James P. Othmer spent two decades in the advertising business before his terrific first novel “The Futurist” was published in 2006.
While we wait for novel number two — “Holy Water,” due next summer — Othmer offers us an insider’s guided tour to his former occupation in “Adland: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet,” which Doubleday published on Sept. 15 (in a sick joke worthy of “The Futurist,” Othmer’s tome entered the marketplace on the same day as Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol”).
Neither an expose nor a love letter, “Adland” reminded me of the wonderful 1969 William Goldman book, “The Season,” in which the budding novelist and rapidly rising screenwriter explored a world he was in the process of leaving — the Broadway theater.
Goldman combined insider observation with hard reporting as he covered every show that opened on Broadway in the 1967-68 season. The format gave Goldman plenty of opportunities for using material drawn from his own years spent in the trenches of Shubert Alley — the book remains the best single volume on Broadway art and commerce.
Othmer clearly loves the adverising business — and has no regrets about the time he spent there — but he’s wary too, especially in this new age in which ads seem to be all around us, on the Internet, hidden in scripted TV and film, and on wall-screen TVs in places that the “Mad Men” of the 1950s and ’60s would never have dreamed were available to their work.
The author didn’t have much time for reflection when he was in the midst of working on Madison Avenue (indeed, he admits to embarrassment at never having heard of Vance Packard’s 1957 best-seller attack on advertising, “The Hidden Persuaders,” until he read about it in The New York Times two years ago).
“Adland” begins with Othmer’s own adventures in advertising, from observing the fall of the once-mighty N.W. Ayer agency (the loss of the AT&T account was a giant nail in the coffin) to his work with clients such as Kentucky Fried Chicken.
In the KFC chapter, Othmer recalls almost losing it after debating new ad strategies with executives of the fast food franchise and being forced into endless discussion of how the long-deceased Colonel should be depicted in new ads.
“Maybe their problem is beyond advertising,” Othmer says to a veteran KFC account guy. “Maybe it’s their scuzzy restaurants and incompetent employees. Maybe it’s their unhealthy menu, or people are just sick of the Colonel, live, dead, or animated.”
This autobiographical material is very funny and enlightening (and fans of “The Futurist” will recognize the author’s sharply satiric voice). In one especially absurd sequence, Othmer has to justify the hiring of Oscar-winning cameraman Janusz Kaminski for a crazy U.S. remake of a Russian ad for deodorant. (The managing partner asks “What’s he ever done?”)
What gives the book considerable journalistic distinction, however, is Othmer’s post-ad life reporting on the business, including material on the decline of traditional TV advertising and visits to some of the small-but-hot companies in Manhattan that specialize in Web-based ads and viral marketing.
“…25 percent of all current media consumption is online, and by 2011 annual online media spending in the United States alone will double to more than $50.3 billion,” Othmer writes.
“This has advertisers and agencies seriously rethinking the mega-agency model and questioning the very future of the thirty-second television spot that has been the foundation of branding since the days of Milton Berle,” he adds.
Like it or not, we all live in “Adland” now, and we should be grateful that Othmer has leveled with us about the past, the present and the future of a business so many people love to hate.
