As industrial values, efficiency and calculation were not new to advertising in the 1950s. Science and rationality have been always been pillars in modern advertising’s claims to cultural authority, and over the first half of the twentieth century they came to predominate in professional orthodoxy over the competing impulse toward what Jackson Lears calls the “carnivalesque.”118 The best-known advertising professionals of the era held to the conviction that their purpose was to sell the client’s product. They believed that with research and discipline, their persuasive techniques could be codified as empirical laws and the effects of their efforts could be verified
117 David Beer, “Envisioning the Power of Data Analytics,” Information, Communication & Society 21, no. 3 (2018), 466.
118 Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
with scientific certainty.119 For adherents to this mindset, creative fancy and other soft-sell elements that have come to typify brand advertising not only deviated from legitimate principles, but they seemed hopelessly dissociated from the goal of producing a measurable impact on sales.120 According to a 1947 article in Fortune about the J. Walter Thompson agency, whose president subscribed to both behaviorism and a managerial philosophy centered on science, efficiency, and control, “Thompson wants to sell its clients’ products, not make splashes with individual ads.”121
Thomas Frank argues that in the 1960s, agencies abandoned this spirit and its organizational culture. “The authority of ‘science’ in advertising theory,” Frank writes, had been “diminished considerably by the mid-1960s.”122 Frank makes an important contribution to our understanding of how advertisements and management styles exerted forms of cultural power. But he limits his analysis mostly to the production of commercial messages, rather than approaching advertising as a set of relationships and processes that links together advertisers, agencies, media, and related organizations providing research and marketing services. By ignoring media buying and downplaying the broader integration of advertising and marketing (not to mention business uses of computing), Frank fails to recognize that the segmentation of consumer markets that helped catalyze advertising’s reorientation around individuality and difference was facilitated in practice by an intensification of research and calculative procedures. While a loosening of bureaucracy allowed for unorthodox creative expressions that tapped into the zeitgeist of the 1960s, to actually identify narrow audience segments and place commercial messages in front of the right people depended on enormous organizational efforts and a deep
119 Frank, The Conquest of Cool, 38-47.
120 See Joseph Turow, Niche Envy: Marketing Discrimination in the Digital Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 49-50.
121 “J. Walter Thompson,” Fortune, November 1947, 223. Also quoted in Frank, The Conquest of Cool, 43. 122 Frank, The Conquest of Cool, 93.
commitment to systematic and data-driven planning. Agencies may have retreated from scientific approaches to preparing copy, but they moved decisively in the opposite direction in making and evaluating decisions about allocating advertisers’ dollars. As the Television Bureau of Advertising observed in a plea for more research on commercial effectiveness in 1961, “larger budgets, increased competition, [and] narrowing profit margins demand greater accuracy in recognizing and making each decision in this complex age of possibilities, and insist upon finer measures of this accuracy.”123
Advertising Age recalls that unencumbered creative freedom did not even last a full decade: “In the late 1960s, when it became apparent that an economic recession was likely, marketers moved away from image advertising and toward research-backed, results driven strategy.”124 By 1967 a media buying and research director observed that, in his domain, “With the advent of more research the pendulum [had] swung again to reliance on ‘numbers.’”125 That same year the president of a marketing firm owned by Interpublic “predicted that selection of advertising media in the future would rely more heavily on the behavioral sciences.”126 The co- designer of America’s first electronic computer even imagined that sometime between the 1980s and 2010s marketing planning would come to “be handled by a psychologist who is a psychologician of the computer age, fully capable of relating his knowledge of human behavior to the machine”—a prescient, if oddly worded forecast of today’s behavioral data scientists.127 Even earlier, it was reported, “Creative men are being asked to boil down a minute tv commercial to 30
123 “Will Research Reveal tv’s Real Image?” Broadcasting, July 3, 1961, 25. 124 “1960s Creativity and Breaking the Rules,” Advertising Age, March 28, 2005.
125 Malcolm B. Ochs, “Computer Technology: The Potential Revolution in Media Buying,” Broadcasting, November 27, 1967: 20.
126 “TVB Searches for Guiding Light,” Broadcasting, November 20, 1967, 36.
seconds because of the computer’s search for ‘optimum efficiency’ of an ad budget.”128 A calculating mindset was not evacuated from the advertising industries, it simply permeated other areas—ones which gained considerably in power over the next two decades.129 No less a creative shop than Doyle Dane Bernbach reorganized its media operations in 1970, citing as one factor in the decision “the marriage of computer systems to media departments.”130 The leading trade publication for commercial television went so far as to posit, “The computer will be as important a tool in the business of broadcasting in the 1970’s as the transmitter.”131
Without denying the significance of a creative revolution, I argue that we must understand the late-1950s and 1960s as an inflection point in an evolution toward calculation, efficiency, and control. Even as advertising’s place in the popular culture became aligned with creativity and hipness, the intensification of a quantitative logic within marketing and media buying slowly transformed the marketing complex in ways that steered the whole enterprise profoundly toward the goal of efficient and systematic behavioral influence that held sway when the computer arrived. The computer did not create the will to calculation in advertising so much as it presented new resources that could be adapted to that purpose. Under continued pressure from advertisers and the shareholders of the major advertising conglomerates, the institutions and infrastructures supporting and shaping the marketing complex were gradually reengineered to facilitate calculation, as much as to promote creativity.
128 Robert Heady, “Computers Bring New Dimensions to Ad Field,” Advertising Age, December 10, 1962, 88.
129 On the increasing influence of media planning and buying, see Joseph Turow, The Daily You (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 21-33.
130 “Tooling Up for Sharper Buying in the 70’s,” Broadcasting, February 16, 1970, 54-55. In later years, DDB Needham was ahead some larger agencies in installing micro-computers in its offices, and the more open corporate culture encouraged experimentation with computer facilities. Interview with Kevin Killon, April 30, 2018.