42KB
Ogilvy on Advertising — Chapter-18: Lasker, Resor, Rubicam, Burnett, Hopkins and Bernbach
- Source: /library/Ogilvy on Advertising/source-file.pdf
- PDF pages: 320–348
- Pages without text: 342, 346
- OCR note: OCR is supplied below for image-only pages; multi-column reading order may be imperfect, so consult the PDF for layout and visuals.
18 LASKER, RESOR, RUBICAM, BURNETT, HOPKINS AND BERNBACH Six giants who invented modern advertising By confining my selection of giants to those who are dead, I avoid the embarrassment of choosing among my partners – and my contemporaries in other agencies. What, if anything, did these six giants have in common? All six of them were American. All six had other jobs before they went into advertising. At least five were gluttons for work, and uncompromising perfectionists. Four made their reputations as copywriters. Only three had university degrees. ALBERT LASKER 1880–1952 Albert Lasker made more money than anyone in the history of the advertising business. And spent more. And got his money’s worth. The son of a prosperous German immigrant, he started his career as a reporter on the Galveston Morning News, covering sports, crime, religious services, theater, business and politics. When he was 18 his father got him a job at the Lord & Thomas agency in Chicago. At first he had to clean out the spittoons, but quickly became a champion canvasser for new business, criss-crossing the Midwest by train, buggy and sleigh. When he was 20 he bought Lord & Thomas, and remained its head until he retired 44 years later.
Lasker was more than an advertising man. In 1918 he came under the influence of Theodore Roosevelt, and this led to his taking four years off as the head of propaganda for the Republican Party and later the chairman of the Shipping Board. In those days he was a militant isolationist, but he lived to become one of Wendell Wilkie’s strongest supporters in the One World movement, and did everything he could to advance the foreign policy of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. At the age of 65 he started collecting pictures, and died owning nine Matisses, 17 Picassos and a hundred other pictures of the first rank. He once bought half a dozen Marie Laurencins to give away as Christmas presents. He was a brilliant philanthropist, and gave a large part of his fortune to medical research. But it was as an advertising man that Lasker excelled. When he first joined Lord & Thomas, then the third biggest agency in the country, they employed only one half-time copywriter and paid him $15 a week. Then John E. Kennedy, a Canadian policeman turned copywriter, came into his life and persuaded him that advertising was ‘salesmanship in print’, a definition that has never been improved. Lasker said later, ‘The history of advertising could never be written without first place being given to John E. Kennedy, for every copywriter throughout the length and breadth of this land is today being guided by the principles he laid down.’ Lasker held that if an agency could write copy which sold the product, nothing else was needed. For years he refused to employ an art director, and when he finally gave in it was only because he had observed that illustrated advertisements were easier to sell to clients. His attitude to research was equally contemptuous. He used to say that he was perfectly able to give his clients advice ‘without having to lose six months going out to do research, only to come back and tell us that a jackass has two ears’. He never had what is called today a ‘marketing’ department. His intuitive genius for marketing can be illustrated in a story he told about the early days of women’s sanitary napkins. ‘When the Kotex people came to us, the business wasn’t growing as fast as they thought it should. We didn’t have to make investigations among millions of women. Just a few of us talked to our wives and asked them if they used Kotex, and we found they didn’t, and in almost every case it was because they didn’t like to ask the druggist for it. So we developed the simple idea of putting plain wrapped packages on the dealer’s counter so that you could walk into your dealer and walk away with a wrapped
package without embarrassment. The business boomed by leaps and bounds.’ By dispensing with marketers, art directors and researchers, Lasker saved so much money that he was able to make a profit of 7 per cent – probably the world’s record. If an agency makes more than 1 per cent today, it is exceptional. He ran Lord & Thomas as a dictatorship. ‘As you all know,’ he told his staff, ‘I am the owner of this business and therefore I decide the policies. Lord & Thomas is the trade name for Albert D. Lasker practicing advertising.’ He owned 95 per cent of the shares. After he retired he said that he had never attended a directors’ meeting and did not think that one had ever been held. He hired able men, paid them well and trained them well. He used to say, ‘I can get more out of people than they have in them.’ But the turnover was ferocious. At one point the heads of nine major agencies were Lasker alumni. He used to say, ‘I make my men so good that I can’t keep ‘em.’ Before writing his biography of Lasker,* John Gunther asked some of his people what they thought had been his greatest qualities. The consensus was that he combined a sense of detail with a gift for grasping the big picture, and that he had a genius for predicting the reactions of consumers. In addition, his vitality and magnetism were irresistible, and he worked 15 hours a day. No wonder he made Lord & Thomas the biggest agency in the world – for a time. He loathed talking on the telephone, and abominated committees. He never belonged to an advertising club, and avoided his competitors. He resigned several huge accounts out of pique, including General Electric, Quaker Oats and RCA, and after his retirement encouraged his successors to resign Lucky Strike. He had himself driven about in a yellow Rolls-Royce. And, like me, he hated reverse type – ‘If it was natural to read that way, the New York Times would be printed that way.’ He was not shy about conspicuous consumption. His weekend estate outside Chicago had a staff of 50. The gardens covered 97 acres, with six miles of clipped hedges – compared with only one mile in my garden today. And there was an 18- hole golf course. He once defined an administrator as ‘somebody without brains’, but as an administrator himself, he could be ruthless. In the Depression he cut all salaries by 25 per cent when he was taking $3,000,000 a year for himself, and then, at one fell swoop, fired 50 men and women, many of whom had been with him for years.
For all his financial acumen, he made at least one major blunder. When his father died, Lasker inherited a lot of Texas real estate. He promptly sold what was to become some of the richest oil land in the world, and a quarter of downtown Houston. That, plus his philanthropies and his extravagance, is why he left only $11,500,000 instead of a billion. He once said, ‘I didn’t want to make a great fortune. I wanted to show what I could do with my brains.’ His emotional make-up was uncomfortable. Gunther, who knew him well, says that he was sensitive and perceptive, and that he had a bubbling sense of humor. But he could be overbearing, intolerant and arrogant, once being heard to say, ‘There is no advertising man in the world but me.’ I don’t think he was joking. His first wife said that he gave her everything except himself. He could be bad- tempered, demanding and inconsiderate. And he had three prolonged nervous breakdowns. The best advertisement for Albert Lasker is his widow Mary. She has administered his medical foundation with superb ability, and is one of New York’s most constructive citizens. On the one occasion I met her, she told me the story of her husband’s abdication. One afternoon, late in 1942, he suddenly said to her, ‘Mary, I have decided to get out of the advertising business.’ Two days later he gave Lord & Thomas to three of his bright young men (Foote, Cone and Belding), for a token payment of $100,000 – on condition that the name Lord & Thomas should be taken off the masthead. He lived another ten years. STANLEY RESOR 1879–1962 Stanley Resor was the Brahmin of the advertising business. Austere, dignified, cultured, beautifully mannered and rather donnish. When he became head of J. Walter Thompson, the agency was billing $3,000,000 a year. When he retired 45 years later, it was the biggest in the world, with billings of $500,000,000. The secret of his success was his ability to attract exceptionally able men, and to treat them with so much respect that they never left. They included Sam Meek, James Webb Young, Henry Stanton, Ken Hinks and Gilbert Kinney. No other agency has ever had a team of such caliber, or kept it together so long. Resor was never overbearing like Lasker. He managed by consensus, distrusting what he called ‘Individual Opinion’, and thought that brilliance was dangerous.
His agency was structured in the loosest possible way. He detested hierarchies. There were no department heads, and no job descriptions. The agency operated as a partnership, like a big law firm. When he offered me a job, he gave me no inkling what work he had in mind for me. Office boy? Copywriter? His successor? He did not say, and I did not ask him. Resor worked his way through Yale tutoring other students and selling books, but he also had time to win the James Gordon Bennett prize for economics. He retained a life-long admiration for professors and hired at least three to work at J. Walter Thompson – a psychologist, an economist and a historian. He used to say that his agency was the ‘university’ of advertising. Unlike Lasker, he was a fervent believer in research. The economist Arno Johnson was one of his researchers, and another was Virgil Reed, a former Director of the Census. He set up a panel of 5,000 consumers and had them report once a month on everything they purchased. He had a test kitchen in the agency, to invent new recipes for his clients, and he started experiments on television long before it was available for advertising. He also shared my interest in factor analysis and had a team studying techniques which work and techniques which don’t work. A man of rigid principles, he threw away an opportunity to get the huge Camel account because he would not show speculative advertisements. He never took liquor accounts or patent medicines. Perhaps his most valuable innovation was to be the first to employ women as copywriters, starting with his wife. They were housed in a separate department and had to wear hats in the office. Like all the giants, Resor worked long hours. I used to see him on the train that left Grand Central Station shortly before midnight. He was usually reading the Wall Street prices in the evening paper, 20 years before I had any reason to do so. A few years after I hung out my shingle, I lost my biggest account to J. Walter Thompson, and telephoned Resor to congratulate him. ‘David,’ he said, ‘you are a gentleman and a scholar but you are trying to break into the ranks of the big agencies, and that is no longer possible. The investment is too big. I suggest you give up and join J. Walter Thompson.’ I replied, ‘Mr. Resor, I would love to join you, but I couldn’t fire a hundred men and women: ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘times are good. They wouldn’t have any difficulty finding other jobs.’ Two years later he repeated the invitation, this time offering to buy my whole agency, like buying a library to get one book. That was the day I met his wife. He had hired her to write copy at the Cincinnati agency where he worked before
joining Thompson, and she had become one of the best copywriters in the country. Their partnership, both in business and as a couple, was formidable. It was Helen Resor who insisted that the agency’s offices should be decorated with antique furniture, each executive being allowed to choose the period he liked the best. She was said to believe that if their offices were more attractive than their homes, they would work longer hours.* In some ways, Helen Resor was more than Stanley. She was one of the founders of the Planned Parenthood movement, and she made use of her experience as a Trustee of the Museum of Modern Art to form an admirable collection of pictures. Despite the fact that he was married to a copywriter, Resor had a tendency to regard copywriters as idiots. His agency was dominated by its account executives, or ‘representatives’ as he called them. Unlike the author, he believed strongly in the selling power of celebrity testimonials. For Lux Toilet Soap he used Hollywood movie stars, and for Ponds he used titled English women; my friend Erskine Childers, who was later to become President of Ireland, had the job of signing them up. Resor was the first agency chief to start a network of offices outside the United States. This he did in the twenties, at the behest of General Motors. He looked like Woodrow Wilson, but he was a Republican. He lived in an unostentatious house in Connecticut, where he worked in the garden, and had a ranch in Wyoming. None of Lasker’s extravagance. But Resor made one mistake. He stayed too long. By the time he was 80, his ideas for advertising campaigns had become anachronistic. And partners who would have made good successors retired before he did. RAYMOND RUBICAM 1892–1978 The day after I arrived in the United States, I called Raymond Rubicam for an appointment, armed with an introduction from Caroline Ruutz-Rees, the famous headmistress of Rosemary Hall. ‘State your business,’ he barked. ‘I want to pick your brains,’ I replied. The following year, he and George Gallup, who was then his Research Director, hired me to run the Audience Research Institute at Princeton. Rubicam took great interest in our work and treated me with uncommon kindness.
After the war I decided to try my luck in advertising, but I stood in such awe of Young & Rubicam that I did not dare apply to them for a job. As I thought they were the only agency where I would like to work, I had no choice but to start my own. In one of his last letters before he died, Rubicam wrote, ‘We knew you before you started your agency. How come we missed you?’ By that time we had become great friends. ‘Friends’ is not the right word. He was my patron, inspiration, counselor, critic and conscience. I was his hero- worshipping disciple. At one stage, long after he retired from Young & Rubicam, he offered to become chairman of Ogilvy & Mather. If all institutions are ‘the lengthened shadow of one man’, it can be said that the two best agencies in the world today are the lengthened shadows of Raymond Rubicam. Next to my grandfather, whom he resembled physically and in many other ways, Rubicam was the most outspoken man I have ever known. He blurted out whatever was on his mind, without considering what effect it might have. One day he would praise one of my campaigns in language which made me blush, and a few weeks later criticize another campaign with a candor which made me wince. The youngest of eight children in a poor family, he left school when he was 15 and spent the next nine years bumming around the country as a shipping clerk, bellhop, chaperone of cattle, movie projectionist, door-to-door salesman, automobile salesman, and newspaper reporter (at $12 a week). When he was 24 he applied for a job as a copywriter at the now defunct F. Wallis Armstrong agency in Philadelphia. ‘I sat in that lobby – on a bench so hard that I can still feel it,’ he later recalled. ‘At the end of the ninth day, I exploded … I wrote the boss a letter calculated to produce an immediate interview or a couple of black eyes.’ The boss stormed into the lobby, waving the letter, and said, ‘Those ads you wrote didn’t amount to much, but this letter has some stuff in it.’ He stayed with Armstrong for three years, but did not enjoy it. ‘Armstrong said that a copywriter was a necessary evil, but an art director was just a goddamned luxury. He lived to outfox everybody.’ In 1919 Rubicam moved to N.W. Ayer, then the largest agency in the country. There he wrote campaigns which have been included in every anthology of great advertisements, including ‘The Instrument of the Immortals’ for Steinway and ‘The Priceless Ingredient’ for Squibb. Then, after four years with Ayer, he teamed up with an account executive called John Orr Young to start Young & Rubicam, on a shoe-string. Their capital was $5,000 and their first account was a shoe-string. Today their agency is either the biggest or second biggest in the world, with billings of about $3 billion a year.*
He was the first to make research part of the creative process, by bringing in Dr. Gallup from Northwestern University and paying him to measure the readership of advertisements. From this research emerged guidelines which enabled Young & Rubicam to produce advertisements which were read by more people than any other agency’s. Rubicam used to say, ‘The way we sell is to get read first.’ Observing that the effect of his campaigns was often negated by the marketing incompetence of his clients, he hired first-class sales managers to teach them their business. During the first year of Young & Rubicam, their advertisements were notable for the excellence of their copy, but their graphics – illustrations, layouts and typography – were as hideous as any other agency’s. When this dawned on Rubicam, he hired Vaughn Flannery, the best art director in America. From that day forward, Young & Rubicam’s advertisements set a standard of taste which was new in American advertising. But the achievement of which Rubicam was most proud was a larger one. In old age he told me, ‘Advertising has a responsibility to behave properly. I proved that you can sell products without bamboozling the American public.’ While he had no monopoly on this virtue, he had more right than anyone to boast about it. His definition of a good advertisement was that ‘its public is not only strongly sold by it, but both the public and the advertiser remember it for a long time as an admirable piece of work’. In the eternal battle for power which goes on in agencies between the creative people and the account executives, Rubicam – himself a copywriter – came down heavily on the side of the creative people. He called account executives by the old- fashioned and now pejorative word ‘contact men’ and insisted that their only function was to get clients to approve the ads. He taught me to resign accounts when they were spoiling the morale of my staff. He resigned the huge American Tobacco account because he disliked being bullied by the notorious George Washington Hill. His letter is before me: ‘Young & Rubicam and American Tobacco were both successful companies for some time before our association began. I trust both will continue to be successful companies after our association ceases, which it is doing as of now.’
The early success of Young & Rubicam was due more than anything else to the fact that General Foods was their biggest client. One day Rubicam told the head of General Foods that his account had grown too big for any one agency; he should hire a second and later a third. This is how Benton & Bowles gut their first major account, and it is why General Foods came to trust every recommendation Rubicam made to them. At the end of World War II, when I was a Second Secretary at the British Embassy in Washington, I suggested to the Foreign Office in London that they nominate Rubicam to head the public relations function at the fledgling United Nations, only to be told that he should fill out an application form! Off duty, he was less conservative then Stanley Resor. In 1946 he contributed an article to McCall’s deploring the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan. He believed that a demonstration of the bomb would have convinced the Japanese to surrender, and made the United States the moral leader of the world. In the early days of radio he proposed that the programs should be paid for by the government and carry no advertising. When he was made a member of the Advertising Hall of Fame in 1974, he said in his acceptance speech, ‘The national obsession with television is decreasing the literacy of the nation’s children and making the job of the schools much tougher. It is also obsessing the country with crime. Industry and advertising could perform a huge public service if they could induce the television networks to cut down the advertising and cut down the crime.’ During World War II he was a special assistant to the chairman of the War Manpower Commission in Washington, but the environment did not fit him. Like all the other giants, Rubicam was a perfectionist and had a habit of vetoing advertisements when the account executive was on his way to present them to the client. He used to say, ‘The client remembers an outstanding job years after he has forgotten that it was two months late.’ He worked non-stop – until he found happiness in his second marriage. He then retired, aged 52, and went to live in Arizona, where he speculated in real estate and served as consultant to Campbell Soup Company, a role in which I was to succeed him. He had been at his agency for only 21 years, compared with Stanley Resor’s 45 years at J. Walter Thompson and Albert Lasker’s 40 years at Lord & Thomas. The present President of Young & Rubicam has said that ‘Rubicam played a marvelous dirty trick on the rest of us – he didn’t leave behind a list of rules.’ He did, however, leave behind an aphorism which appeals to the present generation at Young & Rubicam: ‘resist the usual’. Or, as his copy chief Roy Whittier put it, ‘In advertising, the beginning of greatness is to be different, and
the beginning of failure is to be the same.’ A point of view which was shared by Bill Bernbach. I knew Rubicam for 40 years, longer than any of my other giants, and loved him more. LEO BURNETT 1891–1971 The first thing that struck you about Leo Burnett was his extraordinary appearance. Carl Hixon describes it perfectly: ‘He was short and slope-shouldered, with a paunch. His lapels were sprinkled with cigarette ash. A large double chin gave him a faintly froggy aspect.When he spoke, his voice was a gruff rumble. But his most memorable feature was his prominent lower lip.’ After working his way through college writing show cards for a department store, Leo landed a job as a reporter on the Peoria Journal. Later, he joined the advertising department of Cadillac, from which he went to an agency in Indianapolis. After ten years there, he joined Erwin Wasey as copy chief, and in 1935 set up his own agency in Chicago. But it wasn’t until he was 60 that Leo hit his stride. It was as if he suddenly turned on his after-burners. By the time he died, 20 years later, his agency had become the biggest in the world outside New York. He was the leader of the ‘Chicago school’ of advertising – which was his invention. Here is how he told the story: ‘In the Michigan town where I was raised, you could hear the corn growing on hot nights. I snuck up on Chicago slowly, by way of outlying cities. When I finally got here I was 40 years old and confirmed in my colloquial ways. ‘People in my home town thought of Chicago as a kind of Rome to which all roads led – beckoning, majestic, maybe a touch or two wicked. ‘Unlike New York, however, which was a mythical place, Chicago was real. Everyone had an Uncle Charlie or Aunt Mabel living here, in Glen Ellyn or somewhere. Whether people approved of Chicago or not, it was “family”, rather like a son who had gone off and made good in an impressive but controversial way. So my little town had a proprietary feeling about Chicago, and when we rubes came flocking in from all quarters of the cornbelt, we recognized each other and knew we were home.
‘I guess what I’m getting at is that Chicago is the Midwest – the heart, soul, brains and bowels of it. Its ad-making ranks are filled with folks whose heads are stocked with prairie-town views and values. ‘Now I don’t intend to argue that Chicago is in any way a worthier city than, say, New York. But I am suggesting that our sod-busting delivery, our loose-limbed stand and our wide-eyed perspective make it easier for us to create ads that talk turkey to the majority of Americans – that’s all. ‘I like to think that we Chicago ad-makers are all working stiffs. I like to imagine that Chicago copywriters spit on their hands before picking up the big, black pencils. I like to think that the language of our ads has been ventilated in the fresh Chicago breezes and rinsed in the clear waters of Lake Michigan. ‘It seems to me that Chicago Advertising draws up a lot of nourishment from the richness of American folklore, restores it, and perpetuates it in a keen and lively sense. ‘I like to think that hereabouts a man can write ain’t into his copy when ain’t is precisely what he means. Remember Will Rogers counseled: “A lot of people who don’t say ain’t … ain’t eatin’ !”’ The greatest compliment Leo ever paid me was to tell the Chicago Tribune that there was one agency in New York which belonged to the Chicago school – Ogilvy & Mather. He suggested we merge. His attitude to the creative process can be summed up in three things he said:
- ‘There is an inherent drama in every product. Our No. 1 job is to dig for it and capitalize on it.’
- ‘When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.’
- ‘Steep yourself in your subject, work like hell, and love, honor and obey your hunches.’ He set high standards for his copywriters and art directors, and applied them through his Creative Review Committee. He once likened the ordeal of appearing before it to being ‘nibbled to death by ducks’. At the end of his life he wrote: ‘Looking back over our greatest achievements, I recall that few of them were generated in an atmosphere of sweetness, light and enthusiasm, but rather one of dynamic tension, complicated by off-stage muttering.’
He did not admire originality for its own sake, and used to quote an old boss of his: ‘If you insist on being different just for the sake of being different, you can always come down in the morning with a sock in your mouth.’ Instead of assigning a project to one creative group, he had a habit of putting several groups in competition. It was enough, he once said, ‘to send strong men staggering to buy a goat farm’. Without any doubt, Leo’s greatest monument is his campaign for Marlboro. It made an obscure brand the biggest-selling cigarette in the world. And it is still running, 25 years after he created it. Print was always the medium which interested him most. Never having worked in direct response, he did not put much stock in long copy. Most of his ads looked like miniature posters. He liked earthy, vernacular phrases, and kept a folder on his desk labeled ‘Corny Language’. ‘I do not mean maxims, gags or slang in its ordinary sense, but words, phrases and analogies which convey a feeling of sod-buster honesty and drive home a point. I sometimes run across these phrases in a newspaper story or in a chance conversation. I chuck them into the folder and one of them might show up in an ad years later.’ When he saw somebody on his staff using the product of a competitor, he issued this memo: ‘As you well know, your income and mine are derived 100 per cent from the sale of the products of our clients. ‘During the 36 years I have been in the agency business I have always been naïvely guided by the principle that if we do not believe in the products we advertise strongly enough to use them ourselves, we are not completely honest with ourselves in advertising them to others. ‘I recognize the unconscious spirit of rebellious independence that exists in all of us, and the compulsion you or I may have to demonstrate that we wear no man’s yoke. I have always felt, however, that there are better and more rewarding ways of doing this than in conspicuously avoiding or flouting the products of the people who pay our way. ‘I guess my feeling is pretty well summed up in the remarks of the vice president of a competitive agency. When asked why he was smoking a not- too-popular brand of cigarette which his company advertised, he replied: “In my book there is no taste or aroma quite like that of bread and butter.”’
Leo deplored the tendency of mega-agencies to put their own aggrandizement ahead of service to their clients. Not long before he died, he told his staff: ‘Somewhere along the line, after I’m finally off the premises, you may want to take my name off the premises, too. ‘But let me tell you when I might demand that you take my name off the door. That will be the day when you spend more time trying to make money and less time making advertising. ‘When your main interest becomes a matter of size just to be big, rather than good, hard, wonderful work.’ I wish I had written that. He had two sons, a geologist and an architect, and one daughter, a poet. He lived on a farm outside Chicago, but worked 364 days a year, except for occasional visits to the Arlington race-track, where he had a box. He had a passion for wild flowers, trees – and charades. CLAUDE C. HOPKINS 1867–1932 By exorcizing the pseudo-literary pretentions endemic in British copywriters of my vintage, and concentrating my thoughts on the obligation of advertising to sell, Claude Hopkins’ book, Scientific Advertising, changed the course of my life. At 17 Hopkins was a lay preacher, but he rebeled against his family’s hardshell Baptist brand of religion, and got a job as a bookkeeper. Not long afterwards, he joined the Bissell Carpet Sweeper Company, and invented selling strategies which gave Bissell a virtual monopoly. Then to Swift as Advertising Manager, followed by Dr. Shoop’s patent medicine company, where he persuaded his agency to let him write the copy not only for Dr. Shoop’s but for Montgomery Ward and Schlitz Beer as well. When he was 41, he was hired by Albert Lasker to write copy for Lord & Thomas. Lasker paid him $185,000 a year – equivalent to $2,000,000 in today’s money. He stayed at Lord & Thomas for 18 years. Hopkins was a prodigiously hard worker, seldom leaving his office before the early hours of the morning. Sunday was his favorite day, because he could work without interruption. From his typewriter came campaigns which made many products famous, including Pepsodent, Palmolive and six different cars. He invented new ways to
force distribution for new products. He invented test marketing. He invented sampling by coupon. He invented copy research. He held that nobody with a college education should be allowed to write copy for the mass market. I know what he meant. He was an uncompromising practitioner of the experimental method, forever testing new ideas in search of better results – even if, as Politz has pointed out, he did not always indicate ‘the boundaries between direct findings from experimentation and conclusions arrived at by general observation and reasoning’. A few of his conclusions have been disproved by later research. We now know, for example, that he was wrong when he said, ‘In every ad consider only new customers. People using your product are not going to read your ads.’ The fact is that users of a product read its advertisements more than non-users. He was a shy, mousy little man and spoke with a strong lisp. His nickname was Thee-Thee, that being the way he pronounced his initials C.C. But he was a good raconteur and after-dinner speaker. He always wore a fuchsia in his buttonhole, chewed licorice root, and spat profusely on the person he was talking to. Rich as he became, Hopkins was notoriously stingy, and never paid more than $6 for a pair of shoes. But his second wife persuaded him to buy an ocean-going yacht, to employ an army of gardeners on their estate and to buy Louis XVI furniture. She filled their house with an endless procession of guests, and played Scarlatti to Hopkins for hours at a time. He thought illustrations were a waste of space. Perhaps they were less important 60 years ago, when magazines and newspapers were thinner, and competition for the reader’s attention less severe. But few experienced practitioners of advertising would now argue with these dicta: ‘Almost any question can be answered, cheaply, quickly and finally, by a test campaign. And that’s the way to answer them – not by arguments around the table.’ ‘Ad writers forget they are salesmen and try to be performers. Instead of sales, they seek applause.’ ‘Whenever possible we introduce a personality into our ads. By making a man famous we make his product famous.’ ‘It is not uncommon for a change in headlines to multiply returns from five to ten times over.’
‘Brief ads are never keyed. Every traced ad tells a complete story.’ Nowadays Hopkins is remembered, if at all, as an uncompromising advocate of ‘hard sell’. Yet he perceived the importance of brand images – a generation before that term came into use. ‘Try to give each advertiser a becoming style. To create the right individuality is a supreme accomplishment.’ Raymond Rubicam abhorred Hopkins, believing that he had devoted his life to cheating the public. He once told me, ‘You are Claude Hopkins with a college education.’ A backhanded compliment if ever I heard one. Five years before he died Hopkins wrote, ‘My chief work in advertising has been meeting emergencies. Nobody ever called me in when the skies were bright and the seas were calm. Nearly every client quit me when he got into smooth waters.’ Sick of rescuing clients from the jaws of bankruptcy and making them richer than himself, he resigned from Lord & Thomas and went into business for himself. Too late. Hopkins was interested in nothing but advertising. There is macabre pathos in the last sentence of his autobiography: ‘The happiest are those who live closest to nature, an essential to advertising success.’ BILL BERNBACH 1911–1982 Bill Bernbach and I started our agencies in the same year, and we both made our reputations as copywriters. He was born 19 years after the youngest of my five other giants. After graduating from New York University with a degree in English Literature, he got a job in the mailroom of Schenley and became the protégé of Grover Whalen, who was the chairman. When Whalen left to run the New York’s World Fair, he took Bill with him as his speech writer. After the Fair ended, Bill joined the Weintraub agency, where he worked with Paul Rand, a distinguished art director who was a fugitive from the Bauhaus. During World War II, he spent two years in the Army, and then went to the Grey agency, where he quickly became creative head. Four years later, with Ned Doyle and Max Dane, he started his own agency, with an investment of $1,200. While his name appeared last on the letterhead, there was never any doubt whose agency it was. Today, Doyle Dane Bernbach is the tenth biggest in the world, with billings of more than a billion dollars.
Bill always created an atmosphere in which talented people blossomed. A woman who wrote deadly dull copy for me wrote brilliant copy for Bill. He was an irresistible salesman of his agency’s work, and terrifyingly obstinate. When I was chairman of the United Negro College Fund, he volunteered to make a television commercial for purposes of fund-raising. I dared to warn him that his storyboard, while a work of art, was not calculated to produce cash contributions. Bill replied, ‘David, you don’t have to worry. There are plenty of other agencies that would be happy to do the job for you.’ Bill’s commercial ran as presented. I am told that he used to carry a card which bore the self-admonition ‘Maybe he’s right’. I once actually heard him admit that a client was right. This precedent- shattering event happened at lunch in the White House, when one of President Johnson’s assistants criticized an anti-Goldwater commercial that Bill had put on the air the previous night. He had a genius for integrating copy with illustration, and never made my mistake of subordinating copywriters to art directors. He held, as I do, that the quality of the idea and the excellence of its execution was the alpha and omega of successful advertising. He worshipped at the altar of originality, and was never tired of denouncing research as the enemy of creativity. This may have irritated some of his clients, but it made him the hero of the creative fraternity. Of all his wonderful campaigns, those I most admire are Volkswagen and Avis. He was less successful with package-goods clients who tried to impose orthodox disciplines. I have often wondered if his output would have been less elegant if, like me, he had started as a door-to-door salesman. He spoke in a quiet voice and looked modest. But he wasn’t. The last time I saw him, he and Rosser Reeves were my guests at lunch. Bill lectured Rosser and me as if we were trainees in his agency. When some of his stodgier competitors started raiding his agency in search of swingers, Bill told me, ‘They don’t realize that these people will be helpless without my guiding hand.’ And guide them he did, always insisting that their advertising, however clever and original, should make the product the hero. He was a philosopher. He lived without ostentation, and organized his time with a self-discipline that is rare among heads of agencies. He once told me that he never stayed in the office after five, never took work home, and never worked at weekends. ‘You see, David, I love my family.’ Shortly before he died, Bill was asked what changes he expected in advertising in the eighties. He replied, ‘Human nature hasn’t changed for a billion years. It won’t even vary in the next billion years. Only the superficial things have changed.
It is fashionable to talk about changing man. A communicator must be concerned with unchanging man – what compulsions drive him, what instincts dominate his every action, even though his language too often camouflages what really motivates him. For if you know these things about a man, you can touch him at the core of his being. One thing is unchangingly sure. The creative man with an insight into human nature, with the artistry to touch and move people, will succeed. Without them he will fail.’ A gentleman with brains. • • • If I had to choose five more giants to complete my All-Time All- American team, they would be three copywriters – James Webb Young of J. Walter Thompson, George Cecil of N.W. Ayer, and Jack Rosebrook of Young & Rubicam; one art director – Vaughn Flannery of Young & Rubicam; and one new business wizard – Ben Duffy of BBDO. And who would I choose from the living stars? Their names are locked in my safe.
Albert Lasker made more money, spent more and gave more away than anybody in the history of advertising. And he got his money’s worth.
Stanley Resor, the Brahmin of the advertising business. He and his copywriter wife made J. Walter Thompson the biggest agency in the world.
The two best agencies in the world are the lengthened shadows of Raymond Rubicam. He was my conscience for 40 years, teaching me that advertising has the responsibility to behave.
Raymond Rubicam assembled the best team of copywriters and art directors in
the history of advertising – like Jack Rosebrook, Roy Whittier, Vaughn Flannery, Henry Lent, George Gribbin, Sid Ward and Norman Robbins. Under Rubicam’s inspiration they created advertisements which were read by more people than any other agency’s – including this ad for Life Savers. This modest ad above announced the opening of Young & Rubicam in 1923.
[OCR from image-only PDF page; verify layout and illustrations in the PDF.]
STEINWAY The Instrument of the Immortals the days of List and Wagner, oi Rubinstein and Berlioz, the pre eminence of the Steinway was as unquestioned as it is today. It stood then, as it stands now, the chosen instrument of the masters the inevitable preference wherever great music is understood and esteemed. STEINWAY&SONS,SteinwayHall,107-109E14thStreet,NewYork
The ad above right, written by Raymond Rubicam in 1919, now looks old- fashioned. The ad at the bottom, written in 1982, has a contemporary look. But which ad is more memorable?
Another elegant and effective ad from the winning Rubicam team.
Leo Burnett personified the Chicago school of advertising. ‘Isn’t making ads the most fun you ever had in your life?’
[OCR from image-only PDF page; verify layout and illustrations in the PDF.]
Why not you? A new triumph awaits at your very finger tips-a cake thetwonewPillsburyCakeMixes-Whiteor Ch with all the tender deliciousness, all the sumptuous late Fudge. Why don't you march in tonight come-hither as the one you see here, And must you one of these truly wonderful cakes and givey go through a struggle to score this new triumph? Not family a thrillthat they can feel right down to at all. You merely have to add milk to either one of tips of their toes? Why not? Why not you? Just addmilk. BEST BRST BEST Youand PiunPisesbun ixo eonmalaaguiattaam CMOCOLATE WHITE Cake MIX Cake MIX Pillsbury CAKE MIXI Mlk is all yotu adids eggs flawuring,or eatrat of sshird reepsired. Than e are mgnemise WHITE AND CHOCOLATE FUDGE
A typical Leo Burnett advertisement. Note the posterized layout. Nobody should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times. It changed the course of my life.
Bill Bernbach – ‘a gentleman with brains.’ He worshipped at the altar of originality and was the hero of the creative fraternity. Notes * Taken at the Flood, Harper, 1960. * This cost JWT the chance to get the Listerine account. Jerry Lambert who owned Listerine told me, ‘I would prefer an agency which spends its commissions on service rather than furniture.’ * If you lump together the three networks which belong to Interpublic, they come out bigger than Young & Rubicam and its subsidiaries.