Sponsor (Oct-Dec 1962)

WHAT MARKET DO YOU WANT TO SELL ON MAIN STREET? To reach Main Street, U.S.A., turn at Mutual. Whatever your market — teen age, young marrieds, executives—you'll find a buying audience on Main Street, U.S.A. And who owns Main Street? Mutual Radio. With 453 listenable affiliates everywhere. Pick your market and head for Main Street, U.S.A. Check the signpost and turn at Mutual Radio. LANDMARK: Mutual Radio delivers 97 of the top 100 Main Streets in America. mutual Radio I am A Service to Independent Stations 'COMMERCIAL COMMENTARY Continued 46 Most of us who remain in the business button up our lips and dci no sneering, at least for the outside world. But I suggest that most of us (and I think this is particularly truej of high level agency executives) have a horrible suspicion gnawing1 at our vitals like the Spartan boy's wolf, that "life is real: life isy earnest and the agency commission is not the goal." That is why we get so violently upset when we are attacked by highbrow critics. We are deeply, secretly afraid that advertising is really kid stuff, and that we are men doing a boy's work. But are we? Frankly, I don't think so. I believe that advertising is an honor-.1 able, difficult, demanding, absorbing, and wholly grown-up profes-l sion. But 1 am afraid that many of us in the business suffer from a peculiar occupational neurosis — we are still madly infatuated with, the picture of the boy we once were, and of the man we hoped to be. I And that, 1 think, is our trouble. When we were very young Our trouble really steins from the kind of guys we were when wel entered advertising. And here, if we're going to explain the problem, we shall have to do a little boasting. Beyond any question, the typical young man who makes a success of the business, starts as a superior human being. He is almost invariably bright, articulate, sensitive, imaginative, adaptable, with a wide range of interests and potentials. He is often a writer (of the 12 agency heads pictured on the Time cover, 10 once wrote copy) and frequently artistically inclined. He has, of course, a gift for business, but it is usually only one of many gifts. And in the end, it is his versatility, or the memory of his versatility which traps him. For what he hopes from advertising is the full expression of all his talents and potentials. And this of course, is impossible. But the memory remains, remains as he moves up the ladder, remains to haunt and torment him with reproaches of unfulfillment. And, living constantly with these inner self-reproaches, he tries constantly to escape them. Sometimes he tries to escape with ulcers or alchohol. Sometimes by plunging into a make-believe world of new tags and labels, by pretending that he is not really in advertising, but in "marketing" or "communications'' or, heaven forbid, "science." Sometimes his escape takes the form of devising high-sounding (and not very convincing) catch phrases about his mission. He tells himself proudly that he is the "catalyst of the country's consumption economy," or even the "architect of a growing, pros perous America." But none of these provide any real relief for our "Adman in Quest of his Youth." For none come to grips with his dilemma. Do you think 1 exaggerate this? Perhaps I do. But 1 still say that our real image problem is with ourselves, not the outside world. And I still say that the 4As and the ANA could do well to concentrate on this. For what most of us need is not some great big shiny, chromium-plated, image-building p.r. program. What most of us need is a more meaningful and satisfactory personal philosophy about our work. ^ SPONSOR/22 October 1962