In a Brooklyn paper recently a Turkish Bath featured the following announcement: Separate Department for Ladies except Saturday and Sunday Nights. And I want to say for myself that I am available for business at almost any hour except 9.45 a.m., the hour assigned for this address. This is midnight for me, for it is my habit to write at night. Moreover, I dont like talking at conventions. The last one I talked at was held in the McAlpin Hotel about three years ago and inside of two days I received three anonymous letters containing varying degrees of vilification. So I cut out speechmaking. I would rather write and be paid for it than talk and be flayed for it. Some people are so inured to the obscurity of a back seat that they resent anybody who aspires to a front pew. Yet it is manifestly unfair to regard any speaker as arrogating to himself the airs of an oracle when as a matter of fact he would rather be relieved of the ordeal than go through with it.
But if a speaker be at a disadvantage, it is nothing to the traditional troubles that have for twenty centuries afflicted those who write for a living.
It is still pretty generally accepted that an artist or a writer is without honor in business, and we ourselves are largely responsible for it, for, however good we may be at selling other peoples wares, we still remain one of the most inefficient professions at selling our own. Now a poet may be an anachronism in a department store, but a good advertising man is at least as important as the shipping clerk. He must, however, be an advertising man and not a poet. Too many of us still wear long hair in our minds and that is something which even the Terminal Barber Shops are incompetent to cure. What I wanted to say is, that we shall have a much more robust and remunerative profession when we learn to sell copy and art and ideas like steel rails, instead of conducting ourselves like supplicants for alms. The medieval idea of procuring a patron still persists among some of us, when all that an advertising writer or an advertising artist needs to sell his wares is to borrow the methods of those he wants to sell them to. It is not necessary for any advertising man to approach an employer in the same fashion that he says his prayers.
But I dont want to be charged with the impropriety of trying to raise wages. I am really not discussing that phase of the matter at all. A division on this issue would suffice to show that many of you are getting more than you are worth, while many of us are still underpaid! But after all, money isnt everything in lifeonly about 98%. What is uppermost in my mind is not our inability to sell ourselves, which is bad enough, but our inability to sell our ideas to those who buy our services. In nearly every instance that has come under my observation in the past five years, the relationship between the advertiser and the advertising man has been wrong.
The average advertising job has two phases. First, the advertising man gets the job and then his employer proceeds to take it away from him. I once, and only once, had an experience of this kind myself. He was a remote relative of the head of the house and his ability was also relative and remote. It should be added, in extenuation, that his congenital malignity had recently been aggravated by the hysteria of a belated honeymoon. At any rate, he decided to prepare a Christmas advertisement, for which he stole the sampler idea of a prominent candy concern and then dragged in the Deity to sell Grand Rapids furniture and linoleums. Some people think they want an advertising man when all that they really want is an audience.
There is, of course, a vast difference between being suppliant and being pliant. A tactful man can concede a comma and achieve a page. It is just as foolish and fatal for an advertising man to be overly stubborn as it is for him to surrender his individuality. Some months ago the advertising man for a client of mine sent me a booklet he had written and asked me to go over it. I deleted three paragraphs, but did not add or change a line of the remainder. It is always easy to improve another mans work. But the revision did seem to be desirable. I sent it back and received a very peevish letter objecting to such liberal cutting. So I called him on the telephone and said: Did you ever see Hamlet ,” He said: Yes, what about it ,” I said: Well, every time they play Hamlet they cut half of it out. And if Shakespeare can stand it, so can you. Still another of our weaknesses is sensitiveness to criticism from those who cannot or do not write themselves. It is absurd to contend that those who cannot produce an advertisement are incompetent to condemn it. You might just as well say that a man has no right to condemn an omelet because he cannot lay eggs.
Criticism, if it is at all intelligent, is an invaluable aid in avoiding it! And a wise man really prefers it, for by catering to criticism he secures credit now and may escape censure later. Now, you are doubtless wondering what all this has to do with Individuality in Advertising. My contention is, that it has everything to do with it. We cannot achieve individuality in advertising until a man first achieves it for himself, that is, assuming that he has any to begin with. Granted that you and I have some ability in our work, two things remain by which that ability can bear fruit. One is that we shall learn both how to create ideas and how to defend them, and the other is, that the only way an employer can develop a good advertising man is to let him alone. There are scores of good advertising men who, through their own pusillanimity, or intolerance higher up, or both, never get a chance to show what they can do. And there are scores of great advertisers continually scanning the horizon for new talent, and overlooking what lies at hand in their own advertising departments. There is an Eastern legend of a man who sold his house to go in search of buried treasure, and the treasure was found in the garden by the man who bought the house.
To come to Individuality in Advertising itself, that is, in the finished product, this is such a large assignment and is susceptible of so many interpretations, depending upon the thing to be advertised, that it is hardly a subject that can be bound by hard and fast rules. But nobody can scan the general run of advertising without feeling that much of it needs fresh air. There is too much talk about space and not enough thought about spaciousness. One cure for this is brevity which I will come to in a minute; and the other is, the need of a little different point of view as to white space. The common conception of white space is that it is a waste of money, whereas it is a genuine investment. It is the first and chief means of giving dignity and character to a layout. That advertisement is quickest to arrest the eye which furnishes a rest for the eye, and there is nothing so restful and inviting, to employ a figure from an old English writer, as a rivulet of prose meandering through a wilderness of margin.
Now, the advertiser says: That is very pretty, but you are spending my money. The answer is that white space does not involve money, but brevity. There is a French proverb which says: The surest way to be dull is to say it all. It has also been observed that no souls are saved after fifteen minutes. See how the bubble of length is punctured with a phrase! Take still another example: Youth is a blundermanhood a struggleold age a regret. There we have a scenario of life in eleven words, embracing the vicissitudes of existence from cradle to crepe, from diapers to death. Brevity really is not expensive to use, though it is expensive to buy because it is difficult to produce. The reformation can come from within, not from without. Everybody sees more of a woman when she is in an evening gown than when she wears a tailored suit. Though the distinction isnt so marked as it used to be.
The need is to declaim less and to display more. And the less you say the more you need to say it effectively. And that means that it should be told with originality. People who condemn cleverness in advertising are those incompetent to produce it. Which means that it is often condemned. White space and appropriate art and typography are after all only the clothes of an advertisement which make for individuality in appearance. They are the frills and the furbelows, but the copy is the voice of the institution, which, indeed, if it have clarity, felicity, and strength, will, like Bacons reference to virtue, look best plain set.