Advertising: The Mammoth Mirror

(6 of 10)

What the admen do not answer very successfully is the charge that they are "hidden persuaders" who manipulate the people of the U.S. like so many puppets, debasing public taste and behavior to serve greedy commercial ends. This picture of their industry is partly the fault of admen themselves, many of whom are fond of magnifying the powers of their craft with claims that it could perfectly well be used to sell not only soap but democracy or "the American way of life." The fact is that advertising, by definition, is the most visible and undisguised form of persuasion; and the American consumer, fully aware of its purpose, has a sturdy skepticism about it. At bottom, advertising is incapable of selling a product—much less an idea—for which there is not a spontaneous demand. Whatever claims he may make for advertising's powers when he is trying to land a client, no adman will soon forget the Edsel. So successfully did Fairfax Cone and his agency whip up interest in the Edsel that 3,000,000 Americans flocked into Ford showrooms in the first week after the car was introduced—and, not liking what they saw, proceeded not to buy it.

The Seven Year Itch. Selling goods to a public thus armored—and showing a profit in the process—are far more significant challenges to today's adman than all the assaults of intellectual critics. Nowadays, virtually every U.S. corporation of any size is already a heavy advertiser—and, on average, changes its ad agency every seven years. In a costly scramble to hold on to their clients, the agencies are offering a stack of services far beyond the writing and placing of ads. Today's big agency advises the client on what new products he should market, designs the packages for him, sends out shock troops to help merchants sell the results, gets the client's name (or his firm's) in the papers, helps put over his pet charities, and procures his World Series tickets. All these extras have nibbled so deeply into profits that the earnings of the major agencies plunged from 5% of gross income in 1956 to 2.5% last year.

Heaviest of the new expenses is for the occult art of head-candling, which the admen call "research." Today virtually all major agencies back up their copywriters and artists with sociologists, economists, statisticians, and a psychologist or two. What all these experts are seeking like the Holy Grail is some statistical method to determine how to frame an ad that will sell The Product without fail. In their quest for this magic formula, the admen engage in some remarkably far-out enterprises. Manhattan's Interpublic is experimenting with a "pupil recording appara tus" that attempts to measure which part of an ad the eye sees first. In Chicago last week, interviewers for the Tatham-Laird agency were running a random selection of shopping-center customers through a 67-ft. mobile trailer to test their reactions to a clutch of the agency's latest campaigns and an operative for the Leo Burnett agency was trying out newly filmed TV commercials on small groups of housewives whose fingers were wired to polygraphs as a check on their spoken reactions.