Old Advert Quotes

The problem with trying to find your happiness through avoidance is the nature of reality. Reality simply does not allow us to evade unwanted experiences. Sure, we might be able to escape a few {...] but the evasive life often comes at a cost, like having to live your life in terror. Even if we can successfully ward off some terrifying experiences, we can not advert them all. Particularly, the most unpleasant ones: sickness, old age and death. If our strategy has been to flea unpleasant circumstances, when they come to meet us - as they surely will - our suffering will be great indeed.

Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, the legendary San Francisco-based ad agency behind such classic campaigns as “Got Milk” and the Foster Farm Chickens, had found itself in a funk—and felt increasingly irrelevant in an emerging, transmedia world of social networking, user-generated content, mobile, Internet video, and more. So a few years ago, the agency set an ambitious goal to completely revamp itself for the digital age. “Our goal is to be unrecognizable twelve months from now,” creative director Jamie Barrett said at the time. The idea: transform an agency known primarily for eye-popping television spots into one badass, multiplatform marketing machine. It was well worth the effort. In less than a year, Goodby saw revenues leap 20 percent to $102 million. At the start of its transformation effort, 80 percent of the twenty-five-year-old agency’s revenues came from traditional advertising campaigns, while less than 20 percent came from digital initiatives. Today, after three years of reinvention, those numbers are nearly flip-flopped, with 60 percent of revenues now coming from digital initiatives, and 40 percent from traditional. Now, a team once vexed by what it called “Crispin Envy”—for all the attention Crispin Porter + Bogusky receives for its groundbreaking work in digital media—has found its own footing, and then some. While many have driven the transformation, no one has received more credit as a catalyst for change than Derek Robson, forty-two, whom Goodby recruited from adverting agency powerhouse Bartle Bogle Hegarty in London.

Things are different now. Nowadays the client wants to show the big guys who keep a careful eye on what’s happening on screen and in real life that he can simply flush a million dollars down the tubes; and for that, the worse his advert is, the better. The viewer is left with the feeling that the client and the producers are absolute idiots, but then the signal indicating how much money it costs reaches the viewer’s brain. The final conclusion about the client is as follows – he may be a total cretin, but his business is doing so well he can afford to put out any old crap over and over again. And that’s the best kind of advertising there can possibly be. A man like that will get credit anywhere, no sweat.