Chapter 6: Not with a Bang But With a Wimper (The Attention Merchants)

The average woman was outraged, Business Week reported, to find that “the soap which made her so popular at the dance was made with a little creosol… recommended by the Government for disinfecting cars, barns and chicken yards.”

Some of the most intense new critics of advertising were internal. In 1928, Theodore MacManus, who had so famously branded Cadillac, Dodge, and Chrysler, decided he’d had it.

Writing in The Atlantic, he denounced both his own industry and the whole of modern civilization: “Advertising has gone amuck,” he wrote, “in that it has mistaken the surface silliness for the sane solid substance of an averagely decent human nature.” A serious Catholic, he blamed the American brand of Protestantism for creating a “Nadir of Nothingness” in which people worshipped consumer goods as “brightly packaged gifts of the gods.”

Helen Woodward, a copywriter of prominence, wrote a popular book lamenting the emptiness of what she’d done with her life. She offered a professional confession: “In the advertising business we thought ourselves important. We thought we knew what we were doing; we had our plans for next week or next year. The realization came to me with a slow shock that I was nothing, we were nothing. We were feathers all of us, blown about by winds which we neither understood nor controlled.”

The darkest was the work of James Rorty, another former copywriter, who wrote Our Master’s Voice: Advertising (1934), in which he described the job’s effect on the soul.

The adman, he wrote, “inevitably empties himself of human qualities. His daily traffic in half-truths and outright deceptions is subtly and cumulatively degrading. No man can give his days to barbarous frivolity and live. And ad-men don’t live. They become dull, resigned, hopeless.

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Related posts:

1. Will It Fly Summary (7/10)
2. Modern Man in Search of a Soul Summary (8/10)
3. Part 2: Stir Up The Transgressive and Taboo (The Art of Seduction)
4. Chapter 19: And They Lived Happily Every After (Sapiens)