Walter Taplin 1960

Walter Taplin was an economist and journalist, editing The Spectator magazine between 1946 and 1954. Between 1942 and 1945 he worked as an economist and statistician at the UK Government War Cabinet.

Walter Taplin wrote Advertising: A New Approach in 1960, which is one of the first books to discuss and analyse the early Mad Men-like advertising agencies of this era.

The copy of this book that I found on a rusty old shelf in the open air castle grounds at Hay-on-Wye is the book signed by Walter Taplin as a personal gift for RA Bevan: better known as Bobby Bevan, one of the most important founders of the advertising industry (Benson, later Ogilvy & Mather, now WPP). Bevan was also subject of a scandal involving Randolph Churchill and wife (Randolph was the son of Sir Winston Churchill).  

Here are some quotes from this book:

On 1960 New England, USA:

"And the puritan ideal remains. The New England housewife still holds it firmly in her mind as she leaves the little white church and drives away in her new car to her centrally heated house with its television, washing machine, dish-washing machine, refrigerator, vacuum cleaner, floor-polisher, fully mechanised kitchen, individual baths and showers, and the elaborate do-it-yourself outfits of her husband."

Shades of Mad Men there? 

On Wants and Advertising:

"This is the process - a process as long and as complicated as life itself. There is no need to stop or be glad about it. You can either rejoice that human beings have wants, and that other human beings try to satisfy them and be paid for their trouble; or you can deplore the nature of humanity."

More shades of Mad Men!

On Marketing before Manufacturing:

"The full seriousness of the error regarding marketing as a late, and possibly superfluous and wasteful appendage to the 'real' process of production must be emphasized, since this is one of the most vulgar errors about the economic system - one which has not only befogged the conversation of public bars but also vitiated the opinions of educated and cultured people and even delicately tinted the writings of some of those few economists who have turned their attention to questions of advertising in recent years."

In the IT industry, you can still see in 2010 those left-brained founders of start-ups falling into this trap! 

On Consumer v Industrial Buyers:

"Although industrial buying may be more rational than most buying by final consumers, the process of persuasion is even here at work in the early stages to attract the attention of the potential industrial buyer."

Business-to-business is the same as business-to-consumer?

On Persuasion in Business v Politics and Religion:

"The first thing to do is to remove one piece of debris which cumbers the ground. This is the idea that, whatever the effects of persuasion may be, they are worse in business than elsewhere. This is a very common idea. Attacks upon salesmanship and advertising are frequent; attacks upon the devices of persuasion as employed in politics and religion are not."

Has this position changed 180-degrees since Walter Taplin made this point? I'm thinking of political SPIN and the extreme religious factions of our times.