The Real Mad Men Read Online Free Page A

tell you, it’s far more a matter of intuitive trial and error than finely tuned science.
    Yet the book, perhaps preying on the paranoia of a fearful nation, engaged in the Cold War and fed fanciful science-fiction tales of invisible rays and undetectable brainwashing, was a bestseller for six months, exercising almost supernatural power over its readers. In 1966, Victor Navasky, now a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, wrote for The New York Times : “In the thirties, economists knocked advertising. In the forties, novelists knocked advertising. In the fifties, sociologists knocked advertising and Hollywood began making movies out of the novels of the forties. In the sixties, the politicians who saw the movies began to attack advertising.… It has been attacked for ‘arousing anxieties and manipulating the fears of consumers to coerce them into buying’ and at the same time it has been dismissed as impotent, misdirected, and irrelevant.”
    The final nail? Some time in the mid fifties, Webster’s dictionary changed it’s definition of “huckster” from simply “hawker, peddler” to add “one who produces promotional material for commercial clients, particularly radio and newspapers.” The humiliation was complete.
    The real cause of discontent, both internal and external, was the advertising itself. By and large, it was execrable. To make matters worse, the more the economy boomed, the more there was of it to see.
    A 1962 Time article stated, “Many admen tend to ascribe much of the responsibility for television’s excesses to one source: Manhattan’s Ted Bates & Co, which funnels a greater percentage of its business into TV than any other agency (80 percent) and has rocketed from nowhere in 1940 to fifth place among all US agencies.… The enfant terrible at Bates is Chairman Rosser Reeves, fifty-two, who propagated the dogma of the Unique Selling Proposition, or USP. The rule: find a unique proposition that promises a specific benefit to the customer and will thereby sell The Product… the agency hammers it home with water torture repetition.”
    IF, FOR GENERATIONS OF CREATIVE people, Bill Bernbach is their Redeemer, no one more than Rosser Reeves best personifies the antiChrist. By his invention and implementation of the USP, Reeves probably had as huge an influence on the course of advertising as his contemporary, but in the diametrically opposite direction.
    Actually, the problem so many ad people had with Reeves was not so much the USP itself, it was the way he went about implementing it and his utter indifference to the wider effect of his advertising on the public.
    One of his most notorious commercials was for Anacin: hammers banging away at the inside of a cartoon head. It ran unchanged for seven years and when you’d seen it once you never needed or wanted to see it ever again. That it must have cured millions of headaches there can be little doubt, as sales tripled and the advert made more money for Reeves’ client, as he liked to point out, than Gone with the Wind , on a production budget of just $8,200. The media spend over that period was $86,400,000, a staggering amount for the era. The question that never bothered him was how many headaches it, and so many others of his commercials, caused.
    A story he liked to tell clients says it all. A farmer buys a mule that he finds to be unusually stubborn and simply won’t get going. He takes it to an old farmhand who is said to know everything there is to know about mules. For $5 he says he can fix it. The money changes hands and the old man picks up a 45-pound hammer and hits the mule as hard as he can, right between the ears.
    â€œHey,” says the owner, “I paid you to cure him, not kill him!”
    â€œI know,” says the old man, “but first I have to get his attention.”
    Hit them hard, straight between the ears,