the Man Who Hated Advertising: Howard Luck Gossage and Advertising Revolution That Predicted Future of Marketing

Howard Luck Gossage made some of the most beloved advertising of the twentieth century - and spent his life arguing that advertising had no right to exist in the form it had taken.From a converted firehouse in San Francisco, with a dozen employees and barely a decade of real work before leukemia killed him at fifty-one, Gossage produced a body of campaigns that the industry still talks about long after the names of the men who out-billed him a thousand to one have been forgotten. He gave away a kangaroo for an Australian airline. He sold pink air. He offered to launder a stranger's shirt and got 11,342 of them in the mail. He sent three eccentrics walking a thousand miles to a World's Fair and never had to run another ad. He asked whether we should flood the Sistine Chapel so tourists could get nearer the ceiling - and helped save the Grand Canyon.But this is more than a collection of delightful stunts. Gossage was a moralist who believed the audience was a person, not a target; that nobody reads ads, only what interests them; that the reader had to be respected, amused, and invited rather than surrounded and worn down. He introduced Marshall McLuhan to America. He turned a struggling magazine into one of the most influential publications of the 1960s. And he issued a warning his industry ignored: that one day, if advertising kept treating people as a captive audience, it would find that it had been tuned out.That day came - with the remote control, the ad blocker, the subscription people gladly pay to escape advertising entirely. Half a century after his death, the questions Gossage asked have become the central questions of marketing: Can a brand earn attention instead of buying it? Is the audience the target, or the medium? Almost every idea the connected age treats as new - content that people seek out, marketing as conversation, the audience as your distribution channel - Howard Gossage worked out first, and better, in the 1960s.The Man Who Hated Advertising is the story of advertising's most articulate rebel: the wittiest man in the business, the one who never quite believed in it, and the one who turned out to be right.