Storyboard (2 page)

“N
EVER
A T
IME
W
ITHOUT
B
EAUTY
. B
E
S
URE
O
F
Y
OUR
L
OVELINESS
W
ITH
F
OUNDATION
S
OAP
.
Wherever
you are—asleep or awake, at work or play—there is no time when
your
beauty is not enhanced by make-up if you use Foundation Soap.” Simon Purvis was
reading
over the shoulder of Sophia Last, with whom he shared an office. “Give it here,” he said, taking the top clipping from the file she was studying.” Why all this interest? Do
you
use Foundation Soap, love? Is that why you look so lovely all the time? Or is that the natural you, lambent beneath the
maquillage?
”

“Just natural me.”

“True. But not modest to say so.” He continued to read. “Foundation Soap comes in five natural shades, specially blended by expert cosmeticians for your
complexion’s
needs.”

“I know.”

“There’s Radiant Peach, Apple Blossom, English Rose, Magnolia and Gypsy. Why are you reading all these anyway?”

“For a meeting. P.A.’s office.”

“That’s interesting. I wonder which shade
he
uses. Perhaps there’s a special one for burst capillaries. Old Tawny—as supplied to members of the Institute of Directors.”

“Shut up, Simon. I’ve got to go down in a moment, and I want to read these first.”

“Don’t bother. They’re all the same. Anyway, why Foundation Soap? Are we getting the account?”

“Of course not. How could we?”

“Quite right, love. A foolish question, and I’m a foolish boy to ask it.” The Agency already handled an account for one of the big soap and synthetic detergent companies, and could not accept a competitor. “Then what?”

“How should I know?”

“Mysteries! Mysteries!” Simon said. “What an
exciting
life we copywriters lead! You get on with your reading, love, and I won’t hinder you. Anyway, I’ve got a dishonest little eleven-inch triple to write for the
News
of
the
World
.” He went back to his desk on the opposite side of the tiny office, picked up a pencil, and wrote “Science tells us …” meditatively on top of a sheet of blue copy paper. Sophia turned over one advertisement, and began to read the next. Simon was quite right; they
were
all the same, with only
unimportant
variations of picture and phrasing.
Nevertheless
, she read them all. When, twenty minutes later, she went off to her meeting in P.A.’s office, Simon had reached his second sub-head, “The Secret of Life”, and did not even look up to see her go.

*

P.A. was one of the Agency’s senior Directors, all of whom had initials and no names. He was a little ruddy man, who had once been Production Manager to a firm in the Midlands which manufactured wash-basins and lavatory pans. He had been at school with the
Chairman
of the Agency and when the Chairman, who had been an Account Manager at another Agency, had
broken away in 1932 to found his own, he had asked P.A. to join him, and P.A. had raised what money he could, and had come to London. The Chairman had brought with him from his previous employers a nucleus of clients and of creative staff who had been working for those clients, and to that nucleus other nuclei had been attracted when the Chairman had
persuaded
F.R. and G.K., the other two founder-members of the Agency, to venture with him. Since that time the Agency had grown and grown into the tall glass-fronted building which now housed it, so that it would not now consider accepting as a client any firm which could not afford to spend more than
£
100,000 a year on
advertising
, and the only such client which still remained on the Agency’s list was the little Midlands manufactory which had once employed P.A.

There were seven Directors now, all growing old. P.A., F.R., G.K. and the Chairman had been joined by B.C. (once the Advertising Manager of the Agency’s first really big account), L.T. (ex-schoolmaster,
ex-journalist
, and now the Agency’s Creative Director), and R.P. (the Company Secretary). The Agency was not a family firm. The Chairman had believed, when he founded it, that advertising skills and what is called
flair
are not necessarily inheritable, and each member of the Board had agreed to sell his stock holding when he
retired
to the man who should succeed him. The heirs of this succession would be drawn from the body of
Associate
Directors, not yet dignified by initials, who jostled and manœuvred, like fish too closely packed in a tank, for the Directors’ favours, and as the years passed and the Directors grew nearer the retiring age, the fish
became
more slippery and more determined.

Increasing age and the long experience of power had
brought out eccentricities in all the Directors, but P.A. was the most capricious. He enjoyed being P.A. He was a virtuoso in advertising. He did not simply anticipate the intentions of his clients; he reacted intuitively to their deepest temperamental needs, bullying the
masochistic
, steadying the uncertain, sage to the would-be sage, the plain man to the stupid, the man-of-the-world to the man-of-the-provinces, and had even sold to one client, whose temperament was ruled by boredom, what later turned out to be a spectacularly successful though dotty advertising campaign simply by telling him, “After all it’s your money. Why shouldn’t you have some fun spending it?” To his copywriters and artists, to the painstaking economists of the Marketing Dept., P.A. was an irritation only bearable because they knew that once
he
had accepted a campaign, at least the client would be sure to accept it also. But you never knew where you were with him; he was a chameleon.
Sometimes
he would discard all your carefully compiled market data, saying fretfully, “What the hell good is all this bumph? I need an idea. Don’t people
have
ideas any more?” and sometimes he would refuse to show to his client even the most brilliant campaign until every advertisement had been tested for memorability and meaning by a panel of working-class housewives in Norwich, checked against comparable experience in the United States, and reported upon by the psychologists of the Tavistock Institute. And the most annoying thing was that, virtuoso or not,
P.A. didn’t really know anything about advertising.
His intuition told him how to treat his clients, whom he met frequently, but nothing about the people who bought his clients’ goods, very few of whom he met at all. As for his subordinates at the Agency, P.A. did not need intuition to deal with them; it was for them
to adjust themselves to him, and for him simply to be P.A.—P.A. in whatever
persona
he chose to adopt, P.A. the Tycoon, P.A. the Good Fellow, P.A. the Creative Genius, P.A. the Man of Decision, P.A. the Unhurried, P.A. the Leader of a Devoted Team, all these P.A. s and others, but always (centre-stage) P.A.

P.A.’s office was on the first floor. Since it faced the square, most of the outer wall was of glass, and was covered by a long Venetian blind of grey with dark blue cords. P.A.’s desk was conventionally large and
leather-topped
, and there was seldom anything on it but a ceramic ashtray, an ivory telephone, and sometimes a letter-book of red leather. There were chairs in the room and a sofa, and a dark blue carpet. On one wall there was a painting by Sir Winston Churchill; on another was a large board covered with asbestos felt, on which advertisements could be pinned. Those who attended meetings in P.A.’s office tried to arrive early enough to avoid having to sit on the sofa; it was difficult to look alert on so comfortable a piece of furniture, and anyway, as Donald Wallace of Marketing once remarked, you felt too much like one of the Three Little Maids from school.

When Sophia arrive with her Copy Group Head, Hugh Grover, she saw that the other people in the room were all members of the Glo group—Glo was a washing powder made by Hoppness, Silch & Co., who also made New Fiz, Super, Shining Blue and Gentle (which were also washing powders) and Coppelia, Kingfisher and New Dream (which were toilet soaps). Each of the Agency’s accounts was under the general charge of one of the directors, and under him there was the team which actually worked on the day-by-day conduct of the account—an Account Manager and his Assistant, a Marketing Group Head and
his
Assistant, a Copy Group
Head and a copywriter, an Art Director, a TV Director, and someone from Media Planning. All these people, unless the claims of the account were very heavy indeed, would also work on other accounts, but usually with a different set of work-mates, so that the temperamental stresses set up in one group were not carried over into any others—Sophia herself worked under Hugh on Poppity Pops (a breakfast food) and Ambergris
Shampoo
, but none of the other members of the Glo group worked on those accounts.

These were the members of the Glo group: Keith Bates and Tony Barstow (Account Management), Don Wallace and Peter Wicklow (Marketing), Hugh Grover and Sophia Last (Copy), Fidge Randolph (Art—he was the son of Sir Burton Randolph, who had painted the portrait of every Lord Mayor in the Midlands between 1900 and 1915), Desmond Bast (Television) and Harold Hartley (Media). They sat uncomfortably in P.A.’s office, waiting for P.A. to arrive, for it was one of P.A.’s characteristics that he was never there when you came to his office for a meeting. Nobody knew where he went—perhaps, as Simon Purvis had suggested, it was only to smoke a cigar in the Directors’ loo—but he would always allow time enough for everyone to become
unsettled
before walking briskly in to start the meeting.

Hugh sat like a cat on the sofa, and folded his paws in front of him. He was a little gray comfortable man, grown senior in the Agency simply by staying there. “Just in time,” he said. “I
am
glad.”

Stacked together by Don Wallace’s chair were a
number
of charts—pieces of heavy cardboard, on which
parti-coloured
columns indicated, on one chart the different market shares held by competing products, on others the different sorts of people, by age, sex and social class, who
bought these products, on yet another the amounts spent by each of the products in press and television advertising. An easel was propped just behind the door of the office. Obviously Donald was to deliver a lecture. The meeting would go on for a long time, and Sophia hoped there would be tea. The tea served to Directors was better than the tea brought round by trolley to other members of the staff.

“What’s it all about?” she said to Peter Wicklow.

“Foundation Soap.”

“Yes, I know. But what about it?”

“P.A. won’t say.”

P.A.’s secretary opened the door, and P.A. himself entered the office. “What—late am I?” he said. “I’m always late for meetings. Let’s get started.” He sat down, looked round the room as if checking them off in an Attendance Register, nodded to Donald, and said, “Donald, you begin.” Peter Wicklow set up the easel, and placed the first of the charts on it. Donald said, “P.A. wants me to tell you about Foundation Soap.”

“Well, go on. Do it,” P.A. said.

Foundation Soap had only been on the market two years. It was made and sold by Pettifer’s, a small firm that did most of its business in proprietary medicines. Consequently Foundation Soap was outside the control of the three colossi who between them manufactured most of the soaps and washing powders to be found in the shops. Although small, Pettifer’s was what is called “old-established”; it had excellent distribution among chemists all over the country, and a good reputation in the trade. The firm had begun in the nineteen-twenties by supplying standard unbranded items like aspirin, yeast and sulphur tablets, which chemists could bottle under their own labels, and had gone on slowly to
produce a range of branded products which sold steadily, if not particularly quickly, chiefly because they were “ethicals”—which means that you could not buy them without a doctor’s prescription, so that they were not advertised except in the medical magazines. In 1952 Pettifer’s had bought up a declining firm which had once sold cosmetics, but was by then reduced to a single product, a bubble bath called Desire Me. Supported by an occasional quarter-page advertisement in the women’s weeklies and put out to all the chemists who already bought from Pettifer’s, Desire Me settled down to a steady, if unspectacular, rate of sale, and Pettifer’s
directors
began to look about for something else; the Desire Me organization, they felt, was not being used as fully as it might be. They had no wish to re-enter the market for cosmetics; it would be easier to try something new. So Pettifer’s had consulted its Agency, and that Agency had mounted a research, and out of it all came
Foundation
Soap, which was not exactly a cosmetic, and not exactly a soap, and certainly not a patent medicine, but had done very well for Pettifer’s just the same.

Advertising has not been a profession very long, but already, among the older, toping generation, among the directors of some of the smaller agencies growing senile together in golfing suburbia, there is talk of the good old days. All the successes of advertising in the good old days, they would tell you, were sudden flashes—
advertisements
printed upside down, pages left almost entirely white, slogans which swept the people into the shops where they bought and bought and bought again, puns which passed into the public language. Perhaps that was so once, and those who see the Agency as a wilfully malevolent force which corrupts men, leading them like sheep always into a deeper slavery, certainly like to
believe
it. But success stories nowadays are seldom so
simple
; the flash is not so sudden. Agencies begin with facts. If an old product is in decline, its Agency must discover why the people who used to buy it are doing so no longer, and whether other people, who have never bought it, might now be induced to do so. If a new
product
is to be produced, it will be fashioned out of what people like and dislike about other products of the same general nature; before you can undertake the expense of making something, and marketing it, you have to be sure that people will want what you have made—and they cannot be made to want it unless there is
something
in them which
does
want it, whether they know it or not. So that, long before anyone has begun to devise advertisements, the Market Researchers of an Agency have been as busy as mice in houses and shops, asking questions and tabulating answers, and burrowing below the surface of those answers to discover whether
anything
is meant which has not been said. Then, out of all the people in the country, you will know how many of them are in the market for your product, and for what reasons they may buy it. Now the Media Department of your Agency must determine whether or not you can reach them economically by advertising—for, let us say, if only women under the age of twenty-five can be
expected
to buy your product, and only 20 per cent of the readership of a women’s magazine which reaches two million women are under that age, and if the cost of a colour-page in that magazine should be
£
2,800, you will be paying fourteen shillings to show your advertisement in colour at a reasonable size to each hundred of your potential customers, who may not even read the
advertisement
, let alone buy your product. Only then will the Creative Departments of the Agency, knowing now to
whom they have to sell and for what reasons and by what media, only then will they begin to devise
advertisements
, making them as credible as they can, and as memorable so that long after the telly has been switched off, the magazine laid by, the poster left behind in the crowded street, those advertisements will go on working in the mind. And that is what happened to Foundation Soap. It was a success story of advertising today; many people had worked in different ways to make it sell
successfully
.