A farewell to advertising

PERSONAL COLUMN BEN DUNCAN

Last September, I resigned from my job in an advertising agency. I had spent, off and on, about ten years in the business. I hadn't wanted

to go into it, and I was pleased to be out of it. I did not, however, resign because I dis-

approved, nor because I had found something more respectable to do. I left for one reason only : a duodenal ulcer, which I had long be- fore I came anywhere near advertising, but which I was convinced I would never get rid of while I went on working in it.

I began my advertising career as a copy- writer, and spent most of my time in that work.

I ended as a director of my agency, a fact I record neither as boast nor confession. I never- felt quite comfortable in advertising at any level; but I never felt uncomfortable enough to leave it, either.

Being lukewarm in this way, I was unusual. Advertising as an institution raises strong pas- sions. Many people disapprove of it violently, and among these are often those sinners who worked in it but became saints instantly upon leaving it. I can already feel beatification creep- ing up on me.

A cartoonist friend of mine, who's known me for a long time, said that I reminded him of a Paris whore, working away in the capital and saving up for a respectable old age in Provence. The climate of Cambridgeshire is not Provencal, and health forced me to leave before my earn- ings made me anywhere near independent. Otherwise, my friend's judgment seems to be a fair summing-up.

But the question which obsessed me all the time I worked in advertising was this : is it worth doing well?

By doing it well, I do not imply the ever more diabolical manipulation of human motives which I am distressed to discover many able people believe advertising agencies to have in their power. To me, the idea that subtle and devious playing upon unconscious desires could emerge from an institution as intel- lectually crude as the average advertising agency is not worth space to dismiss.

By doing advertising well, I mean only the application to advertisements of the same stan- dard of writing, design, typography and illustration as would be applied to the editorial content of the medium in which it appears. This may appear a quixotic task to have set myself. It did not seem so at the time, either to me or to most of my generation in adver- tising. We were, many of us, arts graduates who had been unable to find any better way of using the education we had been given. We knew that what we were producing would be widely seen and read. We tried, with an earnest- ness characteristic of those early nineteen-fifties, to do it well.

Those who had the power to accept or reject our work were, on the whole, neither earnest or over-educated. They were not easy people to persuade that better-written, better-looking advertisements were also more effective. Ugly, offensive advertisements were more familiar, more dependable, in some strange way more virile.

I do not expect to be believed, but I set this down in the interests of strict truth (for which a period in advertising has given me an added respect). The businessmen with whom I dealt were embarrassed to have their companies' names put to attractive advertisements. They

were more comfortable with crudity, both of design and vocabulary. They equated with effeminacy the absence of such injunctions as hurry, hurry or buy now which were then much in fashion.

Yet, by a paradox, they withdrew trembling from direct statement. To say outright what a

product did, let alone what it was, could cause

hysterical scenes when advertisements were pre- sented. Thus I had to battle to be allowed to

weed out the draper's language of such chilling gentility that it turns reasonably-priced dresses into economy gowns.

Not all objections to my suggested wording were even so easily understood as these. A client once refused to sanction the use of the

word nicest because it was an anagram of incest. His kind of reaction was not untypical. Nevertheless, my generation and I struggled on. We sought, in the press, larger spaces in

which some kind of reasoned argument might be made, instead of the more frequent appear- ance of smaller spaces which would only accommodate some idiot piece of repetition.

These larger spaces would also, of course, allow for some skill and artistry in the use of photo- graphy. Similarly, in television, we tried to get longer commercials to make possible, if not argument, at least an intelligible statement of a case.

We tried, in short, to include only what made sense, and was relevant: to discard unread- able squiggles of name-blocks left over from the Edwardian past, phrases like runes whose meaning had long been lost, and drawings of pills, sweets, sewing cotton and such converted into fearful little robots.

To what now seems to me a remarkable degree, we succeeded. By the time I left my advertising job, clients were actually asking for the kind of work which, five years before, one could have been fired for suggesting. At one time, no one would have dared to suggest that a respected serious composer be employed for a television commercial. Now these, the best photographers and artists, even writers and stage producers unconnected with advertising, are increasingly used by agencies.

But was the struggle worth the prize? I am now convinced that it was not. In common with my earnest contemporaries, I had hoped that the improvement we achieved was obvious, and that our advertisements would be more accept- able to the educated community. We were, it now seems to me, touchingly eager to be approved of by this group, for we were, our- selves, drawn mostly from outside the main- stream of society. The writers and designers of advertisements include a high proportion of aliens, colonials, divorcees, inverts of both sexes, products of racially mixed marriages, in- telligent women and other misfits of the modern world.

The respectability which we sought eluded us.

I found that advertisements I had dared to think might be admired for their restraint were con-

demned for their insidious 'soft sell.' Those in which I had, at considerable cost to myself, resisted the brazenly vulgar, were castigated as appeals to apers of the aristocracy.

Indeed, the work produced by the likes of me was often singled out for abuse by the critics of advertising. Being less equivocal, or simply more understandable than the general run, it seemed to cause more offence to those who wished that advertising didn't exist at all. I suppose, too, that if you disapprove of what an advertisement is trying to do, you will not like it better because it contains a well-executed drawing, or is remarkable for its typography.

What little satisfaction we took in what we produced was further reduced by the shame- less plagiarism which characterises the practice of advertising. No sooner has a striking idea appeared in an advertisement than, as soon as is mechanically possible, press and television are flooded with second-rate imitations of it.

The sameness which results means, I think, that advertisements are seldom beheld as individual, but as parts of one great mish-mash of words and pictures. The general effect, on a television or cinema screen, or in a publication, cannot be otherwise than jarring and un- pleasant. Once I had realised this, the effort to improve one ingredient of the stew began to seem forlorn.

However, the improvements we made did, I think, raise the standing of the advertising com- munity within the business world. When I be- gan in advertising, employees of my agencies were received in large businesses with the sort of uncomfortable condescension a tradesman might arouse in a newly rich and recently ennobled ex-merchant. By the end, we were treated by the heads of these companies as people who deserved to be heard.

I am not sure that this change is cause for celebration. It has certainly enriched, and I think strengthened the hands, of the very forces in advertising who fought it every step of the way. You will sec. throughout the advertising business, chairmen and managing directors proudly displaying work which they would cer- tainly have stopped if they had seen it in time.

Yet they have profited socially and financially from the efforts of the art-school and university graduates who entered advertising in the years when jobs for them were scarce. The copy- writers and designers of my generation have mostly retired, exhausted, to other jobs like teaching, to motherhood, or, like me, to futures still in doubt.

Our successors, what I saw of them, seemed to me to be made of tougher stuff. They did not give the impression that they would risk their own prospects in pursuit of such chimeras as good writing or good design in advertising. Many of the more able among them seem in any case to take a quick look at advertising and get out of it into something more agree- able; or, since opportunities for them are now so much greater, never get into it at all.

So I doubt that the attempted improvement will go on. Certainly I can't picture the kind of scenes I remember taking place now. In my early advertising days, tycoons who seemed able to read only with some difficulty were subjected to lengthy lectures on the use of singular and plural verbs following collective nouns. I once, myself, undertook unsuccessfully to explain to a cotton king from Manchester the flaw in logic involved in the phrase cheap prices. I was present when a schoolmaster turned copywriter objected to a proposed new name for a con- fection because it joined to a neuter noun of Anglo-Saxon origin an Old French feminine diminutive suffix.

Such efforts don't seem, in retrospect, a very good use for educated minds. So perhaps I'm lucky that I've been forced to turn mine so something else.