“Indeed,” I agreed. “The same skills that I built my career on are as valuable as ever. If you write well, if you have creativity and good instincts about how to communicate with people, then you’ll make progress. Once you get in the door, it won’t take long before your talents are recognized.”
“Well, creativity is always good,” said Leslie Monroe. “But we should be clear that writing is no longer the advertiser’s primary tool. As early as the sixties, when I got my start, whether you were making classy ads for Ogilvy or hilarious ones for Bernbach, the priority was always to deliver a complete visual statement. Graphic artists and copywriters had come to be regarded as equals.”
“Certainly, visual impact has always been important,” I said. “I always worked with talented illustrators, and they deserve more recognition than they get. But words are still key. No matter what first draws our attention, language is where we make our decisions. If you look at the first ad in English—by William Caxton, from the 1400s—it says that a volume of Easter rules is for sale at his print shop and can be had ‘good cheap.’ No matter how you dress them up, the basic principles of advertising are all already there in Caxton’s ad.”
“What a charming fact, Miss Boxfish,” said Tuck. “Very typical of your famous style, as I understand it.”
While I was trying to figure out what Tuck meant by this—typical how?—Geraldine Kidd piped up again.
“We all still get a giggle from the ads of Miss Boxfish’s era,” she said with a youthful toss of her youthful head. “I’m sure most of us remember our grandparents constantly quoting some of the famous Boxfish lines. And they were, to be sure, hugely innovative for their time. But over the years, the way we in the profession think about advertising—how it fits into a larger marketing plan—has changed a lot. For instance, and to respectfully take issue with something Miss Boxfish just said, we now understand that the advertising that we remember from her heyday simply does not take full account of the way people actually make purchases.”
“Really, Miss Kidd?” said Tuck. “How do you mean?”
And then Geraldine Kidd sat up in her seat, expertly angled her shoulders toward the “A” camera, and proceeded to demolish everything I had achieved in my career.
“First of all” she said, “the old ads spoke to people. They charmed them, won them over, laid out the case for the product. This kind of friendly persuasion can be delightful, but it also assumes that the audience has the linguistic aptitude to follow the argument, the sophistication to appreciate the wit. This style of advertising can’t sell anything to people who don’t have those capacities. Next, the old ads assume that it’s the heads of households—educated and informed—who make purchase decisions. That isn’t necessarily so. As often as not, the real decision maker is a child. I could cite other examples, but my point is that it is ultimately just not that important how much we enjoy a particular ad, or how much we’re entertained by it. Do we remember the name of the product? Will we act on what we’ve been told? That’s what matters. We can’t value our own cleverness more than our results.”
“I think we all know it was established early on,” said Tuck with a wink, “that pictures of little children can sell just about anything.”
Then Leslie Monroe spoke up—smiling, wresting the wheel of the discussion away from addled Tuck, reasserting her authority over the upstart Kidd—to administer the coup de grace.
“That’s exactly right, Tuck,” she said. “And not only children. Animals. Music. Fire. Sex. Darkness. Loud noises. The odors of the body. We’ve known for fifty thousand years that these things carry a powerful emotional charge. I came on the advertising scene just as we were finally learning how to use them in a systematic way to reach and motivate our customers.”
She pivoted in her seat—Lurex halter glinting beneath her cropped batwing jacket—and laid a small, lushly moisturized hand on my elbow.
“Lillian’s writing from those early years,” she said, “the late 1920s to the early ’40s, is just so clever. So glamorous, in its zany way. So fun! And innovative! And that, I’m sad to say, is really the problem. There’s only one Lillian Boxfish. Ads that tried to imitate what she did—that used humor to appeal to people’s sentiments and their reason—weren’t as successful. Worse, they made it easier for the audience to spot the tricks, to learn the methods. Lillian’s ads were stylish, but styles change for exactly this reason. My peers and I knew we’d never beat Lillian at her own game. So we cut in line. We got to the audience before they listened to her pitch, before they thought anything at all. We figured out that it’s far more effective to appeal to fundamental emotions: envy, fear, lust. Animal instincts.”