Abstract

"The 1960s Creative Revolution in Advertising: Resistance from Traditionalist Ad Agencies"

Cynthia Meyers, College of Mount Saint Vincent (cynmey@gmail.com)

The so-called Creative Revolution looms large in the lore of the American advertising industry. Beginning in the late 1950s, many national brands shifted from the long dominant “hard sell” advertising strategy, which explained various product attributes in visually busy ad layouts, to the “soft sell” strategy, which focused on appealing to consumers’ emotions or sense of humor in aesthetically minimalist ad layouts (most famously, in a Doyle Dane Bernbach Volkswagen ad headlined “Lemon”). Thomas Frank (Conquest of Cool) and Samuel W. Franklin (The Cult of Creativity) argue the Creative Revolution served to manage consumer cynicism in an era of saturated markets.

However, there was significant contemporaneous resistance to the Creative Revolution within the ad industry. Relying on archival material from the Hagley Museum & Library, I analyze how the leadership of the traditionalist ad agencies criticized the new creative agencies for their concerns with aesthetics, cleverness, and irony. Such “creative” advertising attracted attention but did not sell products, critics such as Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn president Tom Dillon argued, in part because it relied on entertaining consumers rather than enumerating product attributes. Dillon dismissed what he called “the triumph of creativity over communication.”

Underlying these debates over advertising strategies was a more basic question. Was advertising’s purpose to educate consumers about products—the longtime belief of practitioners such as Dillon? Or, in an era of market segmentation, brand extensions, and issues around product parity, was its purpose to engage consumers’ emotions in order to build brand images? The new creatives claimed their sophisticated ads served to elevate advertising into an art form. Traditionalists, on the other hand, deplored them for undermining advertising’s more important public purpose: to increase sales, expand the economy, and help build wealth for the American people.
[SAM note: potential chairs/comments suggested by Cynthia: Michael Stamm, Jennifer Black, Richard John, Shannan Clark, Pam Laird, Joseph Turow]