The Real Mad Men (4 page)

He found the Lexington Avenue office in the Graybar Building an austere place, far from the image of
Mad Men's
Sterling Cooper.

“There were a lot of very serious account people, all highly intelligent but serious; they were grown-up, they didn't have a lot of fun. They were very well-educated but it was much more like an agreeable law firm, not an agency. Nobody questioned the fact that you were there to use your brains on your client's behalf, that absolutely didn't need to be said. They took the business very seriously; I mean it, I'm not sure the word creative was used at all. There was the art department and the editorial department, which was the copy department, showing its origins in journalism. And the lady copywriters sat in their own compounds, wearing hats.”

Hats seem to have been big, particularly with the women at JWT. Wally O'Brien, an account man, recalls the midweek queue outside the New England Room (a boardroom that resembled the kitchen of a New England farmhouse, a JWT feature dating back to pre-war days). “Wednesday was ‘Women's Day,' when only women could eat in the room, and they'd vie with each other to wear the most outrageous hat to lunch. We'd stand outside to see them go past on their way in!”

The agency wouldn't accept an alcohol or cigarette account and they'd never pitch for new business competitively or speculatively, on the argument that they couldn't put forward responsible recommendations until they had a real, deep understanding of the client's market.

Alcohol consumption in the office was almost unheard of. And ever since
Reader's Digest
published its 1952 “Cancer by the Carton” article, examining possible links between tobacco and cancer (long before the 1964 Surgeon General's report on the effects of smoking on health), several agencies refused to handle tobacco, extraordinarily lucrative though it was. Several prominent figures called for it to be banned and plenty more dropped it on the announcement, including both Bill Bernbach and David Ogilvy. Indeed, the head of McCann-Erickson, Emerson Foote, resigned because his agency continued to handle cigarettes.

So the business wasn't without its principles and principled people. Nevertheless, the novelists were right in their portrayal of a group of people who, rightly or wrongly, were riddled with low self-esteem. Reported in a lengthy essay in
Time
magazine, late in 1962, only 8 percent of admen polled believed that their fellow admen were “honest.” Indeed, so much self-examination and self-flagellation was going on that the president of the American Association of Advertising Agencies urged his members to stop “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.”

IN
1957
, one book, Vance Packard's
The Hidden Persuaders
probably did more damage to the reputation of advertising than any other single tangible factor. It claimed to expose practices within the advertising business of subconscious coercion, subliminal advertising, and wonderful and weird techniques that either forced us to surrender our innermost thoughts, fears, and desires, or got us all buying products without ever realizing why we were doing it.

Clearly a sensation-seeking writer—
Time
magazine in 1962 described Packard as “one of the nation's most talented self-advertisers”—his book promoted the discomfiting notions, wheezes, and theories of the quack psychologists and pointy-bearded analysts who were besieging agencies with quick-fix nostrums derived from consumer motivational research, depth psychology, and other psychological techniques.

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,” embraced 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.”