Hasta La Creative!

The ever-generous Tom Asacker sent me a serious looking hard bound book, The Ad Men and Women: A Biographical Dictionary of Advertising, edited by Edd Applegate.

I finally cracked the tome and read the chapter on Howard Luck Gossage, written by academic Kim B. Rotzoll.

Here is a passage I particularly like (from page 160):

They (advertising practitioners) regard the audience incorrectly—as individuals gathered by the media to read or watch something else, the non-advertising content. Thus, advertisers never think of the assembled as their audience and, hence, feel no particular obligation to them—as, for example, does the actor. Given this erroneous premise, Gossage asserted, all sorts of sins are permissible—mind-dulling repetition, vapid messages, every conceivable abuse of taste.”

I’m thinking Gossage would have liked the internet—it’s a place where advertisers can run their own content.