What Would Gossage Do?

If an ad man can actually be someone's hero, Howard Luck Gossage has been mine. The guy was doing stuff in the 50's that would take home a bag full of Lions and Pencils if it ran today...seriously. If you haven't read The Book of Gossage, I recommend you click that link now and super express-o-ship it to your office address before reading the rest of this post.

Gossage's philosophy of advertising can be summed up in one or two sentences depending on how you punctuate it: "People read what interests them. And sometimes it's an ad." That quote has guided and inspired my work ever since I started playing this picture/word game.

But Lately I've wonder if Howard was around today, would he say the same thing? In a world of Tivo, and Firefox ad blockers and spam and ad clutter info overload, I'm not sure.

I sometimes think today he might say something more like, "People don't like ads. So don't make them." And then I think, Gossage would have said it much better.

The point is, in today's ad clutter culture, if you're just trying to make interesting ads, you are setting yourself up to fail. The best advice I could give anyone starting out, or anyone for that matter, is don't make ads. We need to be making experiences, and discoveries, and new inventions and playgrounds and then making them relevant to and ambassadors of our brands.

Of course, back in the 50's Gossage was pumping pink air into people's tires and inventing the Shirtkerchief and selling paper by holding international paper airplane competitions. So, perhaps Howard Luck Gossage said it right the first time.