Advertising is at an inflection point. Will history repeat itself?
There was a time when the best and brightest graduated from the Ivy Leagues with their Bachelor of Arts degrees, put on their grey flannel suits and went to Madison Avenue to fuel the American economy. And fuel it they did, creating new brands, line extensions and flankers, and by experimenting with state-of-the-art technologies like television. Compton Advertising led their mid-western clients into this emerging media marketplace, and were the first to create serialized daytime content for television which the makers of Ivory Soap and Oxydol would then sponsor, giving birth to the phrase “soap opera”. Selling advertising time was a mutually beneficial business arrangement for everybody involved—television stations received content to put on the air waves, agencies took a commission from the sales of time blocked for client messaging, and client brands became known, recognized and trusted from coast to coast. Compton’s menu of offerings put the “full” in “full service offering”: it had a casting business, a public relations business, a content/television production business, a media buying business, a media selling business, a research business, a test kitchen, a direct mail business in addition to naming, design, and communications for television, print, radio and outdoor. Today this business offering is but a fraction of what it once was.
It was common for employees to start out in the mailroom; at Compton, the mail boy befriended a young art director and the two of them practiced magic tricks together. Years later, this mail boy came up with the idea of laundering a dirty sock-in-a-sock-in-a-pocket and demonstrated how--with Tide--a dirty sock came through the process clean. It was a huge hit and Tide’s use of “torture test” scenarios and superior laundering status was set, and with it this young man’s career.
Later, when the former mail boy became the Chairman of Compton he made his old friend, the magician art director, partner at an agency subsidiary, one of the first founded and headed by a woman. It was a creative boutique specializing in sophisticated higher end businesses like Conde Nast (publishing/media), Lee Jofa (textiles) and the Platinum Council (fine metals), with Johnson & Johnson, Shulton, and Kenner Parker rounding out the portfolio.
This is the agency where I got my start, on a hot June day in the 1980s, one week after graduating from college. In the beginning women wore dresses and men wore suits. The offices were designed with unsparing attention to detail with furniture by Knoll, chrome finishes, navy blue fabric walls and marble conference tables. Our leaders were not accountants, but a creative team--an art director and copywriter.
Cadwell Davis Partners 1982. Herman Davis (with glass raised), and founder Frankie Cadwell to the right.
Herman had a handle bar mustache that would from time to time be dyed magenta on the tips. He wore a fedora and carried an elegant cane draped over his arm when he was in the streets. I spent hours by his side in the studio, dizzied by the fumes of spray mount as he orchestrated a print layout. When I started on Madison Avenue (yes, Madison Avenue!), we would send the copy out to the typesetter in the late afternoon and when it arrived back in the morning--transformed into something we called type--we would gather round the studio. The production manager would hold the type, the studio manager would hold the spray mount and I would hold the razor blade; we worked silently, maybe a static-y radio in the background. Herman would lay the type down, look at it, pull the type back up, cut off a dangling word and paste it on the next line, step away, pull the type up again, ask for another piece of type and we would begin anew. And it was the same on set or in the music studio: we were all his students and surgical assistants.
She--Frankie--was an elegant writer, a woman whose copy was like poetry, a purpose behind every word. Of course she had to be spare and potent because any dangling words could have been cut out with Herman's razor. Oh the blistering fights they would have over a word! She had the voice of a crow, cawing from her office "Herman, don't cut my copy!" or "I want a muffin from Viands!" It didn't matter who you were, if you happened to be walking by you were soon on your way to Viands for her corn muffin.
She worked standing up. She would type her own copy using a dark brown ribbon on cream stationary. "Get this approved!" She would wave the single copy. A quick stop at the duplicating room--five full time employees and home to the world's worst toupee--and I'd be off to East Hampton to get our client's signature just as he stepped off the tennis court. I’d have it back in the city that night.
They didn't love everybody but for some reason--I possessed critical thinking skills (english major), appreciated and understood the art or music being referenced (liberal arts degree), and would track down a client on a tennis court just to get a signature--they liked me. I wrote copy for Conde Nast magazines, I researched and wrote about the first woman to run for President, Victoria Woodhull, which my immediate supervisor later turned into a passion project and a book. They took me to dinners with company presidents, gave me tickets to openings and art shows. It turned me into their kind of account person, one who knew, appreciated and would fight for creativity. An advertising person who knew that it all matters and that taste cannot be acquired but must be earned.
The survivors meet up every year or so, the creative principals long since gone, the doors shuttered after the Saatchi brothers came to town and bought up Compton Advertising along with others, merging, de-merging, purging. We had all been in the trenches together, had all been sent out for corn muffins from Viands, and now have all seen the business turn upside down. Collectively, we had gone on to start our own businesses, win Oscars for directing feature films, moved to Vermont, inherited a fortune, and sadly we had buried one of our favorites who died from AIDS. Friendships flourished in that adversity.
I was the Agency baby. I was so so lucky to be one of the last to learn from true artists and talents. I was even luckier that the lessons stuck and that creative people kept coming into my life, one after the other. We plotted, planned, created and inspired each other to make each project better than the last.
This was my first year in advertising. I was one of the good guys, dressed in white, wine glass in hand. Everything was new. It went in a flash.
Today, it strikes me that the “brand new” advertising business that Compton was a part of in the 1950s and 1960s has come full circle and we are coming upon another “brand new” horizon (didn't someone once say that history repeats itself every seventy years?). We are on the cusp of a new media and content age, a moment in time when it’s possible to bring all the pieces back together under one “full service” digital roof, with retail thrown in as well. Compton’s number has long been retired, and many of the venerable old advertising firms give every impression that they are on their last legs. The agency of the future will likely look a lot like China’s Alibaba or Seattle’s Amazon, a “full service” offering that encompasses content, creativity, research, talent and delivery of products straight to your door. Everything old is new. Again.