"I met Britt Blaser in the summer of 2004 and, after he told me about
his role in the Howard Dean campaign, I was struck by the possibilities
for a general-purpose version of what Dean's supporters had done.
"Tech-aware people have already performed amazing feats of social
networking and grassroots activism. And ordinary people are becoming
more technically literate by the day. I'm fascinated by the
ORGware vision of a universal service that all kinds of organizations
and campaigns can use to attract and engage the rest of us who want to
‘get involved’ but don’t quite know how. ORGware
looks like an answer, and I think it’s as different as word
processors are from carbon paper."
From Agency to Agency, Technology Marches On
an essay written for the 50th Anniversary of the College of Communication Arts & Sciences at Michigan State University
Who knew?
I graduated with a master’s degree in communication at the end of
the summer of 1959. I’d spent the summer in a long narrow office
in the basement of the Journalism Building writing my thesis: A History
of The Advertising of The Packard Motor Car Company. Looking back, I
can’t believe I typed the whole thing on a portable typewriter.
I’d gone to college with a mission: to find myself a job in the
advertising business. I wasn’t sure at the time what that meant.
Then, during my last semester, I asked my advisor, John Crawford, what
kind of work he thought I could do in an advertising agency.
“I thought you wanted to be a copywriter,” he said.
“You think I could do that,” I asked. He said “Yes, I
think you could.” (He had worked as a copy chief at Leo Burnett
in Chicago). After that I sent resumes to copy chiefs in Chicago,
Detroit and New York. (Copy, Art, Radio and TV were separate
departments back then, and a Copy Chief was much like today’s
Creative Director).
In September of 1959 I found myself sitting in a large open space
surrounded by secretaries at the J Walter Thompson company in New York.
(I sat next to another ‘newbie’, Charlie Kafka, and the
news that Kafka and Einstein were sitting in the corner of the 10th
floor square generated a lot of smiles).
They gave me a second-hand office typewriter, a ream of yellow paper
which we called ‘Canary bond’ and a supply of carbon paper.
Word processors and copiers had not been invented, so when my copy,
(radio scripts for Ford dealers at the beginning) was approved, a
secretary re-typed it and made mimeographed copies for distribution.
The head of the Radio department at JWT was a pal of Mitch Miller and
hired him every so often to do Ford commercials. I remember going to a
recording session with Miller and his entire chorus (there must have
been at least 30 singers) in a huge studio, which had once been the
ballroom of the Great Northern hotel on 57th Street. The commercial we
recorded that day was put on 12-inch platters called ETs –
electrical transcriptions and sent to radio stations around the country.
Today, commercials are distributed by satellite feed. I haven’t
heard a singing commercial in years. Music for advertising has long
been composed on computers. And the only living, breathing musicians
working regularly in New York are in orchestra pits on Broadway, at the
opera or at the Philharmonic.
After a couple of years I left JWT and worked for three other big
advertising agencies in succession. Every one of the agencies I have
worked for since 1957 have either been taken over or absorbed; of them
all only JWT has survived (Do you remember Needham, Louis & Brorby,
Benton & Bowles, Warwick & Legler? I didn’t think so.)
I became a partner in a startup agency in the 1970s and that, too, has
disappeared. By the 1980s our agency, Lord Geller Federico Einstein
(LGFE) went to work for IBM and I bought an IBM Displaywriter for my
secretary. The Displaywriter was a huge dedicated word processor. It
used 8-inch floppy discs and was twice the size of today’s
desktop systems. My secretary thought she was about to be replaced by
this beast, but within three days every secretary in the creative
department had heard what she could accomplish with that thing, and was
standing by her desk waiting to try it. Technology marches on.
In 1981 LGFE introduced the IBM Personal Computer with a campaign
featuring The Little Tramp character created by Charlie Chaplin. I
wrote some of the copy for it on an IBM Selectric, still using Canary
bond. But the word processor that soon arrived with my PC became one
more technology that changed my life.
What has changed? What hasn’t? The fastest-growing ad medium
today is the Internet. Online marketing has become an industry in its
own right. The Moviola we used to edit film gave way to computer
programs years ago. Every aspect of creating and producing print
advertising is electronic. Even customers have changed. With more
information, and more choice they have become harder to reach and less
predictable. With a Tivo on the shelf and a remote control in hand,
they are free to avoid the advertising they were once forced to watch.
Technology has not only changed the process of making advertising. It
has also made the process of finding prospects and getting their
attention a much more intimidating challenge. The most creative person
in an advertising agency these days is the media person who figures out
how to invest client funds effectively.
In the 21st century it’s a new ballgame and technology has
created a new playing field. I now believe that the most important
change in advertising in the past 50 years has been the introduction of
the microprocessor in 1971. Who knew?
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