Word: admen
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Coming to Grips. If admen have not sold themselves as well as their products, it is partly because they are not nearly so masterful at "huckstering" and "hidden persuasion" as their detractors imagine. "Advertising has functioned imperfectly," says Compton Advertising Vice President James Kelly, "in coming to grips with its own business...
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...
Ideals & Eyeteeth. Sprung partly, and loosely, from several of his casual pieces in The New Yorker, The Beauty Part more or less concentrates on the theme that U.S. society is full of nuts who earn their living as plumbers or admen but who really think they are artists and writers; private eyes spend their free time "making collages out of seaweed and graham crackers," and "every housewife in America has a novel under her apron." Cruising around the stage by way of illustration are some of the most spectacular phonies since Piltdown...
Though U.S. admen admit that inexcusable waste and silly, shoddy products do exist in the U.S. marketplace, they insist that even the most sophisticated modern advertising cannot artificially create desires, but can only stimulate existing desires by telling people what goods can be had, what they are like, what satisfactions they bring. By so doing, the admen argue, their trade contributes to mass demand for products, mass employment, mass distribution and mass buying-all of which are essential elements in the creation of mass affluence. Madison Avenue's case for itself thus closely mirrors the case for free enterprise...