C. D. Notley I don't know much about advertising but
I could see after only a brief encounter at a crowded cocktail party with C. D. Notley, who died last week, why he was such a force in his world. Good advertising was putting something on a blank sheet of paper or length of celluloid that would make the cash registers tinkle. He neither apologised for that activity nor wrapped it up in the high-falutin associated with moti- vation research, product research, consumer re- search, media research, or any other research. He took, I am told by a friend who knew him well, the glummest view of the new generation of smart young men pouring out of Oxford and Cam- bridge with good degrees and a mighty ambition to get at easy pickings in advertising. He had come up the tough way himself into the affluence which he enjoyed, and premature smoothness wasn't a quality he greatly appreciated. There were those who preferred to describe his forth- rightness as rudeness, but tough admen, I'm told, thought the world of him.
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