The Cult of Creativity by Samuel W. Franklin;

Author:Samuel W. Franklin; [Franklin, Samuel Weil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000 HISTORY / General, HIS036060 HISTORY / United States / 20th Century, HIS054000 HISTORY / Social History, BUS077000 BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Corporate & Business History
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2023-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

6

Revolution on Madison Avenue

The January 1959 issue of Printers’ Ink, one of the two main organs of the American advertising industry, compiled a slew of daunting problems facing the industry. Despite being in the midst of an era of unprecedented billings—total annual advertising expenditures more than doubled between 1947 and 1957, and would almost double again over the next ten years—the recession of 1958 had shrunk advertising budgets and ad execs didn’t know if or when they would recover. Apparently there was growing “skepticism” among manufacturers about whether advertising even worked, and it was decided that agencies needed to do a better job of explaining to their clients why they deserved money that could otherwise go into sales or R&D. One of the sources of skepticism, it was thought, was oversaturation—an ironic effect of Madison Avenue’s success—which meant each individual ad needed to work especially hard to distinguish its clients’ products from the crowd. “The average American is on the receiving end of up to 1,500 ad impressions daily,” the piece read. “The ad message that shines through the mass must be exceptional.”1

Adding to these nuts-and-bolts problems was the issue of advertising’s “unfortunate” public image problem, about which executives had been “fretting” in the wake of Vance Packard’s bombshell exposé The Hidden Persuaders. The ad industry had been the target of skeptics and muckrakers since its beginnings in the late nineteenth century. But in the 1950s Packard led a new flood of criticism that, dovetailing with Cold War political fears, cast Madison Avenue as a force of conformity, soulless consumerism, and quasi-totalitarian mind control. Printers’ Ink considered this image problem a real existential threat, blaming it in part for an impending Federal Trade Commission “crack down” and, under a newly liberal Congress, Senate investigations into some of its shady practices.

The cure? Creativity. Creativity would be “the agency’s key to ’59,” Printers’ Ink declared, predicting it would “assume a new, much more important role.”2 Walter Guild, president of a San Francisco agency, explained how this “new emphasis on creativeness” would address the industry’s multiple woes. It would, first, improve the quality of ads themselves. “Too much advertising is just plain dull!” he wrote, echoing the consensus among both advertising professionals and their critics. Clients “are increasingly aware and covetous of ‘creative’ advertising, and increasingly weary of the other kind.” Creativity was, as the editors put it elsewhere in that issue, “the force that makes a product, a campaign, a company, a commercial or a thought stand above the crowd.”3

Such “creative” advertising would, Guild explained, be accomplished only by liberating “creative” people—copywriters and artists—from the tyranny of the organization. As PI also noted, Madison Avenue was falling prey to the same bureaucratic bloat that infected the rest of America. A “merger splurge,” as top agencies competed to match the growing size of clients (who, in an attempt to dodge antitrust laws, were undergoing a merger splurge of their own), caused agencies to balloon, with larger teams, more middle managers, more meetings.4 Draper

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