Blazing new trails

Today I discovered this letter, written by a young, offbeat American copywriter sixty-odd years ago. I wanted to post a couple of sentences of it here. I found myself highlighting one paragraph, then the next, and ended up copying the whole thing. It’s so well written, and sums up pretty much everything I’ve been thinking about creativity and advertising since last summer.

May 15, 1947

Dear ___________:

Our agency is getting big. That’s something to be happy about. But it’s something to worry about, too, and I don’t mind telling you I’m damned worried. I’m worried that we’re going to fall into the trap of bigness, that we’re going to worship techniques instead of substance, that we’re going to follow history instead of making it, that we’re going to be drowned by superficialities instead of buoyed up by solid fundamentals. I’m worried lest hardening of the creative arteries begins to set in.

There are a lot of great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately they talk the best game. They know all the rules. They can tell you that people in an ad will get you greater readership. They can tell you that a sentence should be this short or that long. They can tell you that body copy should be broken up for easier reading. They can give you fact after fact after fact. They are the scientists of advertising. But there’s one little rub. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.

It’s that creative spark that I’m so jealous of for our agency and that I am so desperately fearful of losing. I don’t want academicians. I don’t want scientists. I don’t want people who do the right things. I want people who do inspiring things.

In the past year I must have interviewed about 80 people – writers and artists. Many of them were from the so-called giants of the agency field. It was appalling to see how few of these people were genuinely creative. Sure, they had advertising know-how. Yes, they were up on advertising technique.

But look beneath the technique and what did you find? A sameness, a mental weariness, a mediocrity of ideas. But they could defend every ad on the basis that it obeyed the rules of advertising. It was like worshiping a ritual instead of the God.

All this is not to say that technique is unimportant. Superior technical skill will make a good man better. But the danger is a preoccupation with technical skill or the mistaking of technical skill for creative ability.

The danger lies in the temptation to buy routinized men who have a formula for advertising. The danger lies in the natural tendency to go after tried-and-true talent that will not make us stand out in competition but rather make us look like all the others.

If we are to advance we must emerge as a distinctive personality. We must develop our own philosophy and not have the advertising philosophy of others imposed on us.

Let us blaze new trails. Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling.

Respectfully,
Bill Bernbach

Excerpted from “Bill Bernbach’s Book: A History of Advertising That Changed the History of Advertising” © by Evelyn Bernbach and Bob Levenson.

Defamiliarisation

DSC_0282, originally uploaded by crumplestiltskin.

‘The problem of the artist is to defamiliarise the ordinary’ – Paul Rand, graphic designer.

The familiar consists of the scope of our experience. Outside of these boundaries, we are lost. When what we see doesn’t fit into the rules we order the world by, we’re suddenly out of our depth, forced to reconsider how we think. But how many times can this happen? Surely there comes a point where everything is ordinary, where nothing can be defamiliarised any more?

The moment of defamiliarisation is liberating. The transition from known to unknown, like a cat’s surprise at the wetness as it walks through a puddle, or a child’s realisation that it cannot touch the objects it sees in a mirror.

How can a photo ever succeed in defamiliarising what it portrays? The graphic designer has the advantage of working in a world that is not governed by physics and reality, being able to step outside of the inherent and imposed limitations of the world and into a place ruled only by imagination. By nature a photo has to have an equivalent instant in time and space, that is, it has to be grounded in the ordinary, which makes it so much harder for it to break down the ordinary. I suppose this makes it all the more real as an art form, and easier to identify with, because like us it can’t transcend the limitations of its form.