Not mad about the ad men

ADVERTISING:DAVID ABBOTT, the stylish London-based advertising copywriter, once wrote that the 26 letters in the alphabet when carefully, skilfully and imaginatively organised represent the most powerful way of gaining an unfair advantage over your business competitors.

But very few businesses today seem to be interested in Abbott’s advice, being content to roll out cliche after cliche in ads, promotions, digital messages and even when engaged in direct selling. Marketing communication messages are full of the pompous, mind-maiming language of managerialism.

That little rant was brought on by the publication of a new book on the creative revolution in advertising in New York in the 1950s, Andrew Cracknell's The Real Mad Men.

New York at the time was a ferment of creativity and the creative revolution in advertising was led by the Brooklyn-born writer Bill Bernbach who shattered the long-established conventions of American car advertising with his minimalist work for Volkswagen.

Even the most famous TV ad for this campaign, Snowplough, relied on words for its dramatic effect.

The commercial opens with a shot of a snow-covered suburban estate at dawn as a figure leaves a house, opens the door of a car laden with snow, drives off to a compound where the driver emerges to approach a much larger vehicle, when the voice-over delivers the coup de grace; “Have you ever wondered how the snow-plough driver gets to the snow plough. Well you can stop wondering. This one drives a Volkswagen.”

Bernbach’s agency, DDB, were also responsible for the cheeky “We’re No 2. We Try Harder” campaign for Avis, a series of beautifully crafted ads that completely wrong-footed the dominant brand leader, Hertz.

It took Hertz almost four years to find the right touch to put the upstart in its place without seeming like a bully. Again it was an inspired copy-led approach that did the trick: “For years Avis has been telling you Hertz is No 1. Now we’re going to tell you why.”

The body copy was hard-hitting but beautifully written: “If you were in the car rental business and you were No 2 and you only had half as many cars to offer and about half as many locations at which to offer them and fewer people to handle everything, what would you say in your advertising? Right. Your ashtrays are cleaner.”

While Bernbach was blazing a trail in New York, Howard Gossage, the legendary “Socrates of San Francisco” was demonstrating the power of words on the west coast. Gossage was a true original. Long before the digi-bores were claiming to have invented “interactive and collaborative engagement”, Gossage believed that the most effective ads were those that enabled the reader to become an active participant. He defined advertising as “the start of a riveting conversation” and his philosophy could be summarised in his declaration that “people don’t read ads, they read what interests them and sometimes it’s an ad”.

He was an early environmentalist – when a proposal to create artificial lakes in the Grand Canyon to provide easier access for tourists was mooted, Gossage opposed it and came up with the immortal line: “Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel so the tourists can get closer to the ceiling?”

We hear a lot about how the internet puts David on an equal footing with Goliath, but good copy has been doing just that for centuries and the internet is still only a channel, you have to have something to say. In 1960s London a small estate agent called Roy Brooks and his team took an unusual step – they positioned themselves as the honest estate agent. Eschewing the overblown, discredited prose so beloved by this profession they decided to make a virtue, and a difference, in telling the truth:

BATTERSEA BARGAIN

“Broken-down Battersea bargain erected at the end of a long reign of universally warped moral and aesthetic values, it was what you would expect – hideous – redeemed only by the integrity of the plebs who built it well.

Originally a one skiv Victorian lower-middle-class family res, it’ll probably be snapped up by one of the new Communications Elite who’ll tart it up and sell it for three times the price in 18 months.

Three normal-sized bedrooms and a fourth for an undemanding dwarf lodger.

Bathroom, big double drawing room, breakfast room and kitchen. Nature has fought back in the garden and won.”

The ads, which appeared as classifieds in the Sunday Times, were so compulsively readable that they created a cult following and reputedly increased the paper's circulation whenever they appeared to such an extent that the paper ran them for free. They were highly entertaining but if you go back over the copy you'll see that they were also very hard selling, shrewdly exploiting the essential greed of the property buyer.

It's hard to think of good Irish examples, but the series of Ballygowan ads which ran in The Irish Timesin the 1980s brilliantly capitalised on a newly self-confident generation that was shortly to rock the nation by electing Mary Robinson and kick-start the economic boom. These witty sophisticated and eagerly anticipated ads were credited with playing a major part in the brand's success.

The blame for the absence of good copy these days is laid at many doors, from declining literacy among the young to lack of basic copywriting skills, but surely the real reason is the failure of the business world to appreciate the power of well-crafted words. After the Battle of Britain, Churchill could have thanked the RAF in the following terms; “Thanks chaps, you were truly heroic and your bravery and courage enabled us to survive”.

But unlike today’s managers Churchill was interested in words and understood their power so he worked a little harder turning them round and round until they came out just right: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” The public never forgot.

As we embark on a new winter of discontent The Irish Timeswould again like to encourage young Irish businesses to kick-start a new economic recovery by using the power of well-crafted copy. Entries are invited for our copy writing competition (see print edition). Let the writing begin.