So who’s making your business hum?

->-> And are you looking after them?

Winston Churchill once said at a dinner party “This pudding has no theme.”

The best advertisements, essays, films, music - the best of anything - have a theme.

Look at this demonstration - almost a century old.

Starts with an alarm clock; ends with a powerful proposition.

Hardly any ad agencies take their own medicine. They tell you to advertise yet don't themselves.

But this is a brilliant exception. It's almost a hundred years old; and if you allow for the fact that many women adorn our business it still teaches lessons.

The Lennen & Mitchell story is instructive. Eventually they changed their name to Lennen & Newell...

... and in 1972 had the bleak distinction of suffering the biggest bankruptcy in advertising history leading to 18 years of acrimonious law-suits.

But let’s move on from such trivia to this ad, which reflects an important truth.

Note the timelessly simple, classic layout and contrast it with some of the kooky, hard-to-read stuff advertisers run today. 

Now follow the theme. Advertising is a people business; but agencies don’t always look after their people as they should. 

David Ogilvy, as so often, put it pithily: "Cosset the geese who lay the golden eggs."

Back in 1987 I had to give a talk to Ogilvy & Mather Managing Directors and - scratching around for a theme - chose this advertisement.

But first I found my man.

I went to one of my copywriters and asked him to make a video about how he felt about things.

I played it and pointed out to my colleagues that people like Andy were the reason for their success.

I got excited about the subject because I believe this profoundly.

Read the ad: see how beautifully it flows.

It starts with a Frenchman called LeRoy - the first example of how important it is to find your man.

Then came the example of a clothing company and how important it was to find their man.

Then on to Claude Hopkins the copywriter who built the world's largest ad agency and what he called "Action Advertising".

(The phrase makes me laugh. If your advertising doesn’t cause action then you've wasted everyone’s time and money.)

Then came how important men are in the Ad Agency business. And having built the story up, the writer points out that Lennen & Mitchell were the men to call. 

Why? Because they’d found the right people. And the right people were themselves.

They were selling personal service, and the copy ends with a simple question I find often works - “Do you?”

The ad is so powerful because it has a great theme - summed up in the slogan at the end: "An advertising agency in which the principals do the work".

Every client wants to know you are involved in their work.

But as I said, this agency came to a catastrophic end - caused by CEO Adolph Toigo who never told his men what he was doing - and ran up prodigious debts.

And just in case you wondered, the principal at my agency (me) wrote this - and was working for a U. S. client an hour ago.

Does this kind of dedication appeal to you? Drop me a line. 

Best,

Drayton

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