Broadcasting Telecasting (Apr-Jun 1958)

ADVERTISERS S AGENCIES CONFERENCE CALL FOR CREATIVITY • Visual communications sessions convene in New York • Brainstorming, conformity come in for special attack Criticism of brainstorming and conformity and a call for more humor and individuality highlighted the third Visual Communications Conference of the Art Directors Club of New York last Wednesday and Thursday. The annual conference was held in conjunction with the 37th Exhibit of Advertising and Editorial Art & Design (see page 84). The theme was "Creativity in Visual Communications." A separate luncheon session Tuesday featured the Art Directors Awards ceremony. Wednesday morning's keynote address was by conference chairman Paul R. Smith, president and creative director of Calkins & Holden, New York. Said Mr. Smith: "It seems very interesting that the advertising business which is supposed to be so highly dependent on creativity and which employs so many high-priced creative personnel and whose competitive practices place such a high premium upon creativity should be so laggard in its investigation of this phenomenon. We are entrusted with the expenditure of $10 billion every year with a gross commission of $1.5 billion and yet the best the advertising business has been able to come up with are some generalities about the handling of creative people and the technique of brainstorming. While better than no technique at all (because it does produce ideas where none existed before), brainstorming is at best an empirical method with little or no basic understanding of the creative process as it is being revealed by contemporary scientific investigation. . . . Not only has the subject (of creativity) been woefully neglected with the result that most people don't know about it, but for some reason or another most people don't want to know about it. There is resistance to knowing about it . . ." But, as the conference wore on, resistance melted quickly. To make some of the cutand-dried material more palatable, ADC invited humorist-pianist Victor Borge to talk about "creativity in humor," and jazzman Eddie Condon to talk about "creativity in music." During Tuesday's awards luncheon. ADC President Walter Grotz, art director of McCann-Erickson's Marschalk & Pratt Div., presented 14 ADC medals and 43 certificates of distinctive merit. He also introduced this year's winners of the club's annual "Management Awards." Among this year's recipients and their citations: Marion Harper Jr., president of McCannErickson: ". . . for inspiration and encouragement given to the art directors of McCann-Erickson throughout the world, resulting in a consistently high standard of visual excellence in advertising produced for its clients." George V. Allen, director of the U. S. Information Agency: ". . . for outstanding efforts in presenting American culture and traditions to the peoples of the world through USIA sponsorship of traveling exhibitions and its information libraries." Morse G. Dial, president of Union Carbide Corp.: ". . . for the high standard of excellence maintained in its advertising; and for the integrated design program conceived at UCC resulting in an outstanding example of the use of graphic art to establish corporate identity." Howard S. Bunn, UCC executive vice president, accepted the award in the absence of Mr. Dial. In the sessions that took place Wednesday and Thursday, a host of salient points were made by numerous speakers. Among them: • Victor Borge: The role of humor in advertising — especially on tv — is not to move goods but to create a climate of acceptability for and friendliness to the sponsor. There is too little humor on tv these days, and the amount that exists is often interrupted by "those idiotic three minutes of nonsense" on behalf of a product that is little different from another product. Too often, an advertiser will lose the friendship he has built up through his star "midway in the commercial." • George Avakian, vice president of World-Pacific Records, former Columbia Records executive and jazz expert: The advertising-radio-tv industry ought well to consider, for commercial purposes, using more of the creative talents and improvisations of the avant-garde composer. He said the "right step in the right direction" has al A DISSENTING VOICE An unexpected rebuttal to "the false statements and unfair attack" on brainstorming was offered late Thursday afternoon from the floor at the third Visual Communications Conference by Willard O. Pleuther, BBDO vice president in charge of brainstorming and communications. Mr. Pleuther, angered by the "unwarranted" and "untrue" statements offered by art director Saul Bass (see this page) asked conference chairman Paul R. Smith for "equal time." Mr. Pleuther dismissed the Taylor (Y ale U.) report on brainstorming cited by no less than eight speakers as "a fine piece of research" that did not involve the "successful application of brainstorming." He said that Dr. Sidney Parnes of the U. of Buffalo had analyzed the "Yale foursome" (so named because its panel consisted of only four members as against BBDO's 15) as inconclusive since that group met for only 12 minutes at a time (as against BBDO's 60-90 minutes) and got the problem at the time of the meeting (as against BBDO's practice of issuing, in outline form, the "problem" some 24-48 hours ahead of meeting). Page 36 April 7, 1958 ready been taken by NBC-TV (which retained composer Carlos Surinach to score the theme for that network's color peacock identification, CBS-TV (which has used composers David Diamond for See It Now and Norman Delia Joio for Air Power and Seven Lively Arts) and Robert Saudek Assoc. (which six years ago had "modernist" Henry Cowell score the "Sun Theme" for Omnibus). • Saul Bass, motion picture and advertising designer and art consultant: As uniformity is achieved by the technical society and business community, efficiency increases, creativity decreases. Mr. Bass said, the concept of the repetitive advertisement is vital to our mass production-mass economy system but, he asked, "at what price?" He declared that industry, particularly many blue-chip advertisers such as AT&T and General Foods Corp., is realizing that there is more to corporate success than profits and is sending its executives back to college to study the classics and the humanities. He dwelt on brainstorming, said that the BBDO-conceived science of Groupthink (see In Review, page 14) "inhibits creative thinking . . . restrains the freedom of open criticism and non-conformity . . . makes individuals pursue an identical train of thought." Basing his opinions on a thorough investigation of brainstorming by Yale U.'s Dr. Donald W. Taylor, Mr. Bass said that this development can "only be useful in giving birth to gadgets or their visual or verbal equivalents. Gimmicks, gadgets and twists are, of course, invaluable but we must recognize that they also are quite superficial. At a time when the superficial has manifest value, it is not surprising that a systematic approach should arrive for its perpetuation. By implication, brainstorming obscures and confuses the real problem, which is that creativity — like freedom — is indivisible. Creativity is a total process. It cannot be isolated in the experience of individuals and turned on and off like a faucet every Thursday afternoon." Mr. Bass noted, "We have had several years of togetherness sponsored by McCall Corp. I would like to propose a few years of aloneness'." • Dr. M. F. Agha, consultant, art director and designer: Advertising is not an art in the purest of senses; it is a conception of art — "creativity within a rigid framework of established forms, canons and formulas with a great body of precedent as a base." It is hard to be "original" in advertising, Dr. Agha pointed out, citing that the best of ads are usually the product of two or three or more contributors, "with dozens of bystanders, calling various precedents to the team's attention and otherwise trying to get into the act." He concluded: "Under these often trying circumstances the creative originality in advertising becomes a matter of knowing everything that was done before, and cribbing only from the least known examples." Of particular interest to the representatives of the advertising agency field was a lengthy presentation on creativity in marketing today, delivered by Remus A. Harris, new products manager of Colgate-Palmolive Co.'s toilet articles division. Mr. Harris Broadcasting