The real Mad Men say a long farewell.
As the last agency on Madison Avenue turn the lights out, we look at the (almost) lost art of the long-copy ad
The New York office of the advertising agency TBWA/Chiat Day is moving. That’s not news. Beyond the company’s staff and clients, does anyone really need to know?
Apparently, the 740,000 print subscribers to The New York Times do.
The agency took out a full-page ad in the newspaper to announce their decision. Why?
It’s because they noticed something interesting. It wasn’t the new location, 15 blocks away on Third Avenue.
Third Avenue is not interesting.
The old address was. In quitting Madison Avenue, they claimed to be the last major agency to leave the thoroughfare that used to be synonymous with the whole advertising industry – so much so, the people who worked there legendarily crowned themselves ‘Mad Men’.
The TV series of that name was set in the industry’s 1950s and 1960s heyday. Now, in 2023, the Mad Men era is officially over.
But it’s not so much the reason the ad was written that interests us. It’s the writing.
The TBWA/Chiat Day ad (above) is what we call long-form copy. It’s very rare now: ads in newspapers (themselves an endangered species) are heavy on promotions or images or both.
But ads like these once caused nothing less than a cultural and creative revolution. In 1959, the agency Doyle Dane Bernbach won the account for Volkswagen. Bill Bernbach, the creative director, a Jewish copywriter from the Bronx, had to sell a small European vehicle with its roots in Nazi Germany to an American public that loved big cars and thought European cars, let alone Nazi ones, were ‘lemons’.
The Think Small campaign made a virtue of the Beetle’s size, its weird looks and the mere fact it was unlike anything any American manufacturer would ever make.
That was a triumph of marketing savvy, art direction and – above all – writing: long-form copy and what we now clumsily call ‘tone of voice’.
It’s that tone of voice the 2023 TBWA/Chiat Day copywriters sought to capture as they told the world they were upping sticks to a less fashionable part of town.
Or maybe ‘pay homage to’ is a better phrase.
How did they do it? Let’s strip this thing down and take a look.
Let’s think about the headline first.
The last ad from the last big ad agency on Madison Avenue.
It’s long for a headline, but the words are short and simple (ask Donald Trump why this works). The rhythmic internal repetition within the sentence is a device writers have been using since biblical times.
Then there’s the full stop.
Newspaper sub-editors to this day wince when they see ads like this. An editorial headline never takes a full point. (I wonder how many readers are noticing that I am committing that sin throughout this piece?)
But there must be a reason why writers with millions of dollars of their client’s money behind them chose to defy tradition and good practice.
First, imagine nothing there. That’s what a newspaper headline-writer would do. It’s fine…but the words just float off into mid air.
Now try an exclamation mark, the notorious ‘screamer’. Too loud, too eager to please. You shy away. A question mark? The last ad from the last big ad agency on Madison Avenue? So, you’re asking me a question I’ve zero interest in answering?
But the full stop ends quietly, but decisively. You can’t help but pause. And consider.
More on full stops. And short sentences.
Virgina Wade: line call
From the Bernbach era on, the full-stop became the copywriter’s punctuation tool of choice. Sentences became shorter. Fancy language was out. Forget sub clauses. Ditch colons. You get the idea.
And sentences became paragraphs. I remember an ad that simply ran:
Meet Virginia Wade.
Literally.
In person.
A bit much?
Maybe.
Definitely.
Now check the syntax in the TBWA/Chiat Day ad. The sentences without main verbs. A different office. And thanks. Iconic ideas like…
But hey, they’re not paid to impress their old English teachers. They're paid to pack as much info as they can into a small space. Persuasively.
It’s awfully quiet around here.
Read the words in the ‘moving’ ad, and the Bernbach ones that inspired it, out loud. Then think of the person speaking those words and where they are.
They’re not in a showroom. They’re not on a street corner. They’re sure as hell not in a pulpit.
Hey, they’re probably in a bar. Just chatting. Not showing off. Just telling you something you might be interested in. No problem if you’re not. We can talk about something else.
Bernbach was a master of complicity as much as simplicity. He turned down the volume. He talked to you as a person, not as a crowd. Before you know it, you’re reading 150 words you hadn’t planned on reading. You are in his world. He’s buying you a drink. You’re buying his story.
It’s all a bit like writing a blog.
Bernbach: a complicit affair
Fact. It’s not that simple.
I bet that ad is the hardest work the TBWA/Chiat Day creatives will do all year. The most drafts, the most mark-ups – such a forest of them you can barely see the original text. The most agonising over every word, but some words more than others.
I speak from experience. Agencies paid to promote other people’s goods are usually hopeless at promoting their own. And they hate doing it.
The one agency which broke that rule, as it broke so many, was Saatchi and Saatchi. When they opened in London’s Soho, a tiny ‘shop’ dwarfed by the Madison Avenue giants, they had the hubris to take a full page in The Sunday Times with the headline WHY I THINK IT'S TIME FOR A NEW KIND OF ADVERTISING.
The byline was creative director Jeremy Sinclair. In truth, the copy was written by a business journalist called Robert Heller (I know: I used to work for him*).
It wouldn’t be the first time the Saatchis would overlook technicalities like the truth – nor show incredible chutzpah while more boring agencies hid behind their brass plates. SAATCHI AND SAATCHI. FIRST OVER THE WALL said an ad in what was still East Germany after the Communist world was liberated that night in 1989.
Shameless. Opportunistic. Genius.
British copywriters instantly responded to the Bernbach way. By the 1970s, Madison Avenue was already beginning to revert to type: play safe, manage the client, don’t let the creatives think they run the show. Rather like the bands of the British invasion in pop music a decade earlier, Saatchis and their ilk took an American form of expression and made it their own.
Maurice and Charles Saatchi: London calls the shots
I can guess which words they struggled with.
It’s a great idea, this ad. Let’s face it, TBWA/Chiat Day or whatever you’re called – you were hardly the most famous agency in the avenue. Hell, Chiat Day made its name in LA before being bought and invited into a forced marriage by the Omnivore parent company..
But as you’re the last one standing, you can grab all that heritage, nostalgia and goodwill for your own. It’s almost as if Don Draper himself worked for you.
But there is a bigger but. You don't want to be seen as dinosaurs: an old-school ‘shop’ with a complicated name that speaks of wearisome, decades-old corporate takeovers. You now have to compete in a world of hip agencies loft-spaced in hip and regenerated areas of second-tier cities, agencies with names like Toenail or Artichoke. (Help – there IS an agency called Artichoke. But I think we’re safe with Toenail).
So, you find a safe place in some casual millennialness. Ahem…hey… and hope the kids don’t notice the ‘figuratively and literally’. (Then you remember that no kid on Earth, or even in this city, reads The New York Times).
You keep it chummy, except when you figuratively if not literally insert the ‘serious’ emoji and let the folks know that you can have a matey laugh at boozy lunches (note: the last boozy lunch on Madison Avenue was in 1991).
But you also have to say how you deplore ‘boardrooms filled with only white men’. The rhythm of the writing gets lost then: but you made the point.
The writing doesn’t quite recover and we end on a tepid piece of word play and a change-of-address card.
Kind of appropriate, that tailing off. It’s what Madison Avenue, and the whole ad industry, has been doing for a while.
But at least they went down writing. Long-form.
Afterword: Streets and avenues and trades
Madison Avenue has no ad agencies now. This happens. You won’t see many people with chisels on London's Stonecutter Street, though you will find Goldman Sachs bankers. Nor are there ropemakers on Hamburg’s Ropemaker’s Street – or Reeperbahn, as it’s known to Beatles fans and connoisseurs of red light districts.
I used to work in Fleet Street when it really was the street where newspaper journalists worked. The last journos left in 2016, and now it’s just a sobriquet that’s come unmoored from its origins. Fleet Street has been annexed by a much bigger cluster – the financial district. And one day an online encyclopedia will have to explain why we once called the UK financial district ‘the City’.
Made you think?
If you want to know how to make words work harder for you and your business, check out our latest courses at Forthwrite.co.uk.
* The author is a former editor of Campaign magazine when it was still called the UK’s ‘advertising bible