Word: admen
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...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...
...newest variant of the appeal to sophistication is that made by needle-sharp President William Bernbach of Manhattan's Doyle Dane Bernbach, who has wowed the ad industry with his grain-of-salt Volkswagen ads playing up qualities that would normally be considered shortcomings ("Think small"). Though some admen still stubbornly insist that "humor doesn't sell," the evidence is that nowadays it does. The major factor in making Duluth's Chun King Corp. a nationally known enterprise has been the zany commercials for the company's prepared Chinese food written by Hollywood's Stan...
...their approach, truly original ads are so few that they are quickly copied. The bulk of menthol cigarette ads-a boy, a girl (shoeless) and a babbling brook-are virtually indistinguishable. Often, too. the less expensive or distinctive a product is, the more pretentiously it is advertised-which leads admen to argue whether it is good salesmanship to make a snob appeal for a non-snob product. The most notable voice raised in opposition is that of Fairfax Cone of Chicago's Foote, Cone & Belding agency, who argues that an ad should come as close as possible to saying...