The sub-title of this book – ‘a true story of a ridiculous attempt to make advertising more truthful’ – gives a flavor of the urgent, declamatory text to be found within.
Cohen, a sometime British creative director and now long-time US resident, “tells his truth,” as people like to say now, a truth which in this case is the story about the agency he co-founded and lead in New York in the 1990s, Mad Dogs & Englishmen.
It’s an engaging example of advertising-copywriter-writing that is getting rarer by the day. It is pared back, active and droll … and in bulk can come over like somebody at a party who is at first a brilliant performer but turns out to be trying a little too hard to entertain. Long copy print advertising can be brilliant for a page but for ‘more than 335 pages’, as Cohen describes his book, it becomes exhausting.
That minor carp aside, there’s much to be enjoyed. For a start, the ads. They’re almost all really cheap and edgy, a client list where the Village Voice might count as one of the larger accounts. The tales of how they came about, or just the accumulation of funky factoids on his life and times in advertising back then, are well worth a flip through. Take random chapters and savor … from the agency’s founding in a walled-off part of Cohen’s loft apartment, to how the death in 2003 of the client Dr Atkins (of Atkins’ diet fame) led to a fatal loss of business for the agency, closing in 2005.
Along the way there are some real zingers and some great advice for anybody planning to do something different with their own new agency. It turns out Cohen’s big motivation (and in a way the fuel for his book title) came from reading the results of a Gallup survey in 1990 that placed advertising as a career option on a par with selling insurance or cars, way down the list of credible occupations and holding just “a 7% integrity rating”.
At Lürzer’s Archive we would like to commend all to follow what Cohen committed to then: “From now on I will tell only the absolute truth about anything I am advertising. I will not be part of this degradation of public trust!”
All images from HONEST!: A True Story of a Ridiculous Attempt To Make Advertising More Truthful, published by Tish Tosh.
