Planet Word

by J. P. Davidson

  TV commercials in the UK particularly like to use endlines and some of the best slogans (and quirky storylines) have become as much a part of our culture as classic TV shows. Many of us can recite advert slogans from our childhood as easily as we can chant a nursery rhyme. ‘Don’t forget the Fruit Gums, Mum,’ Beanz Means Heinz, ‘All because the lady loves Milk Tray.’ ‘Opal Fruits! Made to make your mouth water’, ‘For Mash get Smash!’, ‘Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet’

  ‘The end line has got to resonate with people,’ says Bowen. ‘There are thousands of end lines out there, most of which we don’t care about. But when you get it right and there’s some emotional connection with the end line, then I think you can tell the story which leads up to it again and again, which is what makes the words so powerful.’

  Today the notion of advertising as an art of persuasion is seen as rather an old model. The days of the unique selling propositions –USPs – have gone. One detergent really isn’t that different from another. So you have to attract people to your brand rather than persuade them that it’s the right product. Advertising has become much more about engaging people emotionally, and the most successful way of doing this is by creating a story about the brand.

  Don’s favourite ad from his own agency in recent years is the McDonald’s poems.

  Now the laborers and cablers and council-motion tablers were just passing by …

  and the first-in types and lurking types and like-to lose their-gherkin types and suddenly-just-burst-in types were just passing by.

  He likes the attention to detail of the words, the internal rhymes, the little word jokes. The most interesting thing of all was – ‘it was so human’.

  Does Bowen worry that this storytelling in advertising, the communal appeal of the sales pitch, will be lost as the consumer is targeted with individual messages and offers via the internet?

  ‘I think there will always be good stories to tell. Whenever it’s difficult in advertising, I always say to myself, this brand, with any luck, is going to be around in fifty years, and somebody is going to need to advertise it. So there will be a story to tell. The question is just finding it.’

  The Most Famous Ad Man in the World

  He has the looks, the pipe and the suit of one of the original Mad Men in the American TV drama set in the advertising world of the 1950s and 60s. Dubbed the ‘King of Madison Avenue’ and the ‘Pope of Modern Advertising’, David Ogilvy rewrote the rules of advertising with his emphasis on brand image, consumer research and the Big Idea. ‘Unless your advertising contains a big idea,’ he insisted, ‘it will pass like a ship in the night.’

  Iconic adverts demonstrate the power of the word

  Born in Surrey in 1911, this eccentric Anglo-Scot started his working life as a sous-chef in Paris after being sent down from Oxford University. A job selling Agas, the most expensive cookers on the market, door to door in Scotland during the Depression gave him the experience of direct selling (albeit to stately homes and convents) which influenced his later career. He wrote the company’s sales manual, The Theory and Practice of Selling the Aga Cooker, which began ‘In Great Britain, there are twelve million households. One million of these own motor cars. Only ten thousand own Aga Cookers. No household which can afford a motor car can afford to be without an Aga.’ The twenty-four-year-old Ogilvy offered a variety of personal tips including: ‘The good salesman combines the tenacity of a bull dog with the manners of a spaniel. If you have any charm, ooze it.’

  David Ogilvy and Mad Men’s Don Draper

  After some initial training in the ad agency Mather & Crowther, he left London at the end of the 1930s to seek his fortune in the United States. There he was hired by pollster George Gallup to work with him at his newly founded audience research institute; he and Ogilvy spent months travelling from New Jersey to Hollywood and back, quizzing the public about their movie star preferences and selling the research to studio heads and movie producers. After working for the British Secret Intelligence during the war and a brief period living with the Amish as a tobacco farmer, Ogilvy finally moved to New York in 1948. With virtually no experience in advertising and, as he recalled, ‘no credentials, no clients and only $6,000 in the bank’ $6,000 in the bank’, he opened up his own agency in a two-roomed office with a staff of two. Within a decade he’d built Ogilvy & Mather into an advertising powerhouse that attracted the biggest clients in America. He employed all the skills he’d learned in door-to-door selling and audience research along with a flair for language, a strong visual sense and a personal showmanship – he was known to dress in a full-length black cape with scarlet lining.

  The bulk of Ogilvy’s notable advertising campaigns were produced in these early years. He called them his Big Ideas. He outlined how to recognize one by asking five questions. ‘Did it make me gasp when I first saw it? Do I wish I had thought of it myself? Is it unique? Does it fit the strategy to perfection? Could it be used for thirty years?’

  An early iconic campaign was for a small clothing company called Hathaway. On the way to the photo shoot, Ogilvy stopped to buy some eye patches. The photograph, ‘The Man in the Hathaway shirt’, caused a sensation. The clothing firm couldn’t keep up with demand. The eye patch had given the ad what Ogilvy called ‘Story Appeal’. The reader was intrigued by the model with one eye and wanted to find out more. Other campaign successes followed: ‘At sixty miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock,’ and ‘Only Dove is one-quarter cleansing cream’ (which helped make Dove America’s bestselling soap). When Ogilvy won the Shell account in 1960, other major American advertisers – General Foods, Campbell Soups, American Express – jumped on board.

  Ogilvy was credited with introducing the novel idea (for the 1950s certainly) of the intelligent consumer. In his bestselling Confessions of an Advertising Man he included his most famous aphorism ‘The consumer is not a moron. She is your wife. Don’t insult her.’

  Words were the backbone of Ogilvy’s campaigns. His biographer, Kenneth Roman, worked for him for twenty-six years and described the ad man at work.

  The eye patch gave the ad ‘Story Appeal’ and caused a sensation

  Being edited by Ogilvy was like being operated on by a great surgeon who could put his hand on the only tender organ in your body. You could feel him put his finger on the wrong word, the soft phrase, the incomplete thought. But there was no pride of authorship, and he could be quite self-critical. Someone found a personally notated copy of one of his books in which he had written cross comments about his own writing: ‘Rubbish,’ ‘Rot!’ ‘Nonsense.’ He would send his major documents around for comment, with a note: ‘Please improve.’

  Ogilvy retreated to a chateau in France in the 1970s, unconvinced by the direction advertising was taking – less direct-sell, more art form.

  I do not regard advertising as entertainment or art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative’. I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product. When Aeschines spoke, they said, ‘How well he speaks.’ But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, ‘Let us march against Philip.’

  When Ogilvy died in 1999, the Leo Burnet agency placed a full-page ad in the trade papers. It read: ‘David Ogilvy 1911 – Great brands live forever.’

  Oratory

  Oratory is a powerful ally of the written word because a great public speech is a potent means of communication. It can persuade, move, convince, agitate, enlighten and – yes – manipulate, and history is littered with examples of oratorical tours de force, from Cicero’s attacks on Mark Antony to Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’.

  The art of oratory goes back to ancient Greece, where public speaking was considered an essential part of education. Socrates, Aristotle and Plato discuss it at length, and it remained a central part of Western liberal humanistic education into the twentieth century. Lawyers, politicians and entertainers all need to
be good orators, and it comes in handy if you’re asked to be a best man or after-dinner speaker. Wit, humour and the habit of reasoned arguments are all part of the armoury of the orator. It’s not essential but it helps if you believe in what you’re saying, as the best examples of oratory bear out.

  The art of oratory is more than just the words and the arguments. The American writer Gore Vidal pointed out that in ancient Rome the senators were really drama critics, critiquing not only the contents of one another’s speeches, but the style of delivery. And former President Bill Clinton says: ‘A lot of communication has nothing to do with the words; a lot of it is just your body language, or your tone of voice, or the way you look in your eyes’.

  Clinton is one of the best-placed (and highest-paid) contemporary orators to remind us of the challenge in delivering a truly great speech:

  ‘You measure the impact of your words,’ he says, ‘not on the beauty or the emotion of the moment but on whether you change not only the way people think, but the way they feel.’

  There is fine oratory to be found in fiction too. Shakespeare is a great place to look, of course: Mark Antony’s funeral oration over the body of Julius Caesar in Act 3. The opening words – ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!’ – along with ‘To be, or not to be’ and ‘Out, damn spot’ and a dozen others – must be among the most-often-quoted lines of Shakespeare, but the whole speech is a massive 137 lines of verse, in which Antony works the crowd and succeeds in changing the minds and hearts of the Roman mob. He uses every oratorical trick in the book, every tool of rhetoric to turn their hostility towards him and Caesar into grief for their murdered emperor and rage against Brutus. Gradually, he builds his argument by suggestion, ambiguity, calculated flashes of anger and grief, hypnotically repeated cadences – ‘Brutus is an honourable man’ – and by persuasion, artifice, sneaky cleverness and superb rhetoric, he brings the crowd over to his side. It’s a piece of theatre, performed by a duplicitous man who is a master of oratory.

  Back to real orators, past and present. There are all kinds of different styles of oratory, and obviously they change over time as tastes and traditions change. The demagogic style of someone like Hitler certainly did work once, but we’re not taken in by it in the same way any more. The Reverend Jesse Jackson is one of the most powerful speakers to have come from a background of preaching, a tradition which creates a kind of poetry of words and rhythm. ‘Words,’ he says, ‘paint pictures; words draw our imagination’, and help us to believe we can achieve great things.

  The Reverend Martin Luther King’s famous ‘I have a dream’ speech in 1963, and Obama’s ‘Yes, we can’ drew heavily on this tradition of church preaching. The pastor is both the composer and the conductor, delivering the words and orchestrating the response from the audience by the pace of delivery, the rhythm of the words and pauses, the rhetorical questions, the ‘call and response’ sections where he knows the audience will murmur in agreement, or repeat a phrase. You can hear it when you listen to ‘I have a dream’ and ‘Yes, we can’, these echoes where people accompany the main voice, like background singers.

  The Reverend Jesse Jackson, one of the most powerful preachers in America

  A way with words has always been an asset, and, when used for political ends, or in times of crisis, it’s worth a hundred battalions. In ancient Greece, Demosthenes employed his powerful oratorical skills trying to warn the citizens about the imminent danger of invasion by Philip of Macedon. When Philip advanced on Thrace, the Athenians called an assembly to debate whether or not to heed the great orator’s advice. Demosthenes was sick of people taking liberty and the Athenian way of life for granted, and he boldly called upon the assembly to rise up and take action.

  US Senator Barack Obama at the ‘Yes, we can’ rally in the Johnson Hall at George Mason University

  It is this fate, I solemnly assure you, that I dread for you, when the time comes that you make your reckoning, and realize that there is no longer anything that can be done. May you never find yourselves, men of Athens, in such a position! Yet in any case, it were better to die ten thousand deaths, than to do anything out of servility towards Philip or to sacrifice any of those who speak for your good. A noble recompense did the people in Oreus receive, for entrusting themselves to Philip’s friends, and thrusting Euphraeus aside! And a noble recompense the democracy of Eretria, for driving away your envoys, and surrendering to Cleitarchus! They are slaves, scourged and butchered.

  After his rousing speech, the assembly all cried out, ‘To arms! To arms!’

  Brevity is also a great attribute. Perhaps the most famous speech in American history is Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. It was delivered on the site of the newly consecrated cemetery in Gettysburg, but ironically it was never intended to be the main event. The principal speech was by the former Secretary of State, Edward Everett, which lasted a good two hours and ran to nearly 14,000 words. Lincoln’s, by contrast, lasted two minutes and was only 275 words long. Today, who remembers Everett’s words?

  The Gettysburg Address

  Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate – we can not consecrate – we can not hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

  And then there are the speeches whose power lies in simplicity, in quiet, heartfelt, searing honesty. In the 1870s, the Native American leader Chief Joseph tried to resist his tribe of Nez Perce being moved to a reservation by the US military. After months of fighting and a forced march of 1,300 miles towards the Canadian border, he surrendered with these words:

  I am tired of fighting. Our Chiefs are killed; Looking Glass is dead, Ta Hool Hool Shute is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led on the young men is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets; the little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are – perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my Chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.

  Chief Joseph’s surrender speech may have immortalized him as a great orator, but it did little to help his cause. The US military reneged on their agreement, and Chief Joseph never returned to his homeland in Idaho.

  One of the greatest of all orators was Winston Churchill. His use of the language, cadence, repetition and the honesty implied in the simplicity of the Anglo-Saxon words in his famous ‘fight them on the beaches’ speech can still raise goosebumps:

  Chief Joseph became immortalized as a great orator

  We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall f
ight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

  The repetition of the same phrase – ‘we shall fight’ – is the same device that Martin Luther King used in ‘I have a dream.’ And every word from ‘We shall defend’ onwards (whether Churchill chose them consciously or not) is Anglo-Saxon, apart from ‘surrender’, which is French. Churchill’s speech worked because it spoke to everyone. As the American journalist Edward R. Murrow commented, ‘He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.’

  Winston Churchill on the balcony of Buckingham Palace on VE Day, 1945

  Propaganda

  Propaganda, said the English academic Francis Cornford, is ‘that branch of the art of lying which consists in very nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies’.

  Advertising may have moved on since the Golden Days of Madison Avenue, but propaganda has never shied away from its primary role of explicit persuasion. In its most basic form, it’s about disseminating information for any given cause, and it’s been around for as long as we’ve had organized societies with messages to promote.

  It doesn’t mean it can’t be entertaining or subtle. Some of the best British propaganda was produced in the dozens of films made during the Second World War. Of course, some of them are truly awful, cringe-making examples of pragmatic jingoism, but others have become classics, like the 1942 Went the Day Well? (based on a Graham Greene short story), which tells how a vanguard of Germans, disguised as British soldiers, infiltrates a sleepy, idyllic English village to prepare the way for invasion. The villagers eventually manage to fight back, with a combination of British pluck, ingenuity and surprising ruthlessness (in one scene the local postmistress kills a German with an axe), and Britain is saved. The purpose, of course, was to warn against the danger of invasion (which, in fact, by 1942 was not so real) and ram home the need for constant vigilance; to portray German brutality and evil and, above all, to extol British patriotism, sacrifice and bravery – all standard war propaganda.