Rumble on Madison Avenue

"Our critics are louder than ever. Some people are trying to bury us." So laments Draper Daniels, executive committee chairman of Chicago's Leo Burnett, Inc.--and a lot of others in the $12 billion-a-year U.S. advertising business agree with him. Lately there has been a new flare-up of criticism of the adman and his trade. Semanticist S. I. Hayakawa damns advertising as "venal poetry," and Historian Arnold Toynbee contends that it is the unholy idol of materialism (TIME, Sept. 22). Some of the most articulate critics occupy influential jobs in Government, from U.S. Ambassador to India John Kenneth (The Affluent Society) Galbraith to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton Minow, who has lambasted TV's "many screaming, cajoling and offending commercials."

Last week the American Association of Advertising Agencies heard the answers to a survey it sponsored to discover the attitude of 180 prominent Americans toward advertising. About nine out of ten regard advertising as a productive force, but 44% said that it promotes values that are too materialistic, 12% felt that it is wasteful, and others accused it of ignoring social values, tending to destroy individualism and helping to make the U.S. soft.

Coming to Grips. If admen have not sold themselves as well as their products, it is partly because they are not nearly so masterful at "huckstering" and "hidden persuasion" as their detractors imagine. "Advertising has functioned imperfectly," says Compton Advertising Vice President James Kelly, "in coming to grips with its own business."

Some of advertising's sharpest criticism is selfcriticism, since admen by nature are searching and articulate. Much of the internal questioning comes from members of newer and smaller agencies, often specializing in luxury and prestige accounts, that deplore the hard-sell techniques used to merchandise the big mass products. "Advertising is a bore," snaps Fred Papert, chairman of Manhattan's Papert, Koening Lois. "People don't pay attention to advertising. The trouble is that a lot of agency people have the idea that the public is a bunch of clods--and they write ads accordingly." Howard Gossage, whose Weiner & Gossage spread the word about Irish whisky, is even more blunt: "I don't know a first-class brain in this business who has any respect for it. Advertising is America's only native, original art form. It's the biggest, most eclectic and the lousiest."

Far more common on Madison Avenue than the critics are the admen who testily resent inside or outside criticism of their trade. "The eggheads dislike businessmen, the eggheads dislike advertising," snorts Rosser Reeves, chairman of hard-sell Ted Bates & Co. Says Walter Guild, president of San Francisco's Guild, Bascom & Bonfigli, the ad agency for the Kennedy election campaign: "If Toynbee wants to make his own toothpaste and his wife wants to sew her own brassieres. O.K. He's just using advertising as a focal point to criticize our entire economic system."

Guilt Complexes. Toynbee and other academic critics seem most concerned by advertising's outsized influence on the cultural and living standards of society. "It's like the goat in Leviticus," says San Francisco's John Hoefer of Hoefer, Dieterich & Brown. "Everyone's atoning for his own guilt complexes about having more than his parents or his grandparents. Most people realize that half the world is starving while we're sitting pretty."

But would the world's have-nots benefit if advertising contracted, and the consumer economy spent less on itself? Admen answer that the only reason the U.S. can spend billions for foreign aid and public welfare is the existence of a rich mass-production economy made possible by steady sales--and advertising. Says Fairfax Cone, executive committee chairman of Foote, Cone & Belding: "If the money spent on ads were to go instead into public works, as some of the critics advocate, where would the money come from? They never seem to get down to that." As for another familiar accusation against advertising, Young & Rubicam's Copy Supervisor G. Pat Steel won a prize with an institutional ad that argued: "Advertising does sell people things they don't need. All people really need is a cave, a piece of meat and possibly a fire. The complex thing that we call civilization is made up of luxuries."

TV Intestines. Admen do fairly well in defending advertising's value to a free enterprise economy. But, points out David Ogilvy, president of Ogilvy, Benson & Mather Inc., much criticism "is not on economic grounds, but on the grounds that advertising corrupts public taste, and makes lying respectable." Admen themselves concede that too many ads are strident, misleading, dull or offensive. "People are irritated by some ads on TV," says Charles Brower, outspoken president of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn. "The audience gets bored when yet more intestines appear on the screen as the evening goes on. Who wants to wake up his liver bile all the time?" Cunningham & Walsh President Carl W. Nichols faults some of his colleagues on grounds of creativity as well as esthetics: "I am repeatedly appalled at the lack of ideas in today's advertising. Much of it is shamefully sameful."

The basis of such criticism is that advertising, besides being a valuable economic force, has social and cultural obligations to society that it is not fully meeting. But admen themselves are badly split on just what advertising should do. "Advertising should be creative and edifying and should strive to be an art form," says Doyle Dane Bernbach's Maxwell Dane (whose agency has won plaudits for its artful ads for Volkswagen, Polaroid, and El Al Israel Airlines). But Norman B. Norman, president of Norman Craig and Kummel, insists that "the business of advertising is solely to move goods. You bastardize it if you try to make it an art form."

At the farthest extremity of stridulous sell, or repetition and saturation, stands Ted Bates Chairman Reeves, author of a controversial and wide-selling book, Reality in Advertising. Reeves's rubric: "Advertising is the art of getting a unique selling proposition into the heads of the most people at the lowest possible cost."

Purpose & Pomposity. The advertising world, controlling a powerful medium to influence men's choice, is now begining to debate whether--and how--it should use that medium for society's good as well as its own. If admen are often fair game for critics, it may well be because they have too often pictured themselves as society's savior instead of its servant. "Some admen get pompous," snaps Foote Cone's Fax Cone, "and they come out with statements such as, 'Our lives are better because of advertising.' This is not true. Our lives are better with advertising, but not because of it."

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