THE SOFT SELL
Goodman, Walter
The Soft Sell By WALTER GOODMAN THE eccentric male has become a prominent figure along Madison Avenue these days. The patch-sporting sport in the Hathaway shirt has raised his shirtmakers from...
...Bert and Harry Piel) at whom nobody can take offense...
...Harrell is whistling again...
...As an ad-man, he's a has-been—unless he finds an analyst who can patch up the billboard...
...and the selling is by indirection...
...Best Friend: Thanks...
...Small wonder Lennen & Newell lost the beer account...
...He has conceived an idea: that no man is merely a professional salesman and that television, despite advertising, is not solely an instrument of salesmanship...
...And this is the thing you must remember, which is the guts of television as it stands today...
...Led by Commander Edward Whitehead, that devoted Schweppsian (he has shares in the company), odd types have lately been appearing in newspaper, magazine, and subway ads to espouse the cause of some stimulating drink or other...
...Getting on...
...It could be the ruin of a whole generation of promising bright young men...
...Harrell's closing words sound like a quavering whistle in the dark...
...The patch-sporting sport in the Hathaway shirt has raised his shirtmakers from $5-million-a-year obscurity to $8 million and fame...
...White Horse Scotch, appropriately enough, has set its man on a white horse in a variety of poses and costumes...
...I've been engaged for the last two years in merchandising, on television, the merits of a beer...
...On the other side of the street, the conservatively WALTER GOODMAN is a free-lance writer whose articles have appeared in the New Republic and other publications...
...it is unlikely that he can bear very much guilt...
...So long as an account executive can keep his attention focused squarely on the techniques of his craft, he can keep earning his large salary...
...Await evidence...
...Best Friend: Salute optimism...
...Another dog is currently being walked through the pages of our daily newspapers by Nineteenth Century gents in mutton-chop whiskers, to demonstrate that Wolfschmidt Was There...
...Many...
...Har-rel's lamented beer account...
...Now, in this age of popularized psychoanalysis, these surface operators have been driven to look into themselves along with everyone else, and they are trying to share their vaguely sensed guilt with Commander Whitehead...
...Their gods are eccentric—as primitive deities tend to be, because so much of the world is inexplicable except in terms of arbitrary master wills...
...It is not surprising that the promoters of products whose moral and health-giving qualities have so often been questioned should be the first to feel the full weight of those basic values...
...He seems quite at ease, frequently with his legs crossed, but he rarely faces in the same direction as his mount...
...How many other members of the layout and slogan fraternity are staring into the abyss of themselves these days, and how are they trying to get away from there...
...And here we are, back at those eccentric enthusiasts of whiskey and soda...
...he is a careful technician with an outlook on the world that extends from box-tops to billboards...
...They don't go around pinching girls or abusing small children...
...we are hired and paid to merchandise the merits...
...Remember Mr...
...If he cannot resist a peek past the billboard, he is destined to enter politics, write novels, or contribute think pieces to the Reader's Digest...
...Well, maybe there is...
...Animals seems to add a flash of the eccentric to even the most ordinary fellow...
...I am a professional salesman," says Mr...
...Why, by essentially the same road, the tried road, that brought them to their present dilemma...
...They hold terse conversations in steam cabinets, at cafe tables, on golf courses—all of which climax in a plug for Puerto Rican rum: Joe Stetson: Happy returns...
...Several brands...
...But it is the liquor and related-beverage industry that has really taken the eccentric to its beery bosom...
...Joe Stetson, a decent enough looking citizen, has a Best Friend who is a shaggy dog...
...The whiskey pluggers, stunned by their recent introduction to human endeavors, have created a mythology of their own...
...For an advertising man by definition operates on the periphery of life...
...But the Commander is at best a minor deity as deities go...
...Look ahead...
...He may be in the vanguard of his profession, but surely he is not alone...
...And the copywriters' chuckles at Bert and Harry Piel must die before the cold-blooded calculations of the men who keep track of the month's sales...
...Listen for a moment to Charles Harrell, lately supervisor of radio and TV production for the Lennen & Newell agency, discussing a beverage that he did his best to push...
...For all the polish of their craft, they are as innocent as the people they want to reach—and this is precisely why they are so fabulously successful at reaching the people...
...But we are just practitioners...
...Relska, the World's Most Honored Vodka, commonly known as "La Boisson Diplomatique," features an East European diplomat (of more decorative days) who sports a multitude of medals and badges, a red sash, a black and gold jacket, and several pounds of braid...
...The good advertising man is no thinker— and therefore no hypocrite...
...And I think this is rather good...
...He wears Bermuda shorts and a blazer...
...When primitive minds are troubled in body or soul, they have a way of transferring the responsibility for their woes to mythological beings...
...I don't think it is bad because it is through such activity that we do make progress— whatever they may mean—but we do make progress in the accepted sense in the improvement of the ease of living...
...Harrell tossing out concepts like "basic values...
...Subtly tattooed fellows who exude virility along with the smoke from their Marlboros are doing their best to take this minor-league filter cigarette out of the women's market...
...Harrell lost his job too after talking this way to a class of New York University students last spring...
...Bell's, the Celebration Scotch, has hired a man with a splendid mustache to don a plaid vest and tweed cap and lean on a shuffle-board cue...
...a red jacket with piped trousers...
...New Horizons...
...You concentrate on the virtues of your product...
...The good solid testimonial has been livened up with some wit...
...And this is enough to unsettle anyone who has based so much of his life on contrary assumptions...
...Now the striking thing about these eccentrics is that they are all quite likable and socially acceptable...
...Hate Birthdays...
...And this is the kind of intellectual gymnastics that an advertising man does...
...Or is there some deeper cause for the current vogue of vicarious adulation—of inventing someone else, a rather fanciful someone else, to take the words out of the advertiser's mouth...
...This vodka vogue may be a forerunner of the Competitive Co-existence of the future, but that's another story...
...This has come to be known as the "soft sell" or "Aunt Emma" approach in advertising—a pacifying innovation, to be sure, for the harried TV viewer...
...Great discovery...
...Har-rel's basic values, escaped for the moment, return with a venegance on a thousand Madison Avenue offices...
...garbed financier, behomburged and equipped with cane, prefers, naturally, Hiram Walker's, The Plutocratic Capitalistic Vodka...
...Without having read the small type, I presume that the beast is related to The Original Genuine Vodka of the same name...
...we are professionals...
...If anyone's basic values are affronted nowadays, it will not be by a blamable human, but rather by these peculiar creations (i.e...
...Puerto Rican Rum...
...As Harrell said, "We are not concerned as advertising men with the basic values, and I mean this in the real sense, the basic values of human endeavor...
...a City business suit...
...Dry Rum...
...No man can live compatibly with Procter and Gamble from nine to five and with Plato from six to eleven and weekends (excluding cocktail parties...
...But they are still gods of a sort...
...New drink...
...the merits of a product...
...Here is a confused mind at work— and how could it be otherwise...
...they create gods and demons—some rather sinister, some amusing, all with recognizable foibles—and apportion the universe among them...
...But once he has to compartmentalize his thinking, he's in trouble...
...One evening recently, Moss Hart, in shirtsleeves, and Bennett Cerf, posed dramatically with rapier, were to be found in the moonlight, about to slice one another to ribbons in an affair of honor over whether lemon peel or olive is de rigeur for a dry martini...
...But there they are, solely as instruments of salesmanship...
...Sure our programs stink...
...Is it merely that Americans have suddenly grown too sophisticated for the classic yell, "You Need It...
...they never dun a consumer into submission...
...And, best of all, they never lecture...
...Carioca here extremely good...
...Joe Stetson: Nonsense...
...When such a mind turns introspective, when its thoughts begin to verge on things like progress (whatever that means) and basic values and human endeavors, it is in a precarious way—at the veritable brink of doubt...
...Harrell, with a show of bravado...
...It must be added that Mr...
...I happen to think that this beer is a very good one, and a month ago they told us that they thought that we didn't tell their story too well and they deserted us...
...And yet here is Mr...
...Joe Stetson: Personal example...
...He is thinking again...
...Because our advertising executives are not wise-cracking cynical fellows at all...
...Mr...
...Now, whether or not we lied, I think can be answered in the simple fact that we are interested only in telling the truth about a product...
...An extraordinarily proper chauffeur appears in The New York Times Magazine each Sunday on behalf of Fuller Fabrics...
...Will the ad man be able to create a comical Zeus, able to relieve him of all responsibility, or will Mr...
...Go Out And Buy It...
...Sure, you can do all sorts of philosophical thinking about other products and eventual aims, whatever it may be...
Vol. 20 • October 1956 • No. 10
