As Long As You're Up, Get Their Attention

"The trade of advertising," Samuel Johnson said, "is now so near perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement." Run that statement up any flagpole along Madison Avenue and a thousand admen will haul out their double-barreled Purdeys from Abercrombie & Fitch and pepper it to pieces. Not improve! The hallmark of advertising is improvement: bigger, better, brighter, newer, whiter, faster, cleaner. That goes for the advertising industry as well as for the products, and 1965 is unfolding for U.S. agencies as a bigger, better and brighter year than any before it.

Led by Marion Harper's sprawling Interpublic, whose eight agencies will bill $660 million, the 618 U.S. agencies expect to place a record $7.5 billion worth of advertising by year's end. The best news in the ad world, however, is that the ads are improving along with the industry's fortunes. A new sprightliness has come to advertising, marked by an increasing number of ads that are more whimsical, low keyed, imaginative and natural--in short, more fun to read, hear or view. "Up till recently," says Arthur C. Fatt, chairman of Grey Advertising, "we were concerned with whether or not people saw our advertisements. Now we are more concerned with what impression the advertisement makes."

Slightly Apologetic. The change has been forced on the ad world by the increasing sophistication and affluence of the consumer. "The consumer is not a moron," says David Ogilvy of Ogilvy, Benson & Mather. "She is your wife." With 1,500 ads a day assaulting his eyes and ears, the U.S. consumer has built up what Ogilvy calls "a crust of indifference." The result, according to a new study by the American Association of Advertising Agencies: he automatically shuts out more than 1,400 of the daily ad pitches, reacts to only 13.

To place their products among those 13, admen have switched to new and offbeat ways to capture consumer attention, including pop and op art. The most successful technique is being widely imitated. It is known as the "Bernbach Syndrome" after the ad firm of Doyle Dane Bernbach, and it consists of a wry, conversational, slightly apologetic approach to selling. Doyle Dane is responsible for some of the most fetching current ads, including those for Levy's Jewish Rye bread and the low-keyed, underdog-bidding Avis rent-a-car ads (which led Hubert Humphrey to say: "I try harder. I have to. I'm only No. 2"). Doyle Dane's new service series for American Airlines includes a radio spot that explains how American's baggage handlers are choreographed as carefully as ballet dancers in order to improve their speed. It quickly sets up another underdog. "No, no, Steinhouser," the baggagemaster shouts as a tinny piano bangs out a tune. "You're not making it, Steinhouser." In perhaps its most famous campaign, Doyle Dane originated the "Think Small" motif for Volkswagen.

The same combination of naturalness and whimsy is practiced by Papert, Koenig, Lois, which made Quaker Puffed Rice's "shot from guns" into a scene reminiscent of The Guns of Navarone, with a gun crew in crash helmets and an overscoring of the 1812 Overture. The guns roar; the rice flies. In its Land Rover ads, San Francisco's Freeman, Gossage & Shea has taken a hand from the Rolls-Royce clock: "The loudest noise comes from the roar of the engine." Gumbinner-North uses traditional testimonials for Smirnoff Vodka, but adds a shot of wry.

Whimsical or not, all the ad firms nowadays are high on "creativity"--their catchall term for imagination, provocativeness, a good twist. Tareyton cigarette sales are up 26% because of the black eyes ("Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch!") provided by Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborne. Grey Advertising has created a Honda motorcycle boom by concentrating on discovering attitudes and awareness among young people, then pitching attractive and exotic ads to them that show such dream-wish Honda riders as a girl in a cocktail dress and a handsome man in a business suit speeding off to the theater. And, beginning roughly with the Hunt Food ad for catsup, the graphics of ads have vastly improved: more color, less clutter, better photography.

"Go to London." Perhaps the most significant innovation is advertising's increasing recognition of the new affluence and its effort to appeal to it. Airlines no longer advertise ordinary food: it comes from "21," Voisin or Maxim's of Paris. Pan Am ads now ask: "Want to see an off-Broadway show? Go to London for the weekend." Chivas Regal Scotch boasts that its price ($8.90 a fifth) is higher than others, whimsically advises Scotch drinkers to "drop an occasional dime in last season's empty" for another bottle at Christmas.

Not everyone is happy about the trend, of course. "When times get better, the ads get worse," growls hard-selling Rosser Reeves, chairman of Ted Bates & Co. "There's not so much pressure for sales. Copywriters tend to swing way out because it's more fun." Says Fairfax Cone, executive committee chairman of Foote, Cone & Belding: "We're going through a period when people have forgotten what advertising is supposed to do. It's not supposed to amuse. It's not supposed to shock. Every time an ad is good, it's because it says something."

Despite such criticism, what the ads seem to be saying nowadays is that admen realize that much of their audience has changed--and that advertising, like taste in general, had better change with it. TV has its growing crop of white knights, whirling tornadoes and levitating washers to prove that the hard sell can call on imagination too, but the real symbol of the new look in advertising is a quietly petulant young man in turtleneck sweater, horn-rimmed glasses, and ski boots, created by the small Hockaday Associates. From his comfortable chair he asks: "As long as you're up get me a Grant's." When he first appeared three years ago he seemed so low key as to be pointless, but now his request, endlessly parodied, is part of the language.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.