The Art of Einstein

Ogilvy - on second thought

I’ve now read Ken Roman’s biography of David Ogilvy.  (see my post of January 8). It’s a treat, especially if you were around the advertising game in his heyday, which I was.  

Big, whomping personalities like Ogilvy can be intimidating even after they’re dead.  Happily, Ken wasn’t cowed by the memories as he wrote.  This is a high resolution, 12 megapixel portrait, warts and all.  It brought to mind the adage my mother had framed and hanging in the kitchen that said “ A genius is someone who takes great pains – and gives them to other people” – It sounds like Ogilvy to a T. 

Beyond its value as a biography it’s a faithful look at the ad business in the  middle of the 20^th century, when television was just emerging and “as advertised in LIFE” meant a product had arrived.  Forget “Mad Men” – this book is a lot better picture of reality.

Ogilvy made his name, and a good start on his fortune, writing print advertising back when advertising was defined as “salesmanship in print”.   (two great examples of his work shown).  Words mattered.  Print ads persuaded people to join Book of the Month Club, use Mum deodorant, gargle with Listerine, and bathe with Lux soap.  The display cases in the lobby at NW Ayer held copies of the books its copywriters had published.   Copywriters like Jack Rosebrook, James Webb Young, Bruce Barton, and George Gribben were legends.

Are you getting a feeling that this book pushed a lot of buttons for me?  Yes, it did.  At the same time, though, I wondered  whether, with all Ogilvy’s rules for copywriters and advice for advertisers, it has relevance in world of laptops and Blackberrys?  I believe it does – and I hadn’t imagined that.

Death of the sales people?

A great salesman at work is a beautiful thing to behold.  

So one of my favorite stops at the Motorcycle Show, which some of the motorcycle gang and I visited last Saturday, is the guy with the microphone strapped to his chest like a carnival barker, pitching “miracle” wax while he polishes a carefully painted and pin-striped panel.  When he’s ready to reel in the suckers, he pours lighter fluid on the panel and sets it afire to show how protective the wax is.   

This routine is pure snake oil.  It’s been around since Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound.  And it’s not that far removed from the side-by-side demos that were once the mainstay of Proctor & Gamble television commercials.

The motorcycle show is easy pickings for one of these sales pros.   Thousands of people pay $15 to come here and buy things.   Think about that for a second.  It’s like charging admission to enter Bloomingdales.  No wonder it’s such a fertile 1:1 selling environment.  The place is teeming with people in riding gear.  They show up like bus tourists at a casino, expecting to go home with less in their pockets than they arrived with.   All they want is some lasting evidence of being there:  a bandana, a decal, a T-shirt, a helmet, maybe even a jacket, or perhaps a motorcycle.   

So imagine my surprise when I asked a sales person for information about her product and she told me to check the company’s website!      

Time to bring back the Ecphoneme ?

I use punctuation for a living.  I’ve been doing it for years. 

And, every day I am amazed all over again at how the writing life has changed since I cut my first mimeograph stencil.  It makes you think.  The other day, for instance, pondering emoticons and other forms of email emphasis, I discovered that what newspapermen called a ‘bang’, is actually an ecphoneme!   Don’t ask me how to pronounce it.

Stylebooks advise using the ecphoneme with caution.  I have personally been  ‘advised’ by bosses I’ve worked for to “get rid of those @#$%ing exclamation marks.  They are a bad writer's crutch.”

Of all the punctuation on my keyboard the bang seems to carry the most freight.  A period is a simple signal to stop.  A comma asks politely that you pause before going on.   A bang at sentence end shrieks. This is IMPORTANT!   50% off!! Offer ends soon!!!  It’s as though the sentence were red in the face, with bulging blood vessels throbbing at the temples.

Bury me not on Madison Avenue

I’ve been trying to scrub the word ‘advertising’ from my vocabulary. 

To most people outside ‘the business’ it just means “television commercials”.

Let’s say I’m at a cocktail party and a brilliant conversationalist asks my occupation.  I say  I’m in advertising.  The question I’m then usually asked is whether I’ve done anything my inquisitor has seen on the tube.   (Which reminds me we’re going to have to retire ‘tube’ soon, too, because they’re all flat panels now.  Will YouTube need re-branding?  Think about it.) 

When someone asks that question what they’re hoping to hear is that I’ve done something they’ve seen on television, remember, and found amusing.  Chances are slim.  There’s never been a precious lot of that around.

Anyway, if what you know how to do is create TV commercials you have a valuable skill but you’re not in the advertising business as of 2009. 

Words and Deeds and Advertising

I had lunch with my friend Chuck Griffith today.  He is one of the wonderful writers who helped make our agency's reputation.  He still writes, dreams up software, and builds museum quality Shaker objects – I hesitate to say furniture because the things he builds are works of art. 

After chatting about wives, kids, grand-kids, this and that, we ended up, as usual, talking about advertising.  

Chuck is a devout Windows user and offended by the PC vs. Mac spots Apple has been running.  I find them witty, well cast, and persuasive. He likes the Geico spots with the talking gecko. Whenever one comes on the air I rush for the remote and change channels.  We both have enough experience to know that each of these campaigns are doing the job for the advertiser.  And yet each of us detests one of them.   

David Ogilvy rides again

I went to a party last evening to mark the launch of “The King of Madison Avenue”, Ken Roman’s new biography of David Ogilvy.  

As book parties go, and I don’t get to that many, this one was splendiferous.  It was held in a glittering apartment 43 stories above Manhattan, overflowing with paintings, prints, sculpture, books, even a film of Ogilvy himself on a monitor in the library.  I think the great man would have felt very much at home.  As for me, later, after I got back to Katonah, I felt as though I’d been on vacation.

Birth of my Blog

I don’t know whether or not you’ve ever heard of Jamie Kitman.  I believe he was trained as a lawyer.   I know him as a columnist for Automobile magazine – a publication I’ve read since David E. Davis Jr. birthed it in 1986. 

Davis is long gone, and Kitman is now the main reason I go back to Automobile every month.  His commentary on cars and the motor trade not only tickle me – they’d also pass muster in The New Yorker if the magazine carried a cars column.  Kitman has a sense of humor, an automotive worldview, and is dotes on cars long past their prime.  My kind of pundit.  And a bit of a grump