LEARNINGS FROM THE REAL MAD MEN / OPINION

The Real Mad Men tells the story of what was really happening on Madison Avenue in the 1960s, a time when, for a variety of reasons, some obvious, some startling, it could be argued that the ads have never been bettered and creativity was at an all time high. Here, abbreviated from his Provoke/Internet Week speech, Andrew Cracknell outlines some of the lessons of that period:

You have a client. That client wants you to help them sell their product. That's what you have to do. It's that simple.

But it's extraordinary just how complicated we've managed to make it.

Part of the confusion has been caused by the continuous use over the last several decades of the word 'Communications' in marketing, connoting that communicating what you want to say is the whole job. But having the consumer understand you is not enough. Communication is still, along with the chosen medium, only a means to the true purpose, which is Persuasion.

As Bill Bernbach, the father of the Creative Revolution put it, 'Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art'.

I know it's currently fashionable to hold that Persuasion is not the most effective tool, that System 1 and System 2 thinking dictate that our decisions are much more emotionally than rationally based - at last, the rest of the world has caught up with something creative people have always known. But to extrapolate from that that persuasion is no longer part of the selling process is to assume that persuasion is (a) ineffective - try telling that to a bloke in a market square selling cutlery off the back of a truck - and (b) an entirely rational process.
I think what's happening here is a confusion between a USP and Persuasion - an assumption that persuasive advertising has to have facts and figures. It doesn't, it just has to convince. And sometimes facts and figures help, and sometimes they don't.

Remember that whatever you're doing and however you're doing it, you're ultimately still selling stuff. This rather robust utilitarian view of work on the web may offend some. There is a view around that the world has changed, that the role of web advertisers is no longer that of raw knuckled selling but evolved into some collaborative social activity.

It leads some people to believe that the grubby activity of 'selling' is somehow beneath them, that creating communities, tweeting or seeking Facebook Likes is all the client needs to do on the web. To build relationships, to 'relate'. Sponsored fun.

But just as making a funny or memorable TV commercial in 1965 didn't always deliver sales, you can build as many communities or organise as many flash mobs as you like and get people to lay the product end to end in a virtual world that stretches from here to the moon - but if the client finds he has the same number of unsold boxes in his warehouse at the end of the month as he had at the beginning, it's a waste of time. He doesn't want flashmobs for their own sake - he wants lorries grumbling through the night, loaded with his product.

And as online ads move more to pay-per-action than pay-per-view it's vitally important to think about creating an environment that is going to get the consumer to take the action that's going to generate the ad revenue. To be persuaded, in one way or another.

That's what you do.

How you do it is illuminated by another lesson of the creative revolution and involves the physical seduction of the web medium itself.

A second Bernbach quote runs: 'Our job is to kill the cleverness inside that makes us shine rather than the product.'

If you've got a great story, just tell it. It's understandable - indeed, it's your job - that you should explore and exploit the simply incredible menu of sensations and experiences and processes in the Tardis like toybox that is the web. But your job is also judgement and objectivity - and bear in mind not everyone is as obsessed with clicking your buttons and ringing your bells and blowing your whistles and flashing your lights as you are, and when you finally look up from your screen they won't all necessarily be following. Yes, we're all happily clicking away and we're dependent on the web to a large degree - but we're far more dependent on amino acids and oxygen but that doesn't mean we have to be obsessed with them.

It is so easy to distract people from your message, which in turn makes it even more important that the message and the strategy behind it is robustly simple.

That isn't the whole story; the Creative Revolution also taught us to respect the consumer, that story telling trumps and outlasts gimmickry and fashion and that research can never do the job the creative person is supposed to do.

But at the heart of every great ad of that era there's a simple strategy and a simple story, charmingly and persuasively told.

It really is a timeless lesson.

The Real Mad Men is published by Quercus and is available at all good bookshops and on-line