Review: The Public Arts: The Meaning of Madison Avenue

THE MEANING OF MADISON AVENUE James Playsted Wood. The Story of Advertising. Ronald Press. 1958. 502 pp. $6.50. Martin Mayer. Madison Avenue, U.S.A. Harper. 1958. 332 pp. $4.95.

Teachers who hesitate to generalize about the literary merit of Faulkner after years of studying his works are often far less cautious in their judgments about the worthlessness of contemporary popular fiction. Scholars willing to pit their eyesight against volumes of yellowing, obscure, even illiterate diaries in the hope of new insight into an earlier era dismiss the data of their own age as illiterate and vulgar.

Surely all of us know at least one humanist who preens himself on never watching television, and surely we know several who are ready to dogmatize in spite of lack of experience with the medium. My favorite vignette of this attitude is the middle-aged teacher student of mine who, after several months of classroom study of popular culture, complained, "I know less now than I did three months ago; then I was at least able to make brash generalizations."

Of all the media, perhaps advertising draws the most fire. Those who would retreat from the fray with popular culture buy books instead of TV or radio, and movies too they can ignore. But they cannot avoid the billboards--to say nothing of the bombardment of sound trucks, direct mail soliciting, car cards, throw-aways, free samples, and skywriting. And even the Partisan Review carries publishers' ads.

Two new books offer complementary research on advertising for one who would come to more reasoned terms with the hucksters than a chronic sneer for gray flannel (actually never really a popular fabric on Madison Avenue, says Martin Mayer, upsetting one popular generalization). James Playsted Wood's The Story of Advertising is a history of advertising from the earliest London street cries to the modern advertising agency.

It is the result of library research, and has the flavor of the thesis written from too many notes by an eager scholar also anxious to keep his typist's fees within an academic budget. Martin Mayer's Madison Avenue, U.S.A., on the other hand, dips into history for an occasional briefing, but it is primarily a study of how the modern agency works. Liberated from the great god Chronos, Mayer is the more entertaining. Some of the questions a teacher may want to answer about advertising are the legitimacy of its origins, the image that its sires had of themselves and their medium, the effects of advertising (cultural as well as economic), the public image of advertising.

These things one may glean from Wood but glean he must. Wood is rather oriented toward the "first" and the "earliest," which elicits the same philistine "So what?" from one reader as those obtuse bronze plaques one sometimes finds on historical monuments. Closely related to this antiquarian concept of history is the reproduction of the "picturesque." Mr. Wood both quotes and reproduces ancient advertisements and anecdotes about the business, but they are so uniformly picturesque that the book seems more a sightseeing tour than serious reconnaissance. Mr. Wood avows in his Preface that his volume is "neither attack nor defense."

He does offer both attacks and defenses of advertising. He looks upon P. T. Barnum's, however, with a certain amused tolerance; for the Stuart Chases--and other Consumer-Report type critics of advertising--Mr. Wood has only contempt. "Self-appointed critics" is his withering epithet for these, who, he darkly suggests, were really attacking The American Way.

One would ask what other kind of critic than "self-appointed" Mr. Wood suggests as more compatible with The American Way? One would also ask, who appointed Wood critic of the critics? In a civilization that however facetiously builds an ethic on consumption ("You Auto Buy Now"), it seems that every man a self-appointed critic of advertising is a goal devoutly to be wished. Wood's general attitude toward criticism of advertising is one of quietism: A typical statement: "To argue that men and women are defrauded and deluded by competitive claims which have no basis in measurable properties of the advertised object is often to argue that people should be different and feel differently, live by other standards and values than they recognize or wish to appreciate." (p. 495).

In less academic language, to quote one of Wood's exhibits, "There's one born every minute." The implications of this philosophy are, to anyone who cares about cultural values, horrendous. What, after all, are the aims of religion, of education, of civilization, if not "to argue that people should be different and feel differently, live by other standards and values than they recognize or wish to appreciate."? Martin Mayer's Madison Avenue, U.S.A. is a more witty book, more urbane. Mayer interviewed ad men and toured their habitats, and the differences in his method are obvious in his book.

Mayer, too, announces that he has tried to stay out of the book--with considerably more success than Wood had. Mayer puts the ad man himself on a slide. He also turns the lens on the organization of the ad agency by minutely examining the largest, J. Walter Thompson. He explains the various styles of advertising, distinguishing between Ogilvy's sophisticated eye-patch brand-image, and Ted Bates' "reason-why" sledge-hammer style, for instance.

He investigates the role of marketing research, and the growing part played by social scientists in advertising. He follows through an ad campaign--the boo-boo that accompanied the Edsel's big automotive bomb. When he comes to the biggest question of all, however, he is no less infuriating to the humanities-trained reader than Wood. Mayer dismisses all of the classic arguments for the value of advertising and proceeds to offer what he considers his unique evaluation: Advertising offers added psychological values to the consumer.

Mayer's explanation: "But the fact that value is fictitious as perceived by the consumer does not mean that it is unreal as enjoyed by the consumer. He finds a difference between technically identical products because the advertising has in fact made them different." (p. 311) Throughout both books I was irritated by both authors' abuse of "creative" applied to "creators" of such masterpieces as "You'll wonder where the yellow went," and "philosophy" as applied to the adman's view of the easiest way to separate the sucker from his dollar.

My misgivings were well-founded when Mayer can, with a straight face, construct that metaphysical impossibility he presents as his rationale of advertising's value: Actually identical products are in fact different. One wishes Mayer had somewhere been subjected to a logic course--to say nothing of ethics. Both Mayer and Wood, then, agree that the consumer is a sucker. Since the consumer wants it that way, however, it would be uncharitable of the adman--or the critics--to enlighten him.

One finishes both books wishing that a humanist with Wood's facility with a card catalogue and Mayer's pass to the agency inner sanctums as well as a sense of the cultural importance of the mass media would write still another book on advertising. But such a humanist will have to watch TV commercials and read the ads in Life--not to mention these two influential books--to be able to write the kind of book we need on advertising.

Meanwhile we can learn what our putative manipulators think of us from Wood and Mayer.