The Real Mad Men

by Andrew Cracknell

  To be fair to Packard, these people and their ideas (among them Ernest Dichter, a Viennese psychologist with a Freudian-based résumé, who set up shop in a Manhattan suburb to promote his newly created “science” of motivational research) did exist, and in trying to get business from clients and agencies they probably were making the claims he reported. But that doesn’t mean they were actually being implemented, let alone the least bit effective or successful. As most people who have ever worked in an agency for any length of time will tell you, it’s far more a matter of intuitive trial and error than finely tuned science.

  Yet the book, perhaps preying on the paranoia of a fearful nation, engaged in the Cold War and fed fanciful science-fiction tales of invisible rays and undetectable brainwashing, was a bestseller for six months, exercising almost supernatural power over its readers. In 1966, Victor Navasky, now a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, wrote for The New York Times: “In the thirties, economists knocked advertising. In the forties, novelists knocked advertising. In the fifties, sociologists knocked advertising and Hollywood began making movies out of the novels of the forties. In the sixties, the politicians who saw the movies began to attack advertising.… It has been attacked for ‘arousing anxieties and manipulating the fears of consumers to coerce them into buying’ and at the same time it has been dismissed as impotent, misdirected, and irrelevant.”

  The final nail? Some time in the mid fifties, Webster’s dictionary changed it’s definition of “huckster” from simply “hawker, peddler” to add “one who produces promotional material for commercial clients, particularly radio and newspapers.” The humiliation was complete.

  The real cause of discontent, both internal and external, was the advertising itself. By and large, it was execrable. To make matters worse, the more the economy boomed, the more there was of it to see.

  A 1962 Time article stated, “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 percent) and has rocketed from nowhere in 1940 to fifth place among all US agencies.… The enfant terrible at Bates is Chairman Rosser Reeves, fifty-two, 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 hammers it home with water torture repetition.”

  IF, FOR GENERATIONS OF CREATIVE people, Bill Bernbach is their Redeemer, no one more than Rosser Reeves best personifies the antiChrist. By his invention and implementation of the USP, Reeves probably had as huge an influence on the course of advertising as his contemporary, but in the diametrically opposite direction.

  Actually, the problem so many ad people had with Reeves was not so much the USP itself, it was the way he went about implementing it and his utter indifference to the wider effect of his advertising on the public.

  One of his most notorious commercials was for Anacin: hammers banging away at the inside of a cartoon head. It ran unchanged for seven years and when you’d seen it once you never needed or wanted to see it ever again. That it must have cured millions of headaches there can be little doubt, as sales tripled and the advert made more money for Reeves’ client, as he liked to point out, than Gone with the Wind, on a production budget of just $8,200. The media spend over that period was $86,400,000, a staggering amount for the era. The question that never bothered him was how many headaches it, and so many others of his commercials, caused.

  A story he liked to tell clients says it all. A farmer buys a mule that he finds to be unusually stubborn and simply won’t get going. He takes it to an old farmhand who is said to know everything there is to know about mules. For $5 he says he can fix it. The money changes hands and the old man picks up a 45-pound hammer and hits the mule as hard as he can, right between the ears.

  “Hey,” says the owner, “I paid you to cure him, not kill him!”

  “I know,” says the old man, “but first I have to get his attention.”

  Hit them hard, straight between the ears, painfully, mercilessly—and keep hitting them until they give in. Boring, repetitive commercials, usually featuring quasi-scientists in white coats or basic graphic devices with a voice-over slamming home a product virtue—over and over again: “Four out of five doctors…”

  Typical of this “monkey see, monkey do” approach was a commercial for M&Ms, focusing on the utilitarian point that the candy doesn’t melt in the hand. Two closed fists were shown, the viewer asked to guess which hand holds the M&Ms. Then they’re opened and one is messy, and a grinning presenter helps us to the desired conclusion.

  Tense, nervous headache? Examples of Rosser Reeves’ campaign for Anacin.

  The same 1962 Time article continued, “the average American is now exposed to ten thousand TV commercials a year. As the number increases, so do the admen’s worries about ‘overexposure.’”

  There had been plenty of opportunity for overexposure before, in the heyday of radio. But the new intrusiveness of television, which demanded (and got) both ears and eyes, together with the repetitiveness of the new thirty-second TV commercial format meant that “most admen profess to detect evidence of… more vocal public irritation with strident or tasteless ads.”

  Even more uncompromising, Fairfax Cone, his own agency a big TV spender, said to the Federal Communications Commission, “The great mass of television viewers are treated to an almost continuous program of tastelessness, which is projected on behalf of competitive products of little interest and only occasional necessity.”

  Bear in mind, this was before the remote control and there was no way of changing channel or switching off without actually getting off the couch and walking to the set. Norman Strouse, then president of JWT, worried, “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.” And the more they saw of it, the more the public disliked it.

  YET REEVES HIMSELF was the polar opposite of the crude salesman and media hooligan that his legacy would suggest. Born in 1910, he was the son of a Virginian minister and a graduate of the University of Virginia. It seems he viewed advertising simply as an activity to make money to enrich his leisure time, and his leisure time was as cultured as his output was uncouth. It was as if there were two Reeves.

  Living in Greenwich Village during the beatnik era, he was a poet, a novelist, a keen racing yachtsman and pilot, and, testament to tremendous concentration and analytical powers, captain of the 1955 US chess team picked to play Russia. He was good company, quick-witted, and whilst normally showing a calm poise, he also occasionally betrayed a disarming enthusiasm once he got his teeth into something. His interests even extended to being part of a consortium of eleven Southern businessmen, mainly Brown and Williamson tobacco executives, who “owned” Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) in the early days of his career.

  “What do you want out of me? Fine writing? Do you want masterpieces? Do you want glowing things that can be framed by copywriters? Or do you want to see the goddam sales curve stop moving down and start moving up?”

  ROSSER REEVES

  A huge believer in research and analysis, he passionately held that entertainment or charm in advertising were not just unnecessary but undesirable, describing them as “video vampires.” And any departure from an agreed proposition, even in a small detail, was to be avoided.

  In 1961, Reeves’ philosophy, and guidance on its implementation, was collated into his book Reality in Advertising, which was originally written as a document for executives joining the agency, releasing a torrent of imitative commercials—repetitive, didactic, fact-rich, and entertainment-poor. Uncertain clients, finding reassurance in text books that gave “theories” of advertising a quasi-academic respectability, and looking for risk-free creative “solutions,” embrac
ed the technique. And as so much TV advertising around the world was for companies exclusively led from the United States, it quickly became the style of the first advertising that most of the world would experience on their televisions. Any criticism of his methods would have been robustly kicked into the long grass.

  “Getting the message into the most people at the lowest possible cost, well, it’s almost a problem in engineering, and we should subordinate our own creative impulses to that one overall objective. Does this advertisement move an idea from the inside of my head to the inside of the public’s head? The most people at the lowest possible cost? What else is this business about?… It’s a technical job.”

  Reeves had a point; Bates was almost exclusively a packaged goods agency and despite the antipathy it created, not just for its own sake but for all advertising, clearly a lot of the time his utilitarian advertising for those low cost, functional products was effective. Companies like P&G adopted it as the only way in which they wanted their advertising to be conducted.

  This was the era of constant product innovation, when new variations of medicines, shaving products, hair shampoos, skin creams or foods were flooding the market, to the potential bewilderment of the public. It’s easy to understand that advertising, which was little more than a shouted bulletin board, was often the most efficient way to elevate your pitch above the daily cacophony. And its charisma-free directness was the quickest way to explain the benefits of, say, the previously unheard of product now being sold as hair conditioner.

  But many inside advertising would argue that this soulless hard-sell approach was working for its advertisers at the expense of advertising as a whole. This certainly was not the era when the consumer would claim to prefer the commercials to the programs.

  It took the likes of Reeves’ even more famous brother-in-law, not always one of his greatest fans, to both lighten and soften the advertising mood.

  2A Growing Respect

  “Ogilvy wrote a book. I got the galleys.… Advertising’s already up there with lawyers as the most reviled. This is not going to help.”

  ROGER STERLING MAD MEN

  David Ogilvy married Rosser Reeves’ wife’s sister in 1939. By several measures the two men were similar: workaholics, strongly opinionated advertising writers, and both, in their demeanor at least, cultivated men. But while for Reeves culture ended at his typewriter keys, Ogilvy carried all his considerable personal style into his and his eponymous agency’s work. From the early-fifties onward, a stream of articulate and elegantly art-directed print campaigns issued from Ogilvy, Benson & Mather (OB&M), all assuming literacy and sophistication on the part of the reader—and usually offering the promise of yet more sophistication through the use of the product they were advertising.

  Ogilvy was English, at a time when an English accent was still rare and hugely prized in New York. Ogilvy’s was a particularly well-modulated accent, and with his long, lean figure, foppish hair, and ever present pipe, he was every bit Hollywood’s idea of the perfect English gentleman, a character he exploited fully.

  Ken Roman, his biographer, who worked with Ogilvy and knew him closely from 1963 until he died in 1999, says, “He dressed for his parts. He didn’t wear a business suit. Sometimes he dressed as the English country gentleman with his brogues, a tweed jacket, and lapels on his vest. Sometimes he wore a kilt, before anyone had seen one. Sometimes, at big state occasions, he put on this kind of a purple vest that looked vaguely ecclesiastical. But he never wore a normal business suit, never.”

  Ogilvy’s route to fame and fortune in New York was as peripatetic as it was exotic. Born in England in 1911, he won a scholarship to study history at Christ Church College, Oxford. He left without completing his degree, having suffered some sort of block, and, as quoted by Bart Cummings in The Benevolent Dictators, “ran away from the cultured, civilized life, and changed class and tried to become a workman. I went to Paris and got a job as a chef in the great kitchen at the Hotel Majestic.” He withstood the “slave wages, fiendish pressure, and perpetual exhaustion” for a year, returned to England, and began selling Aga cookers door to door. His sales prowess brought him to the attention of his elder brother Francis’s employers at the advertising agency Mather & Crowther (M&C).

  Ogilvy accepted the offer of a job as an account executive and did well, but felt he was working in his brother’s shadow. To prove his independence he asked for a transfer to M&C’s US office. He went to New York in 1938, and by the end of a year he loved it so much he didn’t think of returning to England. With no firm intention of continuing with a career in advertising, he drifted into his next job, but it turned out to be critical in the formulation of his theories and future practices. He joined George Gallup’s company and entered the new but rapidly expanding world of consumer research.

  ADVERTISING RESEARCH had existed since the late nineteenth century in the form of crude testing of different versions of ads by evaluating coupon responses. Mail order shopping was dominant in a dissipated, still largely rural population, so it was easy to measure the success of an ad simply by tracking the volume of orders that followed each insertion. The offer of a free sample at the bottom of an advert for a new beauty soap wasn’t generosity on the part of the manufacturer, nor was it just about getting a trial; it elicited a coupon to be returned to the company. The coupons were coded to identify the specific advert and the publication in which it had appeared, and by analysis of the returned coupons a basic picture could be drawn of which version of the ads, running in which publications, were the most successful.

  But the research was rough and ready and reactive; it could only give you a crude view afterwards, which you could then apply to your next insertion. As the development of mass production and branded products fed the growth of advertising, market research slowly grew up alongside it, developing from “How did we do?” to “Why?” to “How can we do it better?”

  In an attempt to assuage the advertisers’ anxiety—best expressed by the nineteenth-century Philadelphia store owner John Wannamaker when he said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”—agencies racheted up their research presentations, claiming to be able to produce super-efficient advertising based on their “proprietary” research techniques.

  BY THE 1930S, research had become the Holy Grail of advertising; clients, often uncertain and uncomfortable when handling and evaluating abstract “creative” ideas, were much happier pouring over the endless charts and graphs churned out by the research people, and were reassured by the rules guiding them through the alien world of advertising creativity. The copywriter’s imagination and individuality was allowed to run only to the point at which it interfered with the “proven” rules of how they should do their ads, and intuition became subordinated to research reports.

  An audience measurement system was developed by Claude Hooper, specifically to cater for the explosive interest in radio as an advertising medium, and the phrase “Hooper Ratings” became the scourge of radio producers and agencies across the country. Such was the client confidence in their research that a low Hooper rating on a Monday morning could break a Saturday night radio show.

  In 1931 George Gallup, then a professor of journalism at Northwestern, produced a report of his research into readers’ reactions to advertisements in magazines. He found that ads based around sex and vanity were the most popular with women, the second most popular being those based on the quality of the product. Men also ranked those as their top two, only in reverse order. But in the same survey, Gallup found that those approaches were the two least favored by advertisers, who preferred ads leading on efficiency and economy—which were the least favored by all readers.

  Brothers-in-law but in little else; David Ogilvy (left) and Rosser Reeves (right).

  The impact of his findings attracted major attention across the advertising world and he was wooed by several of the larger agencies. He eventually joined Young & Rubicam (Y&R) to he
ad their research department and then in 1935 set up the American Institute of Public Opinion, which later became The Gallup Organization. The main purpose was the objective measurement of what “the people” were thinking, and his first big success was the correct forecasting of the 1936 election, Roosevelt’s victory over Landon. The Literary Digest, the respected pollster of the day, had projected a Landon landslide. High on the success, Gallup’s business expanded—and it was this organization that David Ogilvy joined in 1939.

  IN THE THREE YEARS he was with Gallup, Ogilvy conducted more than four hundred surveys, many of them in Hollywood, pre-testing films. Interrogating the US public on how they perceive and receive communications designed to entertain them was clearly ideal grounding for a future career in advertising. The rigor of the research and analysis also influenced the development of what became his highly disciplined and well-documented philosophy of advertising.

  By the time Ogilvy returned to New York, now aged thirty-eight, he’d convinced himself he wanted to be a copywriter but felt no one would employ him as he’d never done the job formally. The only other route open to him was to start his own agency. His personal wealth amounted to $6,000 but his brother persuaded his old British agency M&C, together with another London agency, SH Benson, to invest in the venture on condition he employed an American partner—they felt a British man in New York wouldn’t have the business credibility. So in 1948 he set up Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather with Anderson Hewitt, a Chicago advertising executive who contributed $14,000. Hewitt left the company five years later, when it became Ogilvy, Benson & Mather.