Word: admen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...advertising becomes more pervasive, so does debate about it. Never before have admen been so concerned about the future of their business or so nervous over charges that Madison Avenue is somehow corrupting the standards of Main Street...
...conspicuously visible part of it. Fascinated as it is with the business of finding better ways to live, the U.S. public wastes little time worrying about whether advertising may be damaging to its collective psyche. It is unlikely that the citizenry will ever take the step some admen seem to yearn for and pass a national vote of thanks to advertising for its part in enriching U.S. life. But it is equally unlikely that the public will ever be suborned out of its unemotional recognition of the adman for what he is: a highly effective salesman without whose efforts...
...Billings," which are the amount that an agency's clients spend on advertising, are the conventional measure of size in the advertising business. Some admen argue that this gives the public an exaggerated notion of advertising's profitability, and should be abandoned in favor of actual gross income-which, in most cases, means the 15% of billings that the agency takes as its commission...
...Champagne Glass. According to their differing philosophies-and the product involved-admen appeal to vastly disparate human emotions: snobbery ("If they run out of Lowenbrau . . . order champagne''), the confusions of parenthood ("How Sears helps your daughter choose her first bra"), nostalgia ("Our beer is 50 years behind the times"), hypochondria ("Take Geritol to end tired blood"), and the competitiveness of childhood ("Every boy wants a Remco toy"). Inevitably, the most heavily used selling themes turn on three aspects of existence that particularly fascinate Americans: youth, sex and romance. Pepsi-Cola, once typed in the public mind...
...Americans grow more sophisticated, however, the admen are turning to subtler appeals. Board Chairman David Ogilvy of Manhattan's Ogilvy, Benson & Mather plumps for detail-packed text ("How Super Shell's 9 ingredients give cars top performance." "25 facts you should know about KLM") on the grounds that today's customer is hungry for facts. In apparent proof of Ogilvy's contention, U.S. sales of Rolls-Royce cars doubled within three years after Ogilvy started running ads, with 21 paragraphs of text, under the headline: "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this...