Adland

W
hen this book first came out, in 2007, I was surprised by how many people said something along the lines of: âThat's all very well â but what happens next? What's the future of advertising?'

While I devote a short chapter to the future of the industry, for me the response is in the subtitle: âA Global
History
of Advertising'. This, then, is a history book. Pure and simple.

There's a problem, however, which is that history doesn't stand still. When
Adland
was published, Facebook was barely on the radar (it had been opened to the general public a year earlier). The iPhone came out in June that year, after I had finished writing. The iPad was still three years away. All these things and more would radically change the structure of the industry, accelerating an audience fragmentation process that had begun with satellite TV and continued with the growth of the internet.

In other words, just sticking your product on a major TV channel wasn't necessarily the best way of plugging it any more. Your public might be elsewhere, enjoying a new kind of entertainment on a different sort of screen. Confusing times for advertising agencies. Not only that, but the rate at which history is made seems to have accelerated. A new app can rocket from obscurity to worldwide renown in a matter of weeks. Advertising people often tell me they feel as though they're constantly running to keep up.

I address some of these problems in a revised chapter about the future, as well as in the short introduction. Other chapters have been adjusted and updated here and there, but largely left intact.

I fully admit that my real passion is for the history of the industry. During the original writing process, I took great pleasure in evoking the lives and times of people such as Leo Burnett, Bill Bernbach and David Ogilvy. I imagined walking into Ogilvy's office, perhaps to find him testily tapping a pencil on his desk as he examined my attempts to write a pithy phrase. And I was delighted to interview people who had experienced just that.

I also relished listening to experienced ad men and women as they recounted their early careers and recent successes. It's not every day you get to sit down with Alan Parker and listen to his stories about the London adland of the 1970s. Or visit the Greenwich Village apartment of George Lois and hear about his days at Bernbach's DDB.

If you already know these people, you'll realize why researching this book was such a blast.

And if you've never met them before â well, you're in for a treat.

Author's note

As far as contemporary agencies are concerned, all job titles were correct at the time of writing. If I have missed out any advertising luminaries due to lack of space or simple misjudgement, I apologize. Your egos will recover, I'm sure.

Introduction

âAdvertising is show business'

T
he adman sits on the glassed-in terrace of a Parisian cafÃ© and gazes out over the rapidly darkening square. People are hurrying home with baguettes and bottles of wine; maybe even some of the pungent cheese he loves. In the cafÃ© there is chatter and warmth as apÃ©ritifs are served and the city tunes up for another evening of pleasure â an act it has been polishing for centuries. The spindly old streetlamps across the street have just come on, as have the tiny spotlights above an advertising billboard. It exhorts him to buy a new Peugeot.

The adman is pensive. The billboard he is staring at seems to belong to a bygone era. In just a few short years, the landscape of his industry has shifted around him. Not so long ago, the 1960s advertising execs depicted in the hit TV show
Mad Men
would have slotted in to his agency without anybody noticing. But not now. Today they'd look out of place quicker than you can say âanachronism'.

The world has gone digital. A creative idea â the seed of any good advertising campaign â can now be expressed in myriad ways, across numerous media platforms. Posters still exist, certainly. So do newspapers, magazines, TV and radio. But there are also apps and online videos and social networks and all the rest of it. Clients are demanding more for less, and their procurement people are screwing the lid down tight on budgets. Greedy management consultants are nibbling away at his territory.

The adman isn't disheartened by any of this. Faintly anxious, perhaps. There's a lot to think about. But it's exciting. In the
Mad Men
era there were a finite number of solutions to any advertising problem. But now the answer can come from anywhere. It might be a gadget, an event, an art installation. He'd design a car for a client if he had to. There's a reason why the annual advertising festival in Cannes is now called the Festival of
Creativity
.

That's the difference, he thinks, between his agency and a management consultancy. His people actually create things. They
make
them. And the things they make create success for their clients.

The adman smiles and sips his glass of Bordeaux. Despite everything, he thinks, an advertising agency remains a very cool place to work.

Servants and masters

Sir Martin Sorrell, the chairman of marketing group WPP, commented during an interview that âadvertising is considered an extension of show business'. Agencies are by no means court jesters, but the industry's glitz does tend to detract from its vital contribution to the global economy. It may also explain why many agencies have struggled to raise their status from suppliers to strategic advisers in the eyes of their clients.

One of the things that surprised me most during the research for this book was the sheer power that clients wield over their agencies. I was left with the impression that an advertising executive will stop at nothing to gain or retain a client. Certainly, when a client summons them they do not hesitate to cancel a meeting with a journalist, even if he has arranged to fly thousands of miles to interview them. This happened to me not once, but several times. The fashion industry, the subject of my last book, has a reputation for rudeness and inaccessibility. But nobody in the fashion business treated me with the lack of courtesy afforded me by some advertising agencies. And the client always got the blame. Perhaps this is only to be expected in a business where the clients hold all the cards. As one agency boss said, âWe know we're only three phone calls away from disaster.'

We consumers don't have the luxury of worrying about where the power lies in the partnership. We only know that, between them, advertising agencies and their clients have an immense impact on our lives. As digital media challenge the ability of TV to disseminate advertising effectively, brands are forcing their messages onto every blank space, into every crack in the urban landscape. More than wallpaper, advertising is the stuff that surrounds us.

Yet, even today, there is debate about how much of this advertising is really effective. Retail tycoon John Wanamaker stated over a century ago that half of all advertising works, but nobody knows which half. (The quote is occasionally attributed to adland legend David Ogilvy, which seems unlikely, for reasons we'll discover later.) In 2006, a book called
What Stick
s: Why Most Advertising Fails and How to Guarantee Yours Succeeds
, by Rex Briggs and Greg Stuart, suggested that 37 per cent of advertising budgets are wasted.

Most clients continue to spend, however, despite the certainty that many of their advertising dollars end up down the toilet. In a world over-supplied
with brands, they can't afford to stop trying to imprint their names on our minds. Worldwide spend on advertising currently stands at over US $500 billion a year and rising (according to media agency ZenithOptimedia). Agencies may be required to spread budgets over a wider number of media, but their relentless pursuit of consumers continues unabated.

Learning to love advertising

While I allow myself to express an occasional burst of cynicism about the advertising industry, I can't help feeling that it's too much of an easy target. At a casual, dinner-party level, most people are pretty contemptuous about advertising. âSheer manipulation,' they mutter, darkly. The jargon, psychobabble and doubletalk of advertising have been spoofed in print, film and television since at least the 1950s. And yet, there are several reasons to like â even admire â the advertising industry.

I put Jean-Marie Dru, president and CEO of TBWA Worldwide, on the spot and asked him why we should love advertising. âFirst of all,' he said, âthere will always be an intermediary between a product and a potential customer. You may say, “On the internet, that isn't the case”, but in that environment the web itself is the intermediary. Sellers naturally want to reach out to buyers. Second, advertising is a catalyst for innovation. It stimulates competition, creates demand and encourages the development of new products. It is the accelerator at the heart of a liberal economy.

âAnother advantage of advertising â although I'm not saying that this is its primary role â is that we have yet to find a more effective means of financing a free, varied and democratic media.'

Like many of his colleagues, Dru is convinced that consumers enjoy âgood' advertising: âNobody likes a bad product, but a well-made product will always find an appreciative audience. Furthermore, the agencies I know and admire have a great deal of respect for consumers. It is, after all, our job to understand consumers. In fact, advertising has far more respect for consumers than many other industries I could mention.'

Do advertising agencies provoke avarice, obesity and lung cancer? It's debatable. Do they interrupt our favourite TV shows with garbage that we don't want to watch? Thanks to today's ad-skipping technology, less and less. Do they create tiny gems of popular culture? Occasionally â yes.

One could also argue that advertising is a springboard for creative talent. The list of writers and film directors who have worked in advertising is long and illustrious: Salman Rushdie, Fay Weldon, Len Deighton, Peter Carey,
Sir Alan Parker, Sir Ridley Scott, David Fincher, Spike Jonze, Michel Gondryâ¦ I could go onâ¦ and on. The French creative director Olivier Altmann, of the agency Publicis Conseil, once told me, âWorking in advertising is one of the few ways you can be creative and make money at the same time.'

Another reason to respect advertising people is that they work hard. The image of young creatives playing table football in the agency bar is not exactly false, but it is taken out of context. Agency people work long hours, and they rarely switch off. Coming up with âthe big idea' to sell a product in a memorable way is not easy. And then, of course, there are those demanding clients.

In his book
Ogilvy On Advertising
, David Ogilvy wrote: âThe copy-writer lives with fear. Will he have a big idea before Tuesday morning? Will the client buy it? Will it get a high test score? Will it sell the product? I never sit down to write an advertisement without thinking THIS TIME I AM GOING TO FAIL.'

Ogilvy went on to claim that the account executive and the head of the agency lived in perpetual fear, too â mostly of their clients.

Having said all that, there's something enviable about a job in advertising. It seems to be a lot of fun, despite the pressure. Advertising people are often dynamic and charming. At the more senior level, they get to dine in expensive restaurants and travel to interesting places.

Let's face it: advertising is simply one of those industries that make you itch to pull back the curtain and take a good look behind the scenes.

An impossible brief

Strangely enough, this book was inspired by a conversation outside a bar in Tbilisi, Georgia. I was covering a conference about advertising in Central Europe when I found myself chatting with a war correspondent. I observed that my specialist subject seemed pretty trivial compared to his. âNot at all,' he protested, kindly, âI find advertising fascinating. You'd be amazed how deeply engrained the trading mentality is â even in the harshest of circumstances. And advertising is part of that.'

After a brief pause, he asked me, âCome to think of it, can you recommend a book about the history of advertising?'

I thought for a moment. And then I went on thinking. Finally I said to him, âYou know what? I don't think I've ever read one.' âWell, there you go!' He slapped the table. âThere's your next project.'

There have of course been hundreds of books about advertising. Most of them have been written by agency bosses selling their own soup. Others have covered the industries of the United States or the United Kingdom. Few have taken a broader perspective.

Perhaps this is not surprising. Attempting to write a global history of advertising is a vast â if not impossible â task. For a long time I wondered whether it was even worth embarking on such an insane project. Then I stumbled across a line in the book
Paris: Biography of a City
, by Colin Jones. âNo history of anything,' writes Jones reassuringly, âwill ever include more than it leaves out.'

I was also greatly encouraged by Cilla Snowball, the wonderfully named boss of leading UK agency AMV BBDO, who said, âIt's definitely a story that needs telling. There is an archive [The History of Advertising Trust], but who sits down to read an archive?'

âRead' is a key word here. Although I've put together a small and rather eclectic selection of images, this is clearly not a picture book. Many such coffee table tomes are already on the market, and TV commercials are widely available on the web. A quick search for
1984
or
Launderette
on YouTube will provide access to those classic spots. What you'll find here are the stories behind the ads.

Neither did I wish to write an encyclopaedia. In order to provide something manageable for the author and digestible for the reader, the book takes a satellite view of the industry. In roughly chronological order, it endeavours to cover the most famous agencies, the best-known personalities, and the most compelling themes. And as the advertising industry is full of fascinating characters, all of them brimming over with insights and anecdotes, I tried to interview as many industry veterans and leading practitioners as I could get hold of. If any of the big names are missing, that's either because they declined to speak to me, or were unable to fit me in between client meetings.

You may also note that this book has a faintly European slant. This is only to be expected, given that I am a Brit who lives in France. And it's worth pointing out that, of the six biggest agency groups, no fewer than four are based outside the United States: WPP, Publicis, Dentsu and Havas. Two of them â Publicis and Havas â are based right here in Paris.

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