00:00:09.960 - 00:00:33.860

One of the things that made J Walter Thompson agency, the leading advertising agency in the 20th century was the focus on research. And so Stanley Rees, who was the guiding figure through most of the um mid century, had a belief that scientific attitude was the most

00:00:33.869 - 00:00:51.580

important factor in determining what was quality advertising. And he said the agencies that use and employ a scientific attitude are going to be the ones that are most successful. And it turns out he was right about that. And so one of the great things about this

00:00:51.590 - 00:01:19.559

collection is that there our reports and documents and science scientifically gather data and so on. And so there, for example, in 1986 a fellow named Dennis Lanigan gave a speech called it's a long way down to the creative department. In other words, the distance from the

00:01:19.569 - 00:01:41.019

client entering the agency to actually creating an ad, getting to the point where you're creating, the ad is a long way down the hall. And so he had discussed in a lot of detail, all of the different types of research and different, he call it scientific

00:01:41.029 - 00:02:13.070

research in terms of demographics and all the um study of clients and the study of um markets and so on. In 1991 for example, there's a report, 87 slides on ad works. And it's again, it's a report educating clients, educating people in the field about how

00:02:13.080 - 00:02:31.029

the business works. And it's just summary of massive amounts of research. I mean, these people could apply for a National Science Foundation grant, I think and get it. It's really pretty impressive. One of the points that these people make is that there are lots of different

00:02:31.039 - 00:03:02.800

kinds of information that an advertising agency needs to have in order to make decisions about product placement, about where to put an ad, where do the top executives of industries, American industries go for entertainment and for business information. And it turns out that they discovered that

00:03:02.809 - 00:03:19.979

most top executives, of course, this is back in the day when they were all male, just point that out. But it's probably still true that the top executives of most companies watch sports more than any other single thing on TV. And that's why you see so

00:03:19.990 - 00:03:35.429

many very expensive ads on Super Bowl, for example, and ads for things that you would never buy. I mean, you're not going to go buy a plane and you're not going to buy a computing system. But there is a very small number of people who are

00:03:35.440 - 00:03:56.889

making those decisions and they're watching sports and that's why you see some of those ads. So all of this material is is in this, these archives and you can um you can find this and understand why things are where they are and why certain messages to

00:03:56.899 - 00:04:16.950

certain people and so on. So that's before you can start being creative, you have to know who your audience is, where they are and what matters to them. And some of the materials again, as professional to professional materials that are so important. There are several particular

00:04:16.959 - 00:04:41.940

collections within this J Walter Thompson archive that I found very intriguing. So for example, one of them is the new business records and the nifty thing about the new business records is that people don't always understand that advertising agents have to sell themselves to clients and

00:04:41.950 - 00:05:01.989

to get clients. One of the things that J Walter Thompson did and I studied some of these things back in the teens and the twenties, 19 teens and twenties was um promote the advertising field to the country, to culture, to other businesses and why it was

00:05:02.000 - 00:05:22.720

important. And so one of the nifty things about the new business records um is how they describe ways of going after certain kinds of clients. There was a very odd letter that I found um in the 19 seventies that someone from J Walter Thompson was writing

00:05:22.730 - 00:05:38.260

to someone at Sassoon jeans and saying we had a great time at lunch. I just don't understand why you haven't called me it's amazing and they actually use that expression. It's amazing that you haven't called me because we'd be great for you. And I'm thinking, oh

00:05:38.269 - 00:05:59.899

my gosh, this is really pushy. But hey, that must be how it works. So that's a piece of insight and there's nowhere else in the world you could possibly get that. Another set of business records is the review board records, the review board. What is that?

00:06:00.200 - 00:06:23.850

So it turns out that this was a quality control entity within J Walter Thompson. And what they would do is that they would look at quality costs, volume, basically bureaucratic controls. And again, we think of advertising as this hugely creative. Some off the wall, probably too

00:06:23.859 - 00:06:45.529

many people have watched Ad men, which is not how it works. Um And they think that it's just all cleverness, but it's a business. It's like selling or I should say building cars or producing cake mixes and you've got bureaucratic controls, you've got numbers, you've got

00:06:45.540 - 00:06:51.529

quality control just as the same as any other business. And that's very intriguing.