Mad Men, George Lois, and Advertising's Creative Revolution

I'm talking about big ideas that knock you on your ass. The closest to anything I've seen like that currently was the Geico stuff with the cavemen because it's memorable and fun to watch. But mostly today, I could name you brands that spent a half a billion or a billion a year on advertising and I could say to you, "Okay, give me what they say in their advertising--give me the words or the visual of what their message is, and you couldn't tell me what the fuck they do. I could name every car in America and I couldn't tell you what the fuck their advertising is. Every beer brand, you would confuse every commercial for every other.

Back then, our clients adored us and thought we were Joe Geniuses, and maybe we were. We'd attract the kind of guys who were edgy, exciting entrepreneurial kind of guys. That doesn't really happen today. These were guys who weren't trained in marketing and didn't learn that advertising is a science. You can't test great advertising. You can only test the mediocre. Not that I don't care about demographics. You have to understand who you're going after.

But basically I don't let marketing guys tell me what to do. I had an account for a product called Maypo, basically a baby cereal. I said, "Why the hell are you concentrating on [very young] kids? Why can't you sell it like Quaker Oats to older kids?" "Well, I don't know, blah blah blah." "Well, I'm going to do that for you." [He created this classic ad that had Mickey Mantle, Wilt Chamberlain and other sports stars bawling like babies for their Maypo.] How many times does it say, "I want my Maypo!" Seven or eight times? It's redundant but wonderful.

The computer has played a role in destroying creativity with the Photoshop. Everybody thinks they're a designer. I go in and talk at SVA [School of Visual Arts in New York City]. I sit down with a kid: "What are you working on?" "I'm trying to do...blah blah blah, some account." "What are you designing?" "I don't know, I'm just playing around." "What's the idea?" "I'm not sure." Then what the fuck are you looking at? Look at the mirror and talk to yourself and come up with an idea. In the last 20 or 30 years, they don't understand that the essence of advertising is an idea that knocks you on your fucking ass.

The only way we can turn the clock back is by example. But if I walked into one of those giant agencies today, either I - or they - would be dead in a week. I meet so many people in advertising today, and they say to me, "In the old days, you guys were kings."