Paul Feldwick - The anatomy of humbug: how to think differently about advertising

In Chapter Ten of this wonderfully sane book, Paul Feldwick remembers giving a lecture at an advertising seminar in Istanbul. He was presenting several case histories from the IPA Advertising Effectiveness Awards archive: the worlds most rigorously documented instances of advertising having demonstrably and unarguably delivered commercial success as measured by sales, share of market, profit and return on investment. After one such case, a leading figure in Turkish research circles raised her hand and said with absolute conviction, It is not possible that this campaign was successful. The commercial contains no consumer benefit. (No doubt she would also have insisted that bumblebees cant fly.)

Other than advertising, there cant be many activities where theory and practice diverge so widely and so frequently. Like Paul, I came into advertising knowing nothing. And though the agency I joined, J. Walter Thompson, was far more academically inclined than most (it had been dubbed the University of Advertising in the US before World War II) it offered me no immediate training. I was expected to write an advertisement before lunch on my first day and I did. The only guidance I was given, and that much later, was an introduction to what was called The Thompson T-Square. This was a set of simple questions designed to concentrate the copywriters mind on the essentials and was, as the name implied, intended as a practical tool. The questions were: What are we selling? To whom are we selling it? Where are we selling it? When are we selling it? How are we selling it?

It was, and remains, a useful checklist for anyone setting out to write an advertisement for anything in any medium and its not as simplistic as it seems at first sight. In answering What are we selling?, for example, we were encouraged to consider not just the physical product but also what that product might represent to its users. A considered answer for Parker pens, for instance, would be expected to go far beyond a prestigious writing instrument and explore the pens potential as a gift and the pleasure it could deliver to the recipient. But the T-Square was also explicitly intended to lead to the identification of The Proposition, the core of every advertisement: The Proposition is the strongest competitive promise on behalf of a product or service that can be made to the consumer in terms of his (sic) own self-interest. It must be truthful, demonstrable and unique clearly elevating the product or service over the competition. Since the T-Square dated back to the reign of Stanley Resor (who had bought the company from James Walter Thompson himself in 1916, and stayed with it until he died in 1961), this emphasis on a unique competitive consumer proposition probably pre-dated Rosser Reevess adoption of the USP on behalf of the Ted Bates agency in the late 1950s. Yet I dont remember anyone at JWT, then or later, insisting that every campaign for every client contained an explicit competitive promise. Round the world, the agency found the T-Square questions helpful because they encouraged not only a certain discipline of thought but also the exercise of open-ended speculation and imagination. But when it came to instructions about what to put into every advertisement what every advertisement should contain the Resor directive was broadly ignored. It wasnt ignored militantly or even consciously it just, collectively, must have seemed restrictive and wrong.