Word: admen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Some of advertising's sharpest criticism is selfcriticism, since admen by nature are searching and articulate. Much of the internal questioning comes from members of newer and smaller agencies, often specializing in luxury and prestige accounts, that deplore the hard-sell techniques used to merchandise the big mass products. "Advertising is a bore," snaps Fred Papert, chairman of Manhattan's Papert, Koening Lois. "People don't pay attention to advertising. The trouble is that a lot of agency people have the idea that the public is a bunch of clods-and they write ads accordingly." Howard Gossage...
...more common on Madison Avenue than the critics are the admen who testily resent inside or outside criticism of their trade. "The eggheads dislike businessmen, the eggheads dislike advertising," snorts Rosser Reeves, chairman of hard-sell Ted Bates & Co. Says Walter Guild, president of San Francisco's Guild, Bascom & Bonfigli, the ad agency for the Kennedy election campaign: "If Toynbee wants to make his own toothpaste and his wife wants to sew her own brassières. O.K. He's just using advertising as a focal point to criticize our entire economic system...
...would the world's have-nots benefit if advertising contracted, and the consumer economy spent less on itself? Admen answer that the only reason the U.S. can spend billions for foreign aid and public welfare is the existence of a rich mass-production economy made possible by steady sales-and advertising. Says Fairfax Cone, executive committee chairman of Foote, Cone & Belding: "If the money spent on ads were to go instead into public works, as some of the critics advocate, where would the money come from? They never seem to get down to that." As for another familiar accusation...
...Intestines. Admen do fairly well in defending advertising's value to a free enterprise economy. But, points out David Ogilvy, president of Ogilvy, Benson & Mather Inc., much criticism "is not on economic grounds, but on the grounds that advertising corrupts public taste, and makes lying respectable." Admen themselves concede that too many ads are strident, misleading, dull or offensive. "People are irritated by some ads on TV," says Charles Brower, outspoken president of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn. "The audience gets bored when yet more intestines appear on the screen as the evening goes on. Who wants to wake...
...basis of such criticism is that advertising, besides being a valuable economic force, has social and cultural obligations to society that it is not fully meeting. But admen themselves are badly split on just what advertising should do. "Advertising should be creative and edifying and should strive to be an art form," says Doyle Dane Bernbach's Maxwell Dane (whose agency has won plaudits for its artful ads for Volkswagen, Polaroid, and El Al Israel Airlines). But Norman B. Norman, president of Norman Craig and Kummel, insists that "the business of advertising is solely to move goods. You bastardize...