How Howard Gossage invented interactive advertising in the 1950s
Everyone has heroes, in both our personal and professional lives. People we quote, follow, draw inspiration from, wish we could meet (even if they’ve long since passed), or count as mentors. I discovered Howard Luck Gossage very early in my career, and he quickly became one of my advertising heroes.
Years later - in fact 20 years ago nearly to the day - I wrote the piece below for ClickZ. In the 1950s, long before the internet (and later mobile/social) transformed our world and how we communicate with each other and with brands, Gossage became the first regular practitioner of interactive advertising.
As a long-time Gossage fan, it was a great pleasure to discover that my former colleague Rishad Tobaccowala recently hosted an episode of his always-excellent "What Next" Podcast called "The Howard Gossage Show: Fun, Fame, and How to Manipulate the Media." The episode analyzes the genius of Gossage through the eyes of Steve Harrison, who has now written two books about ol' Howard. Rishad and Steve explore the roots interactivity and other insights about the alchemy that makes advertising transcend commercialism and enter pop culture. Definitely worth a listen.
As we stare into the face of yet another technology-driven reinvention of our industry, I found this episode to be a great reminder about how studying the past can help us understand and predict the future. As Rishad often says, "the future does not fit into the containers of the past," and I believe that whole-heartedly. But at the same time, there are lessons to be learned from industry giants of previous generations.
Below you’ll also find the full, unedited text of my original piece in ClickZ, published in July of 2004.
Photo credit: Ashpollakwrites; Used under Creative Commons license.
The First Interactive Ad Exec
More than four decades ago, a man who hated advertising had a vision of what it should become. He worked in the industry he hated, and some would argue that his philosophy changed the very nature of American advertising. The funny thing is that most advertising professionals (at least from my casual survey of everyone I’ve asked) don’t even know who he is or what he contributed to our industry. He’s often mentioned in the same breath with David Ogilvy and other well-known advertising mavericks. Ogilvy himself, in his often-quoted book Ogilvy on Advertising, called this man “the most articulate rebel in the advertising business.” He was inducted into the Advertising Copywriters Hall of Fame after his death, yet few of us would recognize his photo or his name. I only recently discovered him, and immediately became enamored with his story, so I thought I’d share a very small part of it.
Howard Luck Gossage was born in 1918, and bounced around in many different (and widely varied) careers until he found himself working for an ad agency at the age of 36. He became vice president a year later, and in 1957 joined associates in creating a new agency called Freeman, Mander & Gossage.
His advertising career spanned a 15-year period in the 1950s and 60s. He worked mostly in print. The ads of the time were largely straightforward messages driven by advertisers and agencies who believed – in Gossage’s opinion -- that consumers weren’t the brightest bunch and that repetition was the key. In his book Is There Any Hope for Advertising, he answered the question posed by the title: “from an economic point of view, I don’t think that most of it is. From an aesthetic point of view, I’m damn sure it’s not; it is thoughtless, boring, and there is simply too much of it.”
He believed that the people developing ads suffered from a lack of both creativity and information, so they relied on repetition of the same dull message to break through to consumers.
Gossage obviously didn’t like this approach and developed a philosophy that was considered absolutely radical at the time. He believed that advertising should be a conversation. It’s not about one-way messaging, but rather, if you can get the consumer to participate in the ad, then you’ve made a connection and it’s more likely that they’ll remember your brand and your message.
He was fond of coupons, sweepstakes, and other gimmicks that would get people to engage with his ads. But he also knew how to grab people and get them involved with a clever headline. This idea that advertising should be (wait for it…) interactive has since become conventional wisdom, even at offline agencies that deal primarily with passive media.
Gossage said that “an ad should ideally be like one end of an interesting conversation.” The challenge of making passive media interactive is significant, but many in the offline world have achieved success. We’ve all seen the gimmicks that force interactivity, sometimes awkwardly (both online and off). Others manage elegance, such as a recent Volkswagen Jetta ad that I saw in a magazine. There was a basic photo of the car parked on a small-town-looking street. You turned the page, and there was what appeared to be the same photo. Small copy in the margin read “The new Jetta. Worth a closer look.” In the opposite margin: “Find all 18 things we changed in this picture?” It reminded me of the Highlights magazine that I would always thumb through as a child at the dentist’s office, and I spent the time to find all 18 of those changes.
There are countless other examples in offline advertising, from Apple’s “1984” to some spots a few years back from eToys and so forth. We’ve all got favorite ads that we really connected with; ads that made an impact and have stuck with us over time. I’d wager that most of them have one important thing in common: they let you as a consumer participate in figuring out the message. It was John Steel’s book Truth, Lies and Advertising that introduced me to Gossage, so it’s only appropriate to quote him here: “…advertising works better when it does not tell people what to think, but rather allows them to make up their own minds about its meaning. They participate by figuring it out for themselves.”
So what’s the point of all of this? Howard Gossage had a vision more than forty years ago. But until recently, marketers and agencies have had to deal with media that are inherently passive. Finally, in the Internet, we have a medium that is interactive by its very nature. Gossage’s vision can now be fully realized.
History is an excellent teacher, and recent introductions to great minds like Gossage have reminded me that the concept of interactive advertising is nothing new. Rather, we have been given a new medium and a new set of tools to realize the vision. Do not under-estimate the tremendous power of the marriage of these different types of interactivity – the literal lean forward nature of the Internet and the engaging spirit of “figure it out” concepts. Embrace the power. Experiment. Learn how to use it, but keep the consumer at the center.
