Word: admen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...toughest running drama of suspense and conflict draws a small but influential audience. At Lindy's in Manhattan, bookies take bets on the outcome of each month's cliff hanger, The Ratings. Across town on Madison Avenue, admen ante up with million-dollar chips, and on the same fateful turn, TV shows stake their survival, performers their jobs and networks their reputations. Every eye in TV is firmly fixed on the numbers that do what the batting average does for baseball, the big board for Wall Street and Debrett's for the peerage...
...reason for the change is the vastly increased barrage of U.S. advertising ($9 billion in 1955, v. $3.4 billion in 1946). Says a Los Angeles agency executive: "We are suffering from fatigue of believability." To revive the customer, admen are turning increasingly to sotto voce selling: the eye-catching picture, the self-deprecating cartoon, the chuckle. Says one character: "I was a 99-lb. weakling. Then I bought a Carrier Room Air Conditioner. I'm still a 99-lb. weakling but, boy, is my bedroom nice and cool!" In Atlanta a cartoon colonel declares: "I'd even...
...Some admen contend that the soft-sell approach can succeed only in limited luxury-class markets, that keenly competitive mass-marketed goods still demand fact-filled, reason-why copy. Says an old Madison Avenue slogan: "The more you tell, the more you sell." On the other hand, understated advertising has successfully sold many items, from dogfood to diapers, in mass-market fields where there is little discernible difference between competing products. Instead of lecturing readers on engine-ping, Standard Oil Co. (Ohio) diverts them with spaceship cartoons. George Gobel's fey, sophisticated humor has helped to build Dial soap...
...reason why some admen still resist "smart" advertising is that it takes greater imagination and patience to captivate a customer than to clobber him. Even David Ogilvy, who dreamed up the Hathaway Shirt and Schweppes campaigns, was unable to work out a successful offbeat formula for Rinso. At times the determinedly soft-sell ads turn out merely limp. Nevertheless, some of the loudest drumbeaters in U.S. advertising have learned lessons from the velvet-voiced sophisticates. The work of top artists and crack color photographers is being used to a far greater extent than ten years ago-if only to dramatize...
From multimillion-dollar consume-research programs, admen have officially established what people have known all along. As David Ogilvy expresses it: "The consumer is not a moron. She is your wife...