Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(68)
As I wondered what might cause a person to sustain such apparent enthusiasm—an endocrine condition? cocaine?—Mindy waved over an assistant who took my coat and hung it up. The studio was air-conditioned to a meat-locker temperature, the better to prevent us from becoming sweaty and shiny under the lights.
The other guest panelists were Leslie Monroe, an ad exec who’d rocketed from the copywriter ranks in the glossy 1960s and was still in the game, and Geraldine Kidd—she did look young—who’d recently made a stir with a provocative shampoo campaign and was on her way up. We all met in the green room.
The show’s host, Tuck Merkington, came back and greeted us; he was fresh from makeup, salt-and-pepper hair shellacked into an oceanic sweep above his leonine face. Like so many public-television people, he was a former radio guy, with a voice made for broadcasting: even his name sounded like an avuncular chuckle. He thanked us for coming, and Mindy marched us to the set to arrange us in our places, tasteful chairs arrayed in a semicircle that was part home den, part doctor’s waiting room.
The tape rolled. Tuck ran through his introductions of each of us, then kicked off the discussion with a patronizing cliché: “Now, this program will no doubt be watched by a lot of girls who already have a toe on the first rung of the advertising ladder,” he said. “I’d love to ask you on their behalf: What steps are taken by those who scale the heights?”
Geraldine Kidd, unfazed by Tuck’s vapidity, jumped in. “Listen, ladies, here is where you stand,” she said. “Advertising is no longer the dream job of every high-school girl. Radio, television, and public relations have passed it in the popularity race. This is all to the good for those of you who want advertising or nothing, because you really stand a chance to make it.”
“Indeed,” I agreed. “The same skills that I built my career on are as valuable as ever. If you write well, if you have creativity and good instincts about how to communicate with people, then you’ll make progress. Once you get in the door, it won’t take long before your talents are recognized.”
“Well, creativity is always good,” said Leslie Monroe. “But we should be clear that writing is no longer the advertiser’s primary tool. As early as the sixties, when I got my start, whether you were making classy ads for Ogilvy or hilarious ones for Bernbach, the priority was always to deliver a complete visual statement. Graphic artists and copywriters had come to be regarded as equals.”
“Certainly, visual impact has always been important,” I said. “I always worked with talented illustrators, and they deserve more recognition than they get. But words are still key. No matter what first draws our attention, language is where we make our decisions. If you look at the first ad in English—by William Caxton, from the 1400s—it says that a volume of Easter rules is for sale at his print shop and can be had ‘good cheap.’ No matter how you dress them up, the basic principles of advertising are all already there in Caxton’s ad.”
“What a charming fact, Miss Boxfish,” said Tuck. “Very typical of your famous style, as I understand it.”
While I was trying to figure out what Tuck meant by this—typical how?—Geraldine Kidd piped up again.
“We all still get a giggle from the ads of Miss Boxfish’s era,” she said with a youthful toss of her youthful head. “I’m sure most of us remember our grandparents constantly quoting some of the famous Boxfish lines. And they were, to be sure, hugely innovative for their time. But over the years, the way we in the profession think about advertising—how it fits into a larger marketing plan—has changed a lot. For instance, and to respectfully take issue with something Miss Boxfish just said, we now understand that the advertising that we remember from her heyday simply does not take full account of the way people actually make purchases.”
“Really, Miss Kidd?” said Tuck. “How do you mean?”
And then Geraldine Kidd sat up in her seat, expertly angled her shoulders toward the “A” camera, and proceeded to demolish everything I had achieved in my career.
“First of all” she said, “the old ads spoke to people. They charmed them, won them over, laid out the case for the product. This kind of friendly persuasion can be delightful, but it also assumes that the audience has the linguistic aptitude to follow the argument, the sophistication to appreciate the wit. This style of advertising can’t sell anything to people who don’t have those capacities. Next, the old ads assume that it’s the heads of households—educated and informed—who make purchase decisions. That isn’t necessarily so. As often as not, the real decision maker is a child. I could cite other examples, but my point is that it is ultimately just not that important how much we enjoy a particular ad, or how much we’re entertained by it. Do we remember the name of the product? Will we act on what we’ve been told? That’s what matters. We can’t value our own cleverness more than our results.”
“I think we all know it was established early on,” said Tuck with a wink, “that pictures of little children can sell just about anything.”
Then Leslie Monroe spoke up—smiling, wresting the wheel of the discussion away from addled Tuck, reasserting her authority over the upstart Kidd—to administer the coup de grace.
“That’s exactly right, Tuck,” she said. “And not only children. Animals. Music. Fire. Sex. Darkness. Loud noises. The odors of the body. We’ve known for fifty thousand years that these things carry a powerful emotional charge. I came on the advertising scene just as we were finally learning how to use them in a systematic way to reach and motivate our customers.”