Adland - book

Adland Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet, by James P. Othmer (Doubleday, 2009)

I might have thought the title of this book should have been Ad Land, but we are dealing here with an advertising man. So put aside your morals and ethics, and especially your “taste,” and consider the world of advertising. Othmer does, of course, mention the moral and other problems that beset those who make a career in advertising. How, for example, does one deal with having to create advertising programs for things like paste for false teeth, suppositories, or tampax? More importantly, how would you sell things you might well entirely disapprove of, things like sugary cereals to children, or fast foods, perhaps even a Presidential candidate you thought was a terrible choice? How about pesticides or insecticides, sleeping pills, pills to induce erections, or how about selling an oil company you knew was doing terrible things to the environment? What kind of person would you have to be to spend your career creating advertising programs that you knew were misleading or completely dishonest? All of these things get mentioned in this book by an ex-advertising man, but they are not the major subject of the book and he spends little time on them. This is a book written primarily, as near as I can tell, for those who are knowledgeable about the industry, familiar with some of the changes, conversant with the language of the profession, and interested with the future of this strange profession.

I have long wondered about advertising that is, in general, something I despise. It is one of the main reasons I no longer watch television. When I was a child I had an eccentric uncle who lived on a sailboat. There was only radio in those days and we listened to the news rather than watching it. Uncle Otto hated the advertising and had rigged up a mercury switch to combat it. When a commercial came on he would lift up the switch and it was timed to last as long as an ordinary radio commercial, thus allowing him to never listen to one. He also had a rule that he would never buy a product that he saw or heard advertised. Uncle Otto was a great influence on my life in many ways and his hatred of advertising rang a bell with me that I have followed ever since.

It becomes clear from Othmer’s account that the primary reason people go into advertising is because it’s where the money is. If you create even one single commercial that is a resounding success you have it pretty much made for a long time. Simple slogans like “The Jolly Green Giant,” “Where’s the Beef?” and “Fruit of the Loom,” for example, easily made a career for someone in addition to a lot of money. The author, who worked in advertising for twenty years and was reasonably successful, confesses he never made up a slogan that made it “to the big time.” But he did make up many successful programs that were of lesser importance but nevertheless successful. He, himself, became involved in advertising mostly by accident, but once hooked he stayed with it for a long time. This is where another interesting fact emerges from his book, in the process that is advertising those that are involved don’t even pay much, if any, attention to the item being advertised. The excitement and reward comes from the task itself, the challenge, the demands on creativity, and have nothing much to do with the product involved. Indeed, in some cases they are more highly motivated the more difficult the challenge. The simply slogans that emerge from their creative competitions are not simply come by, but involve hours and hours of creative thought as well as trial runs and so on.

But even the professionals, like Othmer himself, can reach a point where they just burn out or decide they cannot continue doing some things. After working on pharmaceutical ads for a time, he decided they should not even be permitted, or, if permitted, should have to have full length ads describing the side effects as well. He seems to have decided he was more or less “burned out” and perhaps “over the hill,” when he found himself in charge of creating a program for a new “turd-shrinking Japanese cat food.”

The main subject matter of this interesting work, however, has to do with the changing profession of advertising and how it is they are going to meet the challenges of advertising less on television and much more on the internet. They talk now of viral advertising, multi-media ads, participatory advertising, digital, and other such things that I do not completely understand. But it seems clear that the traditional advertising agencies, along with the tradition television ads, are becoming far less important and new directions are being called for. Ad agencies are being replaced by “Creation Centers,” and such, and creative talents are now being teamed to collaborate with experts from other professions like computer freaks and even the management professionals that previously had nothing to do with the creation of their ads. No one seems to understand completely where all this will lead but it is certainly the main topic of interest in the schools that exist for training those who wish to make a career of this rather strange profession, places like Brandcenter at Richmond’s Virginia Commonwealth University (I confess to being unaware there even were such graduate programs in advertising, and personally I’m not certain there ought to be). There is much more to this work than I can possibly mention here. If you have an interest in this subject you will no doubt benefit from reading it.