Eggheads and spies
Philip Kleinman
Advertising abounds in theories and even in philosophies, philosophy being the word which the more pretentious ad agencies use to denote whichever gimmick they happen to be using to impress clients. One of the most influential of these theories is that of brand personality, an approach particularly associated in this country with the J. Walter Thompson agency.
It's a soft sell theory, which says in effect that consumers become attached to brands in the same way that they become attached to people, by virtue of a set of emotional associations, rather than _because they believe in a rational way that one brand is of more practical value than its competitors.
Though the theory is easy to make jokes about, there is a good deal of experimental evidence that it does fit the facts of people's behaviour. Likewise there is a good deal of evidence, but anecdotal rather than experimental, that the same theory applies to the manner clients choose their agencies.
Agencies, in other words, acquire personalities or brand images which, over and above the actual services they perform, influence the minds of those who hire them,' fire them or merely exchange opinions about them. It is only to be expected, after all, that the imagemakers themselves have images which excite some attention. .
Thus Doyle Dane Bernbach, Collett Dickenson Pearce or Boase Massimi Pollitt are thought of as 'creative' agencies; Masius Wynne-Williams is a 'marketing' agency; and J. Walter Thompson itself'? — well, its image is compounded partly of the pukka Berkeley Square gentlemanliness to which I had occasion to refer in last week's column and partly of rather donnish cleverness.
JWT's senior executives include a high proportion of eggheads — the best known among them being John Treasure, Jeremy Bullmore and Stephen King — whose qualities of intellect would win them the respect of any audience.
But if JWT London, the biggest agency in Britain, has a brand personality to be envied, what of the parent company in the United States, where it is also the biggest agency? Rather different, I am afraid. It used to be widely thought of as simply rather dull and unadventurous. More recently its image has been tarnished by the fact that a number of the Watergate defendants, including Bob Haldeman, are former JWT employees.
And now it has to cope with the suspicion expressed in Advertising Age, the American ad industry's large-circulation weekly journal, that the agency has had dealings with the CIA. Last week the paper ran a lengthy exposé story on the matter. Actually it didn't expose very much, expect that the now defunct Mullen public relations company, which did admit serving as a front for CIA operations abroad, had a small amount of business contact with JWT and was founded by a man, Robert Mullen, who was formerly a close friend of several JTW bigwigs.
Nevertheless the normally sober-sided Ad Age devoted a whole page to the story under the heading 'Undercover admen.' The paper may simply have been trying to jump on American journalism's hunt-the-CIA bandwagon, and the innuendoes may be entirely unjustified. But, coming after Haldeman and all that, they may well do something to the agency's reputation. in the States. JWT's ;ink with the Nixon gang doesn't appear to have done it any business harm. Indeed the American agency, under the energetic leadership of a new chief executive, Don Johnston, has been recovering lost ground.
Meanwhile I have it on good authority that John Treasure, group chairman of JWT and its affiliates in London, is not a member of the CIA. In his capacity as vice-chairman of the parent company he is going to be Spending two months a year in New York, I understand. Perhaps the presence of a Berkeley Square egghead will help Don Johnston project a less sinister brand personality.
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