There is a Japanese concept called shu-ha-ri that describes the three stages of mastering any discipline.
In the first stage, shu, you copy the master exactly; in the second, ha, you begin to break from tradition; in the third, ri, you transcend the rules entirely.
What’s curious, and this is something modern advertising seems to have forgotten, is that you cannot just skip to stage three.
The masters who appeared to be working from pure instinct are actually drawing on decades of inherited wisdom that has become so deeply embedded it looks like spontaneous invention.
I have been thinking about this because of something that happened to me at my first Junior copywriter job at a major agency.
I was struggling with a headline.
My creative director walked over, looked at my work, read the brief, and, in perhaps 90 seconds, produced three alternatives, each more compelling than the last. I was astonished.
“How did you do that,” I asked.
The creative director paused. “I have no idea, he said. It just came.”
But of course they hadn’t just come.
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The Living Laboratory
It had been coming for thirty years (through every sales letter he’d ever hand-copied, every Claude Hopkins principle he’d absorbed, every failed campaign whose failures had taught him what to avoid. In other words, the apparently effortless act was actually the accumulated interest of decades of study.
This, it seems to me, is something the legends of our trade understood that we have largely forgotten.
Advertising history is not a dusty archive but a living laboratory.
Most of the experiments you are running have already been run. Most of the results you are recording have already been recorded. And to ignore them is to repeat, at great expense, work that has already been done.
Test #1
Take a look at the Martell cognac advertisement below.
It ran in the early 1970s, and it is (among other things) a love letter to advertising history. The cast assembled here represents the iconic campaigns of that era, gathered together as if attending the same exclusive party.
How many famous and legendary ads do you recognize? Can you name the product where advertising? Can you name the people or agency responsible for the ad? Can you tell the story behind how the ad was created?
Here are some of those answers:
The man with the eyepatch, front and center, is unmistakably The Hathaway Man, David Ogilvy's legendary creation from 1951, the campaign that proved a five-cent prop could transform a regional shirt maker into a national brand. The cowboy on the right is The Marlboro Man, Leo Burnett's rugged icon who turned a "women's cigarette" into the world's best-selling tobacco brand. The Gentleman with half grey hair is representing The Great Day Man from the brilliantly interactive hair coloring campaign that invited readers to “put your hand over the gray half and see how much younger I look.” The man looking through the bite mark on his hat is a character from Lucky Strike’s memorable “I’d eat my hat” campaign that made a visual gag out of brand confidence. The blonde woman in the bottom right is the model from Clairol's instructional hair coloring ads, specifically the "Guide to Becoming a Blonde." The Woman in the Knight Costume is a nod to the “Ajax White Knight” campaign from the 1960s. While the original Ajax commercials featured a male knight on a horse, this “Martelligence” version reimagines the character as a fashion-forward woman in a stylized helmet. As for the preppy guy all the way to the left. I’ll be honest, I’m not sure what ad campaign he comes from. He strikes me as the kind of guy who appeared in Hart Schaffner & Marx ads. But he could also be a character from Martell‘s own campaigns as well.
The ad works on two levels:
It sells cognac to consumers, and it winks at everyone in the trade who recognizes the references (and being ad people in the late 60s probably drank a lot of Cogniac
It assumes (correctly) that the most effective way to establish Martell’s credentials is to place it in the company of advertising royalty.
But here’s what strikes me most: that the ad references were so well-known and famous that Martell didn’t fear people not getting it. The creative team behind this ad obviously knew this as well, but at a different level.
They weren’t just aware that these campaigns existed. They understood why they worked, what made each character memorable, and how the visual grammar of each could be borrowed and recombined. In other words, they were playing in a tradition, not just inventing from scratch. And the ad is better for it.
I cannot, however, imagine any advertiser or agency being able to pull something like this off today. And not just because advertising doesn't create well-known famous campaign characters like these anymore. But because I’m not sure that there are that many people in the industry who would even know or care about them if there were.
The Dangers of Admnesia
The difficulty is that modern advertising culture has developed a peculiar amnesia about its own past (and by past I mean even as little as last year).
We celebrate disruption and originality as if they existed in a vacuum, as if the most creative people were those who had freed themselves entirely from precedent. But this is almost exactly backwards.
Bill Bernbach, one of the co-founders of DDB and leader of the Creative Revolution in the 1960s, hated the idea of studying old advertising. But even his techniques and theories did not emerge from nowhere. While he may have rejected the past and what came before, he also emerged from it as young Jewish boy growing up in America. Or rather, he emerged from a deep understanding of what had been tried before. His revolution, in other words, was not a rejection of history but a mastery of it.
In an old JWT paper, advertising's late philosopher Jeremy Bullmore points out that the problem with advertising has never been about a shortage of good ideas but from a shortage of people capable of recognizing them (a statement that has a lot of implications when it comes to AI as well). The question is, how do you become capable of recognizing a good idea? His answer is to study the past. By studying enough historical examples, he argues, you develop what experienced wine tasters call a palate, an unconscious facility for distinguishing quality that cannot be taught directly but can only be developed through prolonged, attentive exposure.
The History of the History of Advertising
This is why the great advertising educators of the past century were also voracious historians.
When a 40-year-old David Ogilvy decided to open his own ad agency, he had zero experience creating ads. So he read everything he could find about what had worked and what hadn’t. He collected advertising books, advertisements, and even legends themselves, the way some people collect stamps, not for nostalgia but for reference.
A great example of this is how Ogilvy didn't just admire Claude Hopkins; he obsessed over him.
He famously demanded his staff read Scientific Advertising seven times. But he wasn't looking for tips; he was trying to inhabit Hopkins’ brain. He wanted to see the world through the eyes of a man who had already solved the puzzles of human desire. He understood that the advertising of the 1920s and the advertising of the 1930s, 50s, and 60s, despite their radically different surfaces, were all attempting to solve the same underlying problem: how to get one human mind to influence another.
Human nature, you see, is not a moving target. The technology may change. The media may change. The cultural references may change. But the fundamental desires, to be admired, to belong, to feel secure, to matter, remain essentially static.
A person reading an advertisement in 1900 may have thought about different things; they may even have, in a Hegelian sense, thought differently about other things. But at the end of the day, he wanted more or less the same things that a person scrolling through Instagram wants today. And if you study enough historical examples, you begin to see the same psychological principles appearing again and again, dressed in the fashions and styles of their respective eras but recognizable beneath the surface.
The best advertising people I know aren;t just the most industry literate, they are also the most historically literate in general.
It’s About History Itself
They have read the classic advertising books. Not because they want to imitate them, but because they want to understand what made them work.
They’ve studied the Volkswagen Lemon ad not to copy its layout but to grasp its psychological architecture.
They’ve read Eugene Schwartz’s Breakthrough Advertising (a book written in 1966 that still commands absurd prices on the secondhand market) because they have discovered that its analysis of market sophistication remains as useful today as it was sixty years ago.
They study the great iconoclastic ads of Howard Gossage of the past, not to copy them, but to learn what made them iconoclastic.
But they are alsostudents of history itself.
I mentioned above how Bill Bernbach despised the idea of studying advertising history. But what a lot of people don’t know is that this is because he studied the history of a different sort.
When Bill Bernbach went home at the end of the day, he didn’t go home and think about ads. He was obsessed with classical music and reading about the history of ideas and philosophy (his favorite book was Bertrand Russels’s “A History of Western Philosophy”
Bernbach’s “Creative Revolution” was fueled by his deep understanding of the historical “man.” He would often argue that while the clothes and cars change, the “biological” man is 10,000 years old. He studied history to find the constants, ensuring his work wasn’t just “trendy,” but eternal. In other words, he, to use a metaphor I will soon explain in great detail, created ads while looking in the rear-view mirror.
The Rear View Mirror
Marshall McLuhan, the media philosopher who coined the phrase “The Medium is the Message,” spent years warning us that “we look at the present through a rearview mirror. We march backward into the future.” Which was a characteristically vivid way of describing people’s tendency to understand new things only through the lens of what we already know. It was, at first glance, a criticism refering to how we are analyzing communication as if the world were still dominated by the medium of books, when in fact it was dominated by TV.
But in one of his final lectures, in Sydney in 1979, McLuhan offered what he called his “new definition” of the rearview mirror. He had, to his credit, come to realize that the rearview mirror serves a different function than he had initially supposed.
“You don’t look into it (a rearview mirror) to see what you’ve passed. You look into it to see what’s coming.”
As an example of this and its practical implications, McLuhan noted that the clothes worn by hippies in the late 1960s and early 1970s (the denim work shirts, the overalls, the sturdy boots) were the work clothes of their grandparents. “What appeared to be a radical rejection of the establishment was actually a retrieval of the previous generation’s practicality, dressed up (or dressed down) in new meaning.” Fashion, McLuhan observed, almost always works this way. Or to put it in McLuhanese: “The future arrives wearing vintage.”
And so it is with advertising.
The techniques that will work tomorrow are not being invented in a laboratory or by an LLM. They are sitting in archives, photographs, and people’s memories waiting to be rediscovered. And if you want to know what’s coming next, then the rearview mirror of advertising, properly consulted, tells you not where you’ve been but where you’re going.
Test #2 and Why Clients Care
Speaking of where you are going, how many of these 14 marketing communications questions can you answer?
1. What is a USP, and who popularized the theory?
2. What did the first banner ad say, when did it appear, and who was it for?
3. Who, in the 1960s, introduced the role of the account planner?
4. How long should a direct mail letter be?
5. What would be an example of a ‘tipping point’?
6. How would you define ambient advertising?
7. What is the best viral campaign you’ve ever seen?
8. What is an A/B split?
9. What is the Pareto Principle as applied to patterns of consumption?
10. Why should Web 2.0 and the semantic web be the engine of CRM?
11. What is permission marketing?
12. What is the purpose of a creative idea?
13. Who wrote “Positioning”?
14. What was Lemon?
As Steve Harrison, in his book (where I got and adapted this list from) “How to Do Better Creative Work,” points out:
“If you can’t venture a viewpoint on or an answer to any of the above, then your client (even your agency) is probably right to dismiss your opinion.”
He also encourages anyone who can answer any of these to start showing off their knowledge to their client. The reason for this is that being creative isn’t enough. Most clients are businesspeople, and businesspeople also want to know that you know your stuff. So you’ve got to convince your client that you know what you’re talking about. And knowing a lot about advertising history, what’s worked before and why, is a great way to convince them of that.
How To Study Advertising History
The question I usually get at this point when talking to them about this subject is about where to start. And it is customary at this point in a newsletter of this kind to say something like “just start reading.” But I have always distrusted this advice in the same way that I distrust the person whoposts “just be yourself” on LinkedIn. If you knew how to be yourself, you wouldn’t need the advice. And if you knew where to start reading the history of advertising, you wouldn’t need this newsletter.
The truth is that most of us (and I include myself in this, despite having spent more years in the practice of persuasion than I care to count on a good day) are busy. We are busy doing the work. We are busy attending the meetings about the work. We are busy attending the meetings about the meetings about the work. And when the day is over, and the office has finally released us from its jaws, we are busy recovering from the experience of having been busy, which is itself a full-time occupation in our Pollyanna civilization.
To tell a busy person to “study advertising history” is like telling a drowning man to take up swimming. The advice is technically sound and practically useless. What the drowning man needs is not a philosophy of aquatics but a method or methods, specific, structured, and repeatable methods that can be performed in the cracks and crevices of an already overstuffed life, and that produces results quickly enough to justify the investment of time that could otherwise be spent doing something profitable, or at least something that looks profitable to the people who sign one’s checks.
What follows, then, is not a reading list or a curriculum. It is a method (or rather, methods) for studying advertising history without requiring you to resign your position and enroll in a graduate program (which does not exist anyway and which, if it did exist, would probably be taught by people who have never written an advertisement in their lives. But most importantly, they are methods that allow you to get the most out of them so that you can use what you are learning today.
Read the Really Old Stuff
It is hard to believe now, but advertising was considered barely legitimate until about a century ago. The earliest advertising books were not teaching technique. They were selling the very idea that advertising was worth paying for. This gave them a peculiar clarity — the clarity of a man who must explain himself to skeptics, which is always more interesting than the clarity of a man preaching to the converted.
Thomas Smith’s Successful Advertising (1885), published by his London printing shop, is probably the oldest advertising book ever written. Smith is most famous for his twenty steps of advertising frequency, that deliciously patient progression from “the first time people look at an ad, they don’t even see it” through irritation and curiosity to, finally, at the twentieth exposure, “they buy what it is offering.” But the book’s real value lies in its focus on principles over media. Smith understood that advertising is fundamentally about persistent, repeated communication, and that patience is not merely a virtue but a mechanical requirement, like the twenty-one days that must be given for the hatching of an egg, whether by the hen or by the incubator.
Nathaniel Fowler’s Building Business (1893) and Charles Austin Bates’s Good Advertising (1896) represent the moment when advertising began to professionalize. These books were written when agencies were essentially media buyers or printmakers, yet they contain surprisingly sophisticated thinking about what makes communication work.
George Rowell’s The Men Who Advertise (1870) is perhaps the earliest American attempt to document successful advertising practices, and Rowell’s later memoir, Forty Years an Advertising Agent (1905), offers a rare first-person account of watching an industry invent itself.
P.T. Barnum is often called the Founding Father of advertising. Granted, it was exactly his style of advertising that people like Fowler and Rowell were trying to move away from. But his autobiography is filled with a menagerie of examples of why they should not have. You will be shocked to learn — or perhaps you will not be shocked, which tells you something about the circular nature of our business — that he invented the concept of the brand campaign, personal branding, and the stunt, among many other things still used today. Of note is what Barnum called all of these things. Publicity. Not advertising. (The distinction between these two words has kept a great many people employed for a very long time, and I am not at all sure we have settled it yet.)
Additionally, Printers’ Ink, which ran from 1888 through the mid-twentieth century, is a goldmine of period thinking. Judicious Advertising and Profitable Advertising offer similar windows into how practitioners understood their craft before modern theory existed, and while they were inventing it.
These books and publications reveal debates we have forgotten we resolved, or have forgotten never will be. The arguments about whether advertising should inform or persuade, whether frequency matters more than creativity, and whether brand building conflicts with immediate sales, all were fought out in these pages, often with more nuance than contemporary discussions allow.
The simplicity of these books is their gift. Before jargon accumulated, before theory calcified, these pioneers had to explain advertising to people who had never considered it a legitimate expenditure. That forced them to articulate fundamentals that later generations took for granted and promptly forgot.
They also reveal why advertising professionals say what they say and write what they write. The authors mentioned above were trying to sell the very concept of advertising. Barnum was, of course, trying to sell himself. And later, advertising professionals who wrote books were for the most part doing the same thing, or at the very least trying to sell their agencies. This does not disprove what they said. But once you see how most advertising theories were created as advertising — or for a particular agency, you cannot unsee it. Especially today. And especially on LinkedIn.
Study the Failures as Carefully as the Successes
We remember the campaigns that worked. But the advertising archive, especially the autobiographies, are full of expensive disasters, and they teach different lessons. The Edsel is a famous example. How Gerald Ratner destroyed his jewelry business with a single joke about his products being “total crap” is another. The lessons of brand destruction are often more vivid than the lessons of brand building, for the same reason that a man remembers the house fire more clearly than the house.
Trace Ideas to Their Origins
When you encounter a technique that seems new, get into the habit of tracing it backward. The “reason why” copy that Claude Hopkins championed in 1907 has roots in the earlier persuasion theory and copywriting of John E. Powers. The emotional storytelling that Bernbach pioneered echoed techniques of Raymond Rubicam and other earlier practitioners. Nothing emerges from nowhere. Nothing in advertising is an orphan, however much it may wish to be.
This archaeological work has a practical benefit: it reveals which principles are genuinely fundamental (because they keep reappearing across decades and media) and which are merely fashionable (because they emerge and disappear with cultural shifts). The difference between the two is the difference between the foundation and the wallpaper. You can change the wallpaper every season if you like. If you change the foundation, you will need somewhere else to live.
Read the Autobiographies, Not Just the How-To Books
The how-to books, Ogilvy on Advertising, Hey Whipple, even Hopkins’s Scientific Advertising, are valuable, but they are arguments. They are cases made by practitioners for their particular philosophy of the craft. The autobiographies are something else. They are confessions. And confessions, because they are written by people who no longer need to win the next piece of business, contain truths that the how-to books carefully omit.
The principle behind this is simple: when a man is explaining his method, he is teaching. When he is telling his story, he is revealing. And what is revealed is almost always more instructive than what is taught.
Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man is the obvious example, it reads very differently from Ogilvy on Advertising because it was written when he still had something to prove and was therefore more honest about his doubts. Albert Lasker’s oral history (transcribed from interviews and available through the Columbia University archives) is a masterclass in how a man who dominated an industry for decades understood what he was actually doing, which was considerably less than his reputation suggested, and he knew it. George Lois’s books are insufferable in their self-regard but invaluable in their specificity — he tells you exactly what happened in the room, who said what, and why. Jerry Della Femina’s From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor as well as Fred Goldbergs The Insanity of Advertising and Howie Cohen’s I Can’t Believe I Lived the Whole Thing capture the advertising business at a particular moment with a candor that borders on recklessness.
Read the Critics, Not Just the Practitioners
This one is uncomfortable, which is how you know it’s useful. Read the people who thought advertising was dangerous, dishonest, or absurd. Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders. Stuart Ewen’s Captains of Consciousness. Even Fredric Wakeman’s novel The Hucksters, which is fiction but contains more operational truth about the client-agency relationship than most business books.
Why? Because the critics see the things the practitioners cannot afford to see. The practitioner must believe in what he does, or at least maintain the appearance of believing, in order to keep doing it. The critic has no such obligation. And while critics are often wrong about the details, they are frequently right about the pattern. Packard overstated the power of subliminal persuasion, but he was correct that advertising operates on emotional and subconscious levels that the industry was reluctant to acknowledge publicly. Reading the critics calibrates your judgment. It is the cold water after the warm bath.
Read What the Legends Read
This is perhaps the most important suggestion on this list, and the one least likely to occur to anyone on their own.
Do not just read Ogilvy. Read what Ogilvy read. Do not just read Bernbach’s speeches. Find out what was on Bernbach’s shelf. Do not just read Hopkins, read the people Hopkins was arguing with, and the people who taught him to argue.
The first method to doing this is simple. Turn to the back of the book. Look at the bibliography, the footnotes, the references, the acknowledgments. These are the breadcrumbs the author has left, sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently, that lead you to the sources of his thinking. Follow them.
When you read Ogilvy’s Confessions, you will find references to Rosser Reeves, to Claude Hopkins, to Raymond Rubicam. Read those. But you will also find references to books that have nothing to do with advertising, books on direct response, on research methodology, on the British civil service, on speech making. These are arguably more important than the advertising references, because they are the raw material from which Ogilvy constructed his philosophy. The advertising references tell you who he agreed and disagreed with. The non-advertising references tell you how he thought.
A second source for such information is in biographies. In fact they are, if they exist, an even richer ground for this kind of excavation. A biography, because it is written by someone other than the subject, tends to reveal the influences that the subject himself may not have recognized or may not have wished to advertise. (There is a reason the word “advertise” has two meanings, and it is not a flattering one for our profession.) A good biography of an advertising figure will tell you not just what he did but what he was reading when he did it, what conversations shaped his thinking, what failures preceded his famous successes, and (most valuably) what ideas he borrowed from outside the trade and repackaged as his own.
This matters for a reason that goes beyond mere scholarly curiosity. The reason is this: every great advertising mind was formed primarily by things that had nothing to do with advertising.
When you read only the advertising books, you get the technique. When you read what the advertising people read, you get the vision that made the technique worth using. The difference is the difference between learning the notes and hearing the music.
James Young, the star creative director of J Walter Thomas Agency and the author of “A Technique for Coming Up With Ideas,” wrote a book review column in the J Walter Thomas magazine entitled “The Best Books About Advertising Are Not About Advertisng.” Bernbach studied philosophy and music. Gossage was obsessed with an adman wnamed Nicholas Samstag (himself an eclectic man) but was also obsessed with ecology, archetecture, politics and the new philosophies of his day (this is how he came to introduce the world to Marshal McLuhan). Leo Burnett was steeped in Midwestern populism and small-town newspaper journalism. Ogilvy’s formative experience was not in an agency but in a kitchen, he was a chef at the Hotel Majestic in Paris before he ever wrote a headline. And these outside influences were not incidental to their advertising work. They were the substance of it. The advertising technique was merely the delivery mechanism for a way of seeing the world that had been shaped by literature, by history, by science, by the experience of living a life that extended beyond the walls of the office.
Nicholas Samstag once wrote a very interesting piece in which he claimed that “the under-generalized man is a case of arrested development,” and that “men who are under-read tend to be under-generalized”, and that “this is a professional liability of the first order.”
The same principle applies here in miniature.
The advertising person who reads only advertising books is under-generalized within his own field. He knows the conclusions but not the premises. He can recite Ogilvy’s rules but cannot think Ogilvy’s thoughts, because Ogilvy’s thoughts were not formed by Ogilvy’s rules. They were formed by everything else Ogilvy ever encountered, and it is that everything else, far more than any principle of advertising, that made him Ogilvy.
Naturally, one should endevour to read his own books outside of advertising. But the into to this newsletter points out, with this too one should start by imitation.
So don’t just read the books of advertising legends, go to the back of the book and read the footnotes. See what books they read and follow the trail. It will lead you, inevitably, away from advertising and into the wider world of ideas, which is exactly where it should lead you, because that is where every good advertisement has always come from, however much we pretend otherwise.
Watch and Read the Ads Themselves
This sounds obvious and is almost never done. I do not mean watch a curated reel of Cannes winners on YouTube. I mean find a way to look at the actual advertisements —(print, television, radio) that ran in ordinary publications and broadcasts during the period you are studying. Not the award winners. Not the famous ones. The ordinary ones. The full-page ads for refrigerators in 1954 Life magazine. The thirty-second spots for laundry detergent that ran during daytime television in 1972.
YouTube is filled with examples of ads that ran in the 60s and 70s.
Old magazines are availble are ebay or in online archives (it;s one of the reason I pay for a New Yorker subscription)
The point of doing this is because while the famous campaigns tell you what was possible. The ordinary campaigns tell you what was normal. And the distance between the two (between what the best people were doing and what everybody else was doing) tells you more about the state of the art at any given moment than any textbook. It also, incidentally, tells you something about the present. Because that distance has not changed much. The best work today is as far above the average as it was in 1960. Which means that if you are producing average work, the historical average is your peer group, and it is not flattering company.
If You Are Really Short on Time
If you cannot do any of the above then read one book. Just one.
Read Stephen Fox’s The Mirror Makers.
Fox published the book in 1984, and it covers the history of American advertising from its nineteenth-century origins through the 1970s, with a later introduction extending the story to the mid-1990s. It has been called, by the New York Review of Books no less, arguably the best general history of advertising ever written. Matthew Weiner, who created Mad Men, called it an academic masterpiece. These endorsements are, for once, not exaggerations.
Fox understood something about advertising that most historians of the subject miss entirely: that it is cyclical. The same arguments, the same tensions, the same innovations, the same panics recur with the regularity of the seasons, dressed in new clothes each time, but recognizable to anyone who has seen them before.
Read Fox and you will discover that the terror currently gripping the industry over artificial intelligence is not new. It is the same terror that gripped the industry when television arrived, when radio arrived, when the national magazine arrived. Each time, the existing practitioners declared that everything had changed, that the old rules were dead, that a new era had dawned requiring entirely new skills. Each time, they were partly right about the machinery and entirely wrong about the principles. And each time the new technology brought on a creative revolution, and not just in its medium but in all the others as well.
You will also discover something subtler and more valuable: a sense for how the cycle works. Not just that it repeats, but how the pattern of disruption, panic, experimentation, consolidation, and eventual integration that advertising goes through every time a new medium or technology appears. Once you can see this pattern, you can see where we are in it right now. And as Mcluhan’s rearview mirror analogy illustrated above, seeing where you are is the first requirement for knowing where to go.
Create a Catalog of Your Own History
Anyone alive today grew up in an era when advertising was everywhere. You were marinated in it. Before you ever read a brief or heard the word “positioning and sat in a conference room and pretended to understand a media plan, you were a consumer of advertising. You where in fact the purest kind of consumer, because you did not know you were consuming it. You simply lived in its presence, the way a fish lives in water, without opinions about the water’s composition or temperature.
One of the best ways to study the history of advertising is to take some time to sit with yourself and write down the advertisements you remember. Not the ones you are supposed to remember. Not the Cannes winners, not the D&AD Pencils, not the campaigns that appear in every retrospective. The ones you remember, from before you knew what you were supposed to admire.
I started doing this when Dave Dye, the British creative director who runs a blog called Stuff from the Loft, understood this principle well enough to build a series around it. He called it “What I Liked Before I Knew What I Was Supposed to Like,” and he invited advertising people to catalogue the advertisements they remembered from childhood and adolescence, before the industry had taught them which work to admire and which to dismiss. The results (at least for me) were revelatory. People who had spent careers winning awards for sophisticated, understated, strategically rigorous work confessed to deep and abiding affection for jingles, for slapstick, for shamelessly repetitive slogans, and for advertisements that no self-respecting creative director would put in his portfolio. And yet these were the advertisements that had worked on them, that had entered their memories and refused to leave, long after the award-winners had been forgotten.
And the fact that you remember them, that they took up residence in your mind twenty or thirty years ago and have refused to leave, is itself a piece of data more valuable than most of the research you will ever commission. Something in those advertisements worked on you. Something in the combination of image and word and feeling and repetition and context penetrated your defenses at a time when you did not know you had defenses, and it stayed.
Jeremy Bullmore told a story about this that I have never forgotten.
His friend Len Heath, having sold his interest in an advertising agency and finding himself in his mid-forties with money to spend, bought a gleaming, arrogant Aston Martin. When Bullmore admired it, Heath said something that should be carved into the wall of every agency boardroom: “You may be interested to know why I bought this car. I bought it because I saw an advertisement for it.” Bullmore expressed the appropriate interest. “But that’s not the interesting bit,” said Heath. “What’s interesting is that I saw that advertisement when I was fourteen.”
Thirty years ago an advertisement seen by a boy who could not possibly have bought the product, who would not be in a position to buy it for decades, planted a seed that finally bore fruit when the money arrived to pay for it. The car Heath saw in the advertisement and the car he eventually bought were physically different machines, thirty years of engineering separated them. But the essence of Aston Martin, as that anonymous advertisement had captured it, remained alive. Perhaps even enhanced, the way a memory of desire often exceeds the original experience that created it.
Now consider what this means for the practitioners of our trade. That advertisement was not, by Bullmore’s reckoning, tactical. It did not offer a special price or emphasize easy payment terms. Nor did it suggest that stocks were limited. It simply made the thing desirable to a boy who could not have it, and the desire outlasted everything else.
I can report a similar experience, though with considerably less elegance. Some years ago I bought a 2001 Toyota Celica — not new, mind you, but a car that was by then well into middle age. I bought it because of an advertisement I saw when I was twenty-one.
Something about that car, as presented to me by someone whose name I will never know, lodged itself in a corner of my mind where it waited patiently for nearly a decade until I was in a position to act on it. It was not a rational purchase. It was the fulfillment of a promise that an advertisement had made to a younger version of myself, a promise I did not even know I had received.
This is important for several reasons, and none of them are sentimental.
First, your personal catalog of remembered advertisements is a record of what actually penetrates the human mind, not what is supposed to penetrate it according to theory, but what does penetrate it according to the only evidence that matters, which is your own experience. This is primary research of the most reliable kind, because the subject and the researcher are the same person.
Second, the exercise forces you to examine the gap between what the industry rewards and what the public remembers. These are not always the same things. They are, in fact, frequently different things, and the difference tells you something uncomfortable about the criteria by which our profession judges its own work.
Third (and this is the reason that goes deepest) your personal history of advertising is also, inevitably, a personal history of yourself. The advertisements you remember are markers of who you were at different ages: what you wanted, what you feared, what you aspired to, what made you laugh. They are, in Bullmore’s phrase, a kind of autobiography written not by you but for you, by strangers who understood something about your desires before you understood them yourself. And if that is not worth an evening’s reflection for someone who makes a living in the business of understanding human desire, then I do not know what is.
Fourth, and perhaps most practically useful of all: your personal catalog, once written, becomes a tool for calibrating everything else you have studied.
As you read the history of advertising in general, when you get to the era you lived through place your list of remembered advertisements alongside the historical record. Compare what you carried in your memory, unprompted and unassisted, with what the annuals preserved, what the critics praised, what the textbooks cited. The overlaps are interesting. So are the gaps.
You will find advertisements in the historical canon (celebrated campaigns, award-winning campaigns, campaigns discussed reverently in every advertising course) that you do not remember at all. You lived through the era in which they ran. You were, presumably, the target or at least adjacent to it. And yet they left no trace. This does not mean they were bad advertisements. But it does perhaps mean something. And that distinction when you figure it out is one of the most important distinctions an advertising person can learn to make.
You will also find the reverse: advertisements in your personal memory that do not appear anywhere in the historical record. They won nothing. Nobody wrote about them. No retrospective includes them. And yet they are alive in your mind decades later, paying rent on the neural real estate they occupied before you ever heard the word “branding.” For me, it’s a 1980s ad for Preheperation H that has a stunt man continously have to land on a horse. These forgotten advertisements are, in a sense, the dark matter of advertising history, invisible to the instruments of professional measurement, but exerting a gravitational force on actual human behavior that the measured campaigns may not have matched.
When you lay these two records side by side you begin to develop what I can only describe as a stereoscopic vision of how advertising works. One eye sees what the profession believes is effective. The other eye sees what was actually effective on at least one real human being, namely yourself. And it is only with both eyes open that you can perceive depth, the depth of understanding that separates the practitioner who knows about advertising from the practitioner who understands it.
This comparison also inoculates you against one of the most persistent diseases in our trade, which is the habit of confusing craft with impact. A beautifully art-directed, exquisitely written advertisement that nobody remembers is a beautiful failure. A crude, loud, arguably tasteless advertisement that plants itself in a million memories and drives purchase behavior for a decade is an ugly success. The professional in you has been trained to prefer the former. But the human in you (the person you were before the industry got hold of you, knows perfectly well which one did the job. Your personal catalog is the testimony of that earlier, uncorrupted witness. You would do well to listen to him.
The Deeper Problem
I have now given you exercises on how to study advertising history for the benefit of your work. You will not do them.
I say this not out of pessimism but out of experience. I have been giving advice of this kind for decades, and the proportion of people who take it has remained, throughout that time, refreshingly consistent: it approaches zero without ever quite arriving.
The reason is not laziness, although laziness contributes. The reason is not lack of time, although lack of time is the excuse most frequently offered. The real reason is more interesting and more human than either of these, and it is this: people do not study the history of their profession because doing so forces them to confront the possibility that they are not as original as they believe.
Too many Americans regard business as they should regard God. Their offices are where they worship, not their churches. And it is not Money who occupies the inner shrine, it’s Business, the ritual of it, the status of it, the feeling of being important and in demand. The same is true of the worship of novelty in advertising. It is not that new ideas are intrinsically better than old ones. It is that believing one’s ideas are new provides a sensation of importance that no amount of historical knowledge can match.
And so the history goes unread. The books gather dust. The archives rot. And every season a fresh crop of advertising people arrives to discover, with breathless excitement, the principles that Claude Hopkins articulated a century ago, and presents them as disruption.
I don’t want to save the human race from this. I never have. But I think you ought to notice it. I think you ought to call it by its right name. And if you don’t, if you prefer the comfortable fiction that your ideas spring fully formed from your own private genius, uncontaminated by anything that came before, then I think you are lost, and you in that sentence is not just you but your whole profession.
A CONCLUDING NOTE
I am aware that this newsletter may be criticized as the work of an old man middle aged white man shouting at the young to get off his lawn. This does not trouble me. The lawn, in this instance, was planted long before I arrived, and the footprints being left upon it belong to people who do not know they are walking on a garden.
Someone will object that the past is irrelevant. That everything is different now. That technology has changed the game beyond recognition, and that studying the campaigns of the 1950s is as useful as studying the military tactics of the Roman legions.
To which I would say: the military tactics of the Roman legions are still studied at West Point. And the reason they are studied ihas nothing to do with nostalgia. It is because certain principles of strategy like the flanking maneuver, the concentration of force, the importance of supply lines, the exploitation of terrain do not change, because the human beings who must execute them do not change.
And neither do the consumers. They are the same frightened, hopeful, irrational, loyal, treacherous, generous, suspicious creatures they have always been. They choose one soap over another for reasons they do not understand and could not articulate, and they conspire to pretend, then as now, that their choices are logical.
The history of advertising is the history of attempts to reach these creatures. Some attempts worked. Some did not. SOme of these attempts would work today, some of them would not. But it’s not so much the practicality of these things that is important know. There is something about just knowing what happened that seems to have an effect. There’s something about just knowing that things worked (not how or when or why) that makes an impression, Which makes the record of these attempts the richest, most practical, and most immediately useful body of professional knowledge available to anyone in our trade. It is sitting on the shelf, free for the taking. All you have to do is reach for it.
But I doubt you will. And the doubting, as I have said, does not make me particularly sad. I have made, I think, a pact with my soul: to describe the world as I see it, flaws and all, and to let the reader decide what, if anything, to do about it. But if even one person picks up a book this week—a real book, about how this business was practiced before he was born—then this newsletter will have earned its keep.
And if not, well…
There are worse fates than being ignored. One of them is being agreed with by everyone, which has always seemed to me the most terrifying form of irrelevance.
Justin Oberman
America’s Advertising Philosopher