Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising Read online

  While positing the desirability of being in Ireland, the text contained in the Pan-Am Clipper ad subtly avoids trading in either nationalist or imperialist constructions. The first three lines of copy each establish the uniqueness of Ireland without ever defining it (e.g. “There is no magic like that of Ireland”), and the final line asserts that the climate is restorative for the mind without indicating what about Ireland specifically engenders this effect. As such, particularized qualities of Irishness elude precise capture in the language of American marketing. Besides tinkering with Hardy’s drafted copy, Shaw also modified both captions that were to appear underneath photographic images of Dublin and Ashford Castle in County Mayo. Hardy’s initial draft of the Ashford Castle caption read as, “Ashford Castle on Lough Corrib in County Mayo offers excellent hotel accommodations. On its 3500 green acres, you can fish, hunt, golf, and enjoy Irish skies!” While retaining Hardy’s straightforward list of generic activities one can do on the grounds, Shaw’s only change is a significant one, amending the second sentence to become in the final copy, “On its 3500 green acres, you can fish, hunt, and play golf under Irish skies.” As such, “Irish skies” are no longer a commodity to be consumed, no longer subject to the tourist’s gaze and instead just a backdrop for leisurely pursuits. A number of contemporary sociologists problematize the claim that tourism is motivated solely by the need for authenticity by pointing to the concept’s inadequacy in assessing “phenomena such as visiting friends and relatives, beach holidays, … fishing, hunting, or sports.” 60 Shaw’s modification to the line maintains its focus on activities rather than the “commodified authentic.”

  Similarly, Hardy’s suggestion for the Dublin image caption read as, “Dublin, capital of Eire, is a metropolis of over half a million people. This is O’Connell Street, with the O’Connell Bridge across the Liffey in the foreground.” In turn, Shaw supplemented Hardy’s straightforward descriptiveness, calling Dublin an “architecturally noble metropolis” and suggesting an extension to the first sentence that indicated the city was “within half an hour’s car drive of wild mountain scenery, and a tram drive of a seaside that rivals the Bay of Naples in European fame.” 61 Again accenting doing as opposed to simply seeing, Shaw asserts the beauty and diversity of Ireland, sidestepping that system that objectifies and exoticizes according to “a particular mode of aesthetic perception—one which renders people, objects, and places strange even as it domesticates them, and which effectively manufactures otherness even as it claims to surrender to its imminent mystery.” 62 The copy Shaw provides for the Clipper campaign (eventually condensed by Hardy with respect to the dictates of space) doesn’t trade in what Griffiths calls the “mythologised and fetishised sign” of Irishness in the global market. 63 In avoiding both “nostalgic” tropes of Gaelic, pagan authenticity and any hint of colonial stereotype, Shaw’s copywriting on the Pan-American campaign seems deliberately phrased and consistent with much of his other writing which, as McEwan has argued, “reveals the tensions that render authenticity an unstable category in modernity.” 64

  Nevertheless, the copy Shaw wrote is counterbalanced by JWT copy that not only is explicit about the product, replete with Pan-American logo and motto (“World’s Most Experienced Airline”), but treads dangerously close to the ideology of tourist marketing . The full facsimile of Shaw’s handwritten changes (published in an August 1956 Round the Square feature) includes a third caption to accompany an image of a Dublin pub that remained mysteriously untouched by Shaw. 65 Indeed, it is the only section whose copy he did not amend in any way: “Figures of O’Connell and other Irish ‘greats’ decorate the front of this typical Dublin ‘pub.’ You can reach Dublin and other parts of Ireland by air, rail or bus from Shannon.” In the first sentence, Irish culture is exotically paraded in quotation marks. Whether Shaw gave any specific blessing or offered revision to this caption cannot be determined but, considering the changes he made to the other captions and the torrent of changes he made to every piece of drafted copy sent to him, it is strange that it was left untouched. In any case, based on the surviving evidence, the playwright seems not to have responded to the other elements of what became the finished advertisement after it appeared; as The New Yorker later observed, “no kick from Shaw so far.” 66

  To a degree, Shaw also is used implicitly as a “stage Irishman” of sorts by the campaign. Even as Shaw the copywriter works to disentangle the description from neo-imperialism, JWT appropriates “G.B.S.” as a brand name endowed not only with authority as a writer but specifically as an Irish writer. Shaw thus is unable to remain apart from commodification; this issue arises most pointedly in a supplement produced in connection with the Pan-Am campaign. Simultaneous to the periodical appearance of the ads, “Pan American distributed to travel agents a redesigned and simplified display poster … which contained a five-line abbreviation of Shaw’s original eight-line statement.” 67 The emerald-colored poster has at its center an image of Shaw’s face (an airplane flying literally overhead) surrounded by Irish iconography (a harp, a cottage, a shamrock, and a castle; see Fig. 5.3). Hovering above Shaw’s condensed blurb and a facsimile signature, the only other text is the centered heading (“Ireland By Clipper”) and the client’s name. Significantly, the revision to Shaw’s blurb removes all reference to air travel, reconfiguring Ireland as the ostensible product, brought to the consumer “by” Pan-Am.

  Fig. 5.3Irish Clipper travel poster, ca. 1940s

  Evoking what Larry Doyle calls “all this top-o-the-morning and broth-of-a-boy and more-power-to your-elbow business,” the design emphasizes recognizable signifiers of “Irishness,” including Shaw’s disembodied head. In the original ad, the image of Shaw (larger than the other three and situated in a visually dominant position) appears to the left of his text and signature at the top of the page. Oddly, the playwright’s picture is captioned with an incomplete sentence, a quoted extract from his copy: “– make the slowest mind flexible for life.” Typical of the choppy JWT copy on the left side of the ad (its ellipses and dashes standing in pointed contrast to the italicized flow of Shaw’s texts), the blurb lacks a subject and, lopping off the “will” from the original, renders the verb inexplicably plural. As such, the copy is a grotesque version of the original, and there certainly is some deeper significance in eliminating the subject and the “will.” Dwarfing the fragment in the travel poster version is the huge, green, stylized word “Ireland” directly beneath Shaw’s picture. Overall, Shaw’s presence in this campaign resembles the way in which Kent reads the representation of Irishness in John Bull’s Other Island as both an expression of postcolonial resistance yet also paradoxically “bound up with [an] inevitability and might of multinationals and transnational capital.” 68 That is to say, while Shaw manages in his own lines to avoid marketing in the key of Broadbent, the ad struggles to evade the imperialist undertones inherent to marketing discourse appealing to American tourists. As with the Harrods campaign, though, the Clipper ad provided another opportunity for agency and personality to renegotiate their relationship to one another and to the consuming public.

  ***If we wished to bequeath to our best friend a MOTTO by which to regulate his efforts and to advance his interest, we would say ADVERTISE, ADVERTISE, ADVERTISE!

  — banner from the Irish Weekly Advertiser (March 25, 1863) 69

  On August 31, 1950, just a couple months before his death, a letter from Shaw appeared in The Times in which he discusses the necessity of promotion:The Soviet State beats us all to nothing in the matter of advertisement, which is a more effective method of propaganda than war, however victorious, can ever be. For over 40 years the Kremlin has been flooding Europe with splendid illustrated magazines in all languages, boosting its extraordinary achievements. … Meanwhile, what have we to show for our own Communism? Plenty. But we never show it. … Our propaganda of plutocracy is incessant. We call it freedom and private enterprise. The future is to the countries that carry Communism farthest and advertise it most
effectually. The Labour slogan used to be Educate, Agitate, Organise. As nobody disputes this nowadays, I propose the addition of Advertise, Advertise, Advertise. 70

  Despite the playwright’s fervent belief in both Communism and marketing, he seems perhaps unable to resist infusing into his advice an undercurrent of Shavian paradox via the implicit echo of the hapless George Robinson in Anthony Trollope’s satirical novel about the field of advertising, The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson (1870). In it, Robinson declares,Different great men have promulgated the different means by which they have sought to subjugate the world. “Audacity – audacity – audacity,” was the lesson which one hero taught. “agitate – agitate – agitate,” was the counsel of a second. “register – register – register,” of a third. But I say – Advertise, advertise, advertise! And I say it again and again – Advertise, advertise, advertise!

  When reading this passage, it is hard not to see the contours of Shaw’s modus operandi with G.B.S. , carving the brand into the zeitgeist with audacity, agitation, and advertisement. In any case, a week later, always attuned to G.B.S.’s missives and their potential to serve the practice, the trades made mention. The World’s Press News and Advertisers’ Review reproduces nearly the entirety of the letter, framing it with the premise thatGeorge Bernard Shaw is unlikely to find any advertising men who will agree with him that the future lies with those countries which “carry Communism farthest and advertise it most effectively” - or even that Britain is, in reality, red right through. However, he will have plenty of his support for his argument that our way of life, whatever we care to call it, needs an efficient promotional backing if others are to be persuaded that it is a good thing. 71

  It concludes by affirming Shaw’s “Advertise, Advertise, Advertise” to be “a proposition which clearly has the makings of a simple, down-to-fundamentals rallying cry for next year’s advertising conference.”

  London agency Samson Clark & Co., Ltd. also jumped on the quote, running notices with the all-caps headline “ADVERTISE! ADVERTISE! ADVERTISE” weeks later in (among other places) The Economist and The Spectator that read,These words conclude a recent letter to “The Times” from Mr. George Bernard Shaw. Although Mr. Shaw was advocating national propaganda, his sage advice applies with equal force to commerce. Sound and sustained advertising – such as is produced by Samson Clarks – is the gateway to growth and greater prosperity. 72

  Just as the makers of Formamint four decades earlier had seized upon his casual mention of their product in an editorial piece, once again, Shaw’s words become repurposed as promotional copy, this time to underscore the imperative of commercial advertising as a whole. That the industry, time and again, turns to him for copy is an indication of the vitality and viability of Shaw’s brand.

  Executive H. S. Gardner observed in a 1929 Advertising & Selling piece that “the modern way of handling [endorsements] is different [in that] now the advertiser doesn’t make the celebrity – the celebrity makes the advertiser.” 73 This trajectory is mirrored in how Shaw initially brokered advertising to “make” G.B.S. and how later the industry returned to him after the brand was established to assist not only in selling wares but in professionalizing their techniques in doing so. Indeed, Shaw’s progenitive marketing and endorsement practices pioneered the practice “in today’s multimedia and cross-promotional marketplace [through which] celebrities from David Beckham and Michael Jordan to Gwyneth Paltrow and Beyoncé construct their own images through the products they endorse or (to borrow a term from Naomi Klein) ‘co-brand’.” 74

  Across the perpetually evolving media landscape since Shaw’s death, the testimonial has not only endured but ferociously thrives. After significant stumbles in its early decades, nowadays, “the money … celebrities receive for product endorsements often surpasses their other income, making them financially dependent on promotional contracts. … In fact, the financial remunerations sometimes offered for such endorsements have fostered a new industry unto itself.” 75 One major difference, for Schweitzer and Moskowitz , is that these compensations, about which contemporary consumers have no illusions, do not seem to harm the efficacy of the endorsements as they did in previous eras:Even in the media-saturated twenty-first century, in which magazine readers know that the familiar faces looking up at then from print ads are likely being handsomely recompensed and favorite television commercials featuring “on the street” testimony are replayed on YouTube, testimonial advertising remains big news and big business. 76

  Soon after Shaw’s death, British advertising experienced a game changer with the arrival of commercial television, “capable of building nigh on 100 per cent public awareness of a new product or campaign in a matter of days” and whose “intrusion into people’s homes changed the relationship of advertisers with the public, and the public with advertisers, [and] transformed the nature of advertising creativity and of agency creative departments.” 77 During the economic boom in America of the late 1950s, Chicago agency executive William D. Tyler heralded the return of what he refers to as the “image-projection concept” in marketing:It was used with tremendous success the last time around when we had rollicking prosperity in the land. That was during the’twenties. In those days, it was known as snob appeal. It did not take the deepest kind of thought to come up with the concept that lots of people want to use the kind of product that the people whom they admire, envy, and emulate use. This was the first writhing in the primeval ooze of the image-projection concept in advertising. … It became so universally used that research seems to indicate that it was losing its potency. This does not imply that emulation, as a motivation, is on the wane, but just the straight-face celebrity-testimonial expression of it. 78

  He argues that personality advertising can only succeed when you “take the people into the act with you”:You have to let them know your tongue is in your cheek, and that you are just asking them to go along with the gag [rather than] insult their intelligence with headlines like “Marilyn Monroe bakes all her seven-layer cakes with Pillsbury’s Best.” 79

  The impish meta-sensibility that Tyler valorizes perfectly characterizes Shaw’s “near-testimonial” performances in commercial ad campaigns but perhaps is equally applicable to any G.B.S. print appearance. As Fintan O’Toole suggests, “the most breathtaking part of the game was that Shaw always let his audience know precisely that it was a game.” 80

  In a July 1895 piece for the Saturday Review, Shaw made the case for personality endorsement while at the same time demarcating the media space G.B.S. would inhabit for the next half century:People do not trust advertisements: the more concerned they are with the benefits held out by the advertiser, the more anxious they are to have the opinion of a disinterested expert as to whether the advertisement can be trusted. 81

  A year earlier, he had articulated his method of creating just such a “disinterested expert”:Very recently the production of a play of mine in New York led to the appearance in the New York papers of a host of brilliant critical and biographical studies of a remarkable person called Bernard Shaw. I am supposed to be that person; but I am not. There is no such person; there never was any such person; there never will or can be any such person. You may take my word for this, because I invented him, floated him, advertised him, impersonated him, and am now sitting in my dingy second floor lodging in a decaying London Square, breakfasting off twopenn’orth of porridge and giving this additional touch to his makeup with my typewriter. 82

  Of course, being Shaw, he could be disingenuous when doing so served his purposes. Ambivalent about participating in a radio program about personal achievement, for example, he declared in a 1932 letter to John Reith , “I never advertised: advertisement, like success, has been shoved on me.” 83 In truth, his campaign was so effective that, in a 1940 letter to his American publisher Dodd, Mead & Co., Shaw advises that “there is no need to spend anything worth mentioning on advertisement: my publicity advertises itself.” 84