”

Any Number Can Win. One reason for such debate within advertising circles is that admen themselves are not all pressed out by the same cooky cutter, as can be seen in the personal histories of the twelve men on the cover (see box, pp. 92 and 93). Grey flannel was never a uniform on Madison Avenue, and Brooks Brothers suits are not the style in the .flourishing advertising communities of Chicago and St. Louis. More top admen than not come from lower-middle-class families and never saw the inside of an Ivy League college. But any generalization about them is riddled with exceptions. The chairman of the nation’s hardest-selling agency, Rosser Reeves of Ted Bates & Co., is a chess expert who. while acting as manager of the U.S. chess team visiting Russia seven years ago, charmed an audience of Muscovites by delivering an engaging speech on international competition and peace. Fast-rising William Bernbach never takes work home (he does not even own a briefcase), and is one of the few U.S. company presidents who choose to live in Brooklyn.

Most top admen, however, work at a coronary-inducing pace: 70-hour weeks are not unusual, and last year the average age of the men whose obituaries were published in Advertising Age was 61, v. 68 for executives in such related industries as publishing. In return, the admen are well paid. It is not uncommon for an adman with some talent and only five years’ experience to enjoy a salary of $15,000 to $20.000—which is about 50% more than a man with similar assets can command in engineering or electronics. “Advertising.” exults Marion Harper, who earns over $100,000 a year, “is an intellectual lottery at which everyone can be a winner.”

Everyone can also be a worrier, for insecurity is the rule. The admen live in a world where the stealing of accounts and executives is a way of life, and where a client’s hunch or whim may erase a score of jobs overnight. On average, the U.S. adman changes his job once every three years during his 30s and once every four years during his 40s—a far swifter turnover than in corporate life as a whole.

Bogeymen Three. Partly because they are insecure and partly because, like most men dealing in words and ideas, they tend toward introspection, admen wear the most conspicuous hair shirt in all of U.S. business. A recent survey of admen published in Advertising Age revealed that only 8% of those polled considered their fellow admen to be “honest.” And because they doubt themselves, the admen overreact to any criticism of their industry —however casual, ill-informed or unimportant. This has caused John Crichton, president of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, to tartly and correctly chide his fellows for spending too much time “staring into the mirror to count the pimples, broken veins and wattles on the serene, handsome and competent face we hope to present to the public.”

For several years, admen have been fretting over the attacks of fashionable critics such as Author Vance (The Hidden Persuaders) Packard, one of the nation’s most talented self-advertisers, who pipes the old tune that advertising twists truth and debases public taste. Most recently, Madison Avenue’s fears have focused on an unlikely trio of bogeymen whom the admen accuse of being in conspiracy to abolish the advertising industry. Bogeyman No. 1 is Presidential Assistant Arthur Schlesinger, who—in one sentence of a 23-page tract published in 1960—tossed out an ill-considered suggestion that perhaps advertising should be taxed. No. 2 is U.S. Ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith, who in The Affluent Society argued that advertising tempts people to squander on “unneeded” possessions money that would be better spent on public works. No. 3 is British Historian Arnold Toynbee, who believes that the stimulation of personal consumption through advertising is un-Christian (“I cannot think of any circumstance in which advertising would not be an evil”), and last year advanced the ridiculous proposition: “The destiny of our Western civilization turns on the issue of our struggle with all that Madison Avenue stands for more than it turns on the issue of our struggle with Communism.”

The Non-Crusade. In their outrage at such attacks, the admen conjure up a threat to their industry that does not exist. There is no evidence that the New Frontier is about to launch a crusade against admen. Neither Schlesinger nor Galbraith carries any great weight in Washington economic councils these days. The Treasury says flatly that it is not considering any special tax on advertising, and Bobby Kennedy’s main visible concern with advertising lies in its effects on the sales of his new book.

For the most part, the admen’s defense against their critics consists of pointing out advertising’s vital role in the U.S. economy. Beyond argument, advertising does induce the public to buy products that are not “needed”—since it can be said that people really do not “need” much more than a cave, a knife and a bow and arrow. But by informing people of the availability of new or improved products, advertising helps to create mass demand—which in turn makes possible mass production, mass employment and greater physical well-being than ordinary men have ever before known.

What the admen do not answer very successfully is the charge that they are “hidden persuaders” who manipulate the people of the U.S. like so many puppets, debasing public taste and behavior to serve greedy commercial ends. This picture of their industry is partly the fault of admen themselves, many of whom are fond of magnifying the powers of their craft with claims that it could perfectly well be used to sell not only soap but democracy or “the American way of life.” The fact is that advertising, by definition, is the most visible and undisguised form of persuasion; and the American consumer, fully aware of its purpose, has a sturdy skepticism about it. At bottom, advertising is incapable of selling a product—much less an idea—for which there is not a spontaneous demand. Whatever claims he may make for advertising’s powers when he is trying to land a client, no adman will soon forget the Edsel. So successfully did Fairfax Cone and his agency whip up interest in the Edsel that 3,000,000 Americans flocked into Ford showrooms in the first week after the car was introduced—and, not liking what they saw, proceeded not to buy it.

The Seven Year Itch. Selling goods to a public thus armored—and showing a profit in the process—are far more significant challenges to today’s adman than all the assaults of intellectual critics. Nowadays, virtually every U.S. corporation of any size is already a heavy advertiser—and, on average, changes its ad agency every seven years. In a costly scramble to hold on to their clients, the agencies are offering a stack of services far beyond the writing and placing of ads. Today’s big agency advises the client on what new products he should market, designs the packages for him, sends out shock troops to help merchants sell the results, gets the client’s name (or his firm’s) in the papers, helps put over his pet charities, and procures his World Series tickets. All these extras have nibbled so deeply into profits that the earnings of the major agencies plunged from 5% of gross income in 1956 to 2.5% last year.

Heaviest of the new expenses is for the occult art of head-candling, which the admen call “research.” Today virtually all major agencies back up their copywriters and artists with sociologists, economists, statisticians, and a psychologist or two. What all these experts are seeking like the Holy Grail is some statistical method to determine how to frame an ad that will sell The Product without fail. In their quest for this magic formula, the admen engage in some remarkably far-out enterprises. Manhattan’s Interpublic is experimenting with a “pupil recording appara tus” that attempts to measure which part of an ad the eye sees first. In Chicago last week, interviewers for the Tatham-Laird agency were running a random selection of shopping-center customers through a 67-ft. mobile trailer to test their reactions to a clutch of the agency’s latest campaigns and an operative for the Leo Burnett agency was trying out newly filmed TV commercials on small groups of housewives whose fingers were wired to polygraphs as a check on their spoken reactions.

So far, all this has yet to produce any surefire way to reduce human impulses to statistics. But Madison Avenue continues the quest out of painful awareness that U.S. businessmen are growing increasingly disinclined to approve their ad budgets without searching questions. The problem that bothers the businessmen was summed up long ago by Department-Store Tycoon John Wanamaker, who was reckoned in his day to be an advertising genius. Said Wanamaker: “Half of my investment in advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.”

Time for the Pros. As in Wanamaker’s day, advertising is still an inexact speculation. The thing that most concerns businessmen is that it is also an increasingly expensive” one. Little more than a decade ago, $1,000,000 was a respectable year’s advertising budget for anyone but a major consumer-goods manufacturer; today a single TV spectacular may cost that much.

Despite corporate efforts to trim advertising expenditures, however, the trend to bigger ad budgets seems likely to continue. Contributing to that trend, along with the flow of consumer advertising, are the industrial and institutional campaigns. This year U.S. business, mostly in the fields of construction and heavy manufacturing, will invest close to $600 million in fact-crammed industrial ads intended to attract the eyes of purchasing agents and establish a company’s reputation so that it will be invited to supply talent and material and to bid on jobs. In addition, there are ”institutional” ads—such as the Container Corp. of America’s series on “Great Ideas of Western Man”—by which companies aim to create an aura of progressiveness in order to recruit customers, stockholders or employees.

Among institutional and industrial advertisers—and even in consumer-oriented industries where products are distinctively different and personal salesmanship is still a vital element—advertising is considered a “controllable” expense to be cut in lean times. Thus General Motors, the world’s biggest advertiser (1961 budget: $142 million), pegs its advertising budget for the coming year directly to what it thinks its sales will be. But for manufacturers of low-priced packaged goods such as beer, proprietary drugs and processed foods, advertising is the one thing that can notably increase sales—which is one reason why the nation’s four smaller cigarette companies spend almost twice as high a percentage of their gross on advertising as front-running R. J. Reynolds and American Tobacco.

In the fast-turning world of packaged goods, where advertising budgets often run higher than the costs of production and a blindfolded customer can scarcely distinguish between competing brands, it is the adman’s task to find and exploit any slight difference, real or imagined, in his client’s product. Says one top packaged-goods executive: “If we’ve got a real product difference, we could let any kid from the Harvard Business School write the ads. When we’ve got parity of product, though, that’s when we need the pros.”

The Enfant Terrible. For Madison Avenue’s pros, the task of getting across the client’s message is getting harder all the time. The average American is now exposed to 10,000 TV commercials a year. As the number increases, so do the admen’s worries about “overexposure.” Frets Chicago agency Chief Earle Ludgin: “Customers are getting deaf to advertising. They’re able to ignore it and pass it by.” Before long, echoes Young & Rubicam President George Gribbin, “the day of the shouter will be gone.”

But it is not gone yet. Most admen profess to detect evidence of “increased public consciousness” of advertising—by which they mean more vocal public irritation with strident or tasteless ads. Armed with surveys of “thought leaders” to buttress their point, the majority of admen lay the blame on the newest major force in advertising: television. An ad for a deodorant or a panty girdle seems right at home in a women’s magazine; the audience is “selective” and the scanning eye can reject the ad if it wishes. But the TV audiences in the nation’s living rooms are “unselective,” often mingling parents, children and casual friends, and in such an atmosphere an explicit ad blares out to the embarrassment of all. Says President Norman Strouse of J. Walter Thompson: “It is a simple matter to turn a page, but TV makes it possible for advertisers to impose rudely on the viewer with every unhappy practice of the industry—hard sell, bad taste, driving repetition.”

Many admen tend to ascribe much of the responsibility for television’s excesses to one source: Manhattan’s Ted Bates & Co., which funnels a greater percentage of its business into TV than any other agency (80%), and has rocketed from nowhere in 1940 to fifth place among all U.S. agencies, with billings last year of $163 million. Chief Executive Theodore Lewis Bates, 61, is a shrewd Down-Easter who graduated cum laude from Yale (’24) and is still one of Manhattan’s most facile copywriters. But the enfant terrible at Bates is Chairman Rosser Reeves, 52, who propagated the dogma of the Unique Selling Proposition, or USP. The rule: find a unique proposition that promises a specific benefit to the customer and will thereby sell The Product. The agency then takes the USP and hammers it home with water-torture repetition—Colgate Dental Cream “Cleans Your Breath While It Cleans Your Teeth,” “Wonder Bread Helps Build Strong Bodies 12 Ways.” (The Bates people like to observe that 20th Century-Fox may not recoup its $30 million investment in Cleopatra, but that their controversial ”split-level head” television commercial for Anacin cost only $20,000 and raised sales of the pills by a whopping $35 million.)

Reeves holds that once he has linked a USP with one of his clients’ products, he has no need to worry about the fact that rival products may be able to offer the same “unique” benefit. All toothpastes clean breath as well as teeth but, says Reeves, if a rival were to make such a claim, it would only remind the public of Colgate. Although the Bates agency engages an expensive stable of doctors and scientists to ensure that its claims are “FTC-able.” the Federal Trade Commission sometimes takes the fun out of the USP game. It has blown the whistle on Bates for suggesting that Carter’s Pills had something to do with the liver (even though Carter had made that claim long before it hired Bates in 1942), for sprinkling drops of water on Blue Bonnet margarine to indicate that it alone delivered “flavor gems,” and for pasting sand on plexiglass to demonstrate that Palmolive Rapid Shave could shave “sandpaper.”

Battle over Controls. Despite its general concern over the television problem, the ad industry has mixed emotions about this kind of crackdown by the FTC. Most admen profess to see serious, long-range danger in the order that the FTC issued in the Rapid Shave case—a sweeping decree that forbade Colgate and Bates to misrepresent the merits of Rapid Shave “or any other shaving cream,” or to use “spurious mockups or demonstrations for any product” on pain of fines up to $5,000 a day. Opponents of the ruling hold that it amounts to an unspecified threat of punishment.

A majority of admen are also disturbed over the FTC’s attempt to win greater powers from Congress. As matters now stand, the FTC has to battle its way through the courts to force withdrawal of an ad that it deems untruthful or misleading. (In the Carter case, it took the Government 16 years to get the company to remove the word liver from the name of its pills.) What the FTC wants is authority to issue its own temporary cease-and-desist orders against ads it deems objectionable, pending a court ruling.

This FTC request has been rattling around Washington for years—and is likely to do so for quite a while to come. A vocal minority of admen, however, would like to see it granted. Says Fairfax Cone: “The industry cannot police itself —it never could. The FTC is just reaching for more authority to do what it’s supposed to do.”

Moving on from questions of truth—which involve only a small minority of today’s ads—a few admen even argue that the FTC should be given more power to deal with questions of taste. But to most observers, including many outside the ad industry itself, this seems a highly dubious proposition. To give any official body—appointed or elected—the right to determine what is “good taste” would scarcely jibe with the traditional U.S. view of a free society.

Nor is there any obvious compelling need for such a drastic departure. “You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements,” wrote British Author Norman (South Wind) Douglas. Allowing for occasional flaws in the glass, advertising is simply a mammoth mirror of the world around it, and the intellectuals who flog advertising are using it, consciously or unconsciously, as a whipping boy for all that they dislike about U.S. society and the U.S. character. In the most effective rebuttal any adman has yet made to Arnold Toynbee, William Bernbach wrote: “Mr. Toynbee’s real hate is not advertising. It is the economy of abundance . . . If Mr. Toynbee believes a materialistic society is a bad one (and I am not saying he is wrong in that belief), then he owes it to mankind to speak out against such a society and not merely against one of the tools that is available to any society.”

In fact, as Historian Toynbee should know, taste and cultivation have historically reached their heights in prosperous societies. By helping to produce mass prosperity, advertising has at least indirectly helped to raise the general level of taste in the U.S.—a development that, in turn, has been mirrored in advertising itself. Even its critics concede that advertising has come a long way since the days when national magazines were littered with ads for nostrums that purported to cure everything from consumption to lost manhood, and when a U.S. soapmaker could bugle: “If we could teach the Indians to use SAPOLIO, it would quickly civilize them.” Today most ads, if not 99, 44, 100% of them, strive for both taste and believability. And, assuming a continued increase in U.S. affluence and cultivation, tomorrow’s advertising should be even more sophisticated and tasteful.

Whatever the state of American culture, all signs are that advertising will always be a conspicuously visible part of it. Fascinated as it is with the business of finding better ways to live, the U.S. public wastes little time worrying about whether advertising may be damaging to its collective psyche. It is unlikely that the citizenry will ever take the step some admen seem to yearn for and pass a national vote of thanks to advertising for its part in enriching U.S. life. But it is equally unlikely that the public will ever be suborned out of its unemotional recognition of the adman for what he is: a highly effective salesman without whose efforts the world would be a far more primitive and less pleasant place.

*”Billings,” which are the amount that an agency’s clients spend on advertising, are the conventional measure of size in the advertising business. Some admen argue that this gives the public an exaggerated notion of advertising’s profitability, and should be abandoned in favor of actual gross income—which, in most cases, means the 15% of billings that the agency takes as its commission.

**Last May, for undisclosed reasons, Ogilvy resigned the Rolls-Royce account.