Across the final three decades of the last millennium, I was the creative director and main copywriter for Hodskins Simone & Searls (HS&S), a hot advertising agency in North Carolina and Silicon Valley. I also still wrote often for a local Magazine called The Sun, which has since grown to become one of the world’s great magazines with no advertising. Since all of its archives are digitized and available to subscribers (which I still am) online, one can cringe through my oeuvre there. That’s what I was doing a few minutes ago while looking for something more recent than this, from the August 1980 issue:
I make my living in advertising.
Mostly I write advertising copy. Which means I write a lot of short, choppy sentences. Like this.
That’s basic copywriting style, by the way. Like peanut brittle, ad copy works best when broken into fragments.
One-line paragraphs are nice too.
At one time, advertising was a much more wordy business. And a lot less sophisticated.
Take the George Washington Hill school of advertising.
Hill was a Durham native, the head of the American Tobacco Company. One day he was dissatisfied with a bunch of advertising ideas that were submitted to him. So he hocked up a wad of phlegm and spat an oyster, right on the shiny corporate conference table.
“See that?” he said. “You may not like it, but you won’t forget it. That’s how I want my advertising to work.”
So to George Washington Hill, and others like him, we owe our nation’s hatred of advertising you just wish you could forget.
Advertising matured as an art in the early Sixties, when those wonderful Volkswagen ads came along. Like the product, the ads were simple and straightforward. They made an impression without leaving bruises.
This was the “creative” school of advertising. After its style became fashionable, some healthy fundamentalist caution developed, best expressed by the new slogan of Benton & Bowles, the Brooks Brothers of advertising agencies: “It’s not creative unless it sells.”
This may sound like a harsh way to judge an art, but I’d rather motivate a customer than please a critic. Just how do you motivate a customer?
The first impulse in advertising, as in all human life, is to argue. But think: how often, even when you make a perfect case, do you win an argument? To argue is to take sides, and it is human nature not to yield a side once taken. If you want a customer to side with your product, don’t start an argument. Some people think advertising motivates by brainwashing. But advertising is not in the business of changing people’s minds. It is in the business of opening people’s minds. That’s what makes advertising an art.
An art, I submit, speaks to the heart as well as the head. A mind that says “ouch” to bombast and “no”to argument will say “aha” to art.
“Aha” is the response advertising looks for. Basically, products sell themselves. Advertising just opens people’s hearts to a product.
The heart is the key. While reason and logic have seats on the mental board of directors, it is feelings that usually cast the deciding votes.
In fact, a lot of what we call thinking is just the noise our minds make while adjusting thoughts to suit feelings.
This doesn’t mean that good advertising makes a purely emotional case, but that advertising appreciates the way the mind operates.
It can be very hard to exercise that appreciation, however, when you’ve got payroll and salesmen and product development to worry about.
That’s why ad agencies exist, so the clients can work on other things, like making the products worth buying.
The interpersonal chemistry, both creative and procedural, inside an ad agency, is fascinating. Good ideas are amplified by other good ideas, refined by other viewpoints, and focused by collective purpose.
The result is usually better advertising, and therefore better results, than a company can get on its own.
It’s this “team art” that I like best about being part of an ad agency. It’s like playing one of your better team sports, or playing in a good jazz band.
David Searls
Durham, N.C.
I’m sharing this for several reasons. One is that it’s not a bad piece of writing. Another is that it has a nugget or two that pertain to life in general rather than just the advertising biz. Another is that it provides some source material for heirs or biographers, should any ever be interested. It’s also a bit emotional for me, because David Hodskins and Ray Simone were more than just business partners. They were first-rank friends whom I loved very much. They also died way too young.
Also,,,, I’ve lately been writing daily posts on this blog in the way I wrote them in my original blog. There would be a banner title for each day (created automatically), and under each of those, I would have headlines over each of the day’s posts, which varied in length from one line to many paragraphs, though most were short. The headlines were punchlines, putting the close or conclusion of the post above it. This was a trick I learned from Esquire‘s Dubious Achievement Awards, which are now unfindable for non-subscibers. (And maybe for subscribers too. Without subscribing, I can’t tell.) Anyway, I’m screwing around with formatting, and will continue to do that. Bear with me.
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