My Life in Cars

Campbell Ewald was too big, its layers of command too complex, to allow an intimate atmosphere. We creative drones seldom even saw our ostensible partners, the account executives. Print copywriters and art directors, the creative infantry, worked in cubicles no bigger than they had to be to hold a man and his typewriter. I wish I’d pilfered the big old Underwood that came as standard equipment. You could drop one of those behemoths from the tenth floor, and it might bounce but it wouldn’t break. And its elegant typeface transformed banalities into profundity. The dark wood, frosted glass, and a stiff sense of order in the office lent an aura of solidity and a kind of charm reminiscent of a bank. It certainly didn’t feel like the world “Mad Men” would later depict.

Not that there wasn’t drinking. A few weeks in, a grizzled, middle-aged fellow-copywriter named Bart took me to lunch. His enthusiasm, if he ever had any, was buried under a thick layer of cynicism. Drinking was Bart’s hobby. Work didn’t interest him. He introduced me to the two-hour, three-martini lunch. It wasn’t Bart’s invention, but nobody ever did more to honor it. Bart, with his toilet humor and alcoholic passion, eventually wore me down. The time passed among red-leather banquettes and linen tablecloths first appeared to be glamorous, then revealed itself as pathetic.

It turns my ears pink today to recall the Corvette headlines I perpetrated. The 1963 Corvette Sting Ray, a startlingly original design, capable on looks alone of making people want to buy it, was the most technically advanced and arguably the least criticized car in General Motors history. And yet “Clip Along the Dotted Line” was the headline I wrote for one Corvette ad. A lame pun: the photo above it showed a Corvette clipping along the dotted center line on a rural highway. Another inanity of stupendous irrelevance: “We Took a Little off the Top.” I borrowed a barbering phrase to prattle about the way the doors of this hot new sports car cut into the roof. Not that Chevrolet advertising set a standard for innovation anywhere. Corporate advertising clung to “Jet-Smooth Ride” as the slogan for the entire model line for years. This gem had come from the pen of Campbell Ewald’s chairman, a Buddha-size man of a certain age whose name, ironically, was Mr. Little. Someone at Chevrolet decided that the failing Corvair could be repositioned as an ideal runabout for women: rear-engined and thus light-steering, gutless enough not to frighten a spinster, cute as a button in pastel colors. Into the breach lunged Mr. Little, an unchallenged copywriting tyro such as only an agency chairman could be. His Corvair headline: “She flirts with you, that’s what she does!” The creative troops cringed.

After two and a half years, my euphoria at having been given a professional home and the early makings of an advertising career had tapered off. I had learned just enough to start feeling restless. A few of my copywriting friends had defected to New York—to Doyle Dane Bernbach, the hottest agency in the world. D.D.B.’s Volkswagen work alone (the now famous “Think Small” ad) heralded a brash new dogma that suddenly made big, conventional agencies seem constipated. D.D.B. mocked the mastodons’ research departments, mission statements, focus groups, and “safe” advertising. Instead, there arose a blasphemous sidestepping of social science, a practice of going straight for the jugular. I felt ready to test my brains and talents in the big leagues, in the most competitive arena extant, New York.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3ndToh1