Advertising: The Hand Bites Back

• Share

Madison Avenue, whose business is creating public images, often has a hard time keeping its own shiny. Admen have learned to put up with image-smashing by professors, but what really hurts is when one of their own hacks away at the pedestal. Last week, on a Washington television program, ex-Adman (cofounder of the high-powered agency, Benton & Bowles, Inc.), ex-Bureaucrat (OPA price administrator), ex-Governor (of Connecticut), ex-Ambassador (to India), ex-Congressman and now Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles committed the Madison Avenue equivalent of treason: he dismissed his advertising career as a youthful mistake.

"If I were doing it all over again," said Bowles, "I would have gone into government right after college and stayed in it. I figure that I lost twelve or fifteen years I might have used some other way that I think I would have perhaps enjoyed more and contributed more. Advertising and public life are a million miles apart. I didn't learn anything out of it ever to help me with government at all. There's a phoniness that runs through a lot of it. In advertising, things are exaggerated."

All Madison Avenue was pained, but none more so than Benton & Bowles's President Robert E. Lusk. Over the years, Lusk said, the agency has suffered in silence while its two former owners* have taken turns knocking advertising, often to the bewilderment of clients unaware that neither "B" is connected any longer with B.& B. Both sold their interests, said Lusk, for "a fraction of a million dollars, and I mean a fraction." When Bowles sold out in 1941, the agency billed $10,500,000 a year; since his departure, the agency has achieved big-league status, last year billed $119,880,000.

"If an advertising man were asked to advise young people about going into politics as a career," added Lusk, finally letting himself go, "he could say that politics is a business associated with all kinds of unsavory characters; that one must compromise oneself with campaign promises; that countless politicians have been grafters and crooks."