The Golden Age Was Not Golden
Nostalgia is a poor substitute for honest memory.
I am guilty of nostalgia. I confess it freely. When I speak about the advertising industry, I find myself drawn, as if by gravity, toward the past — toward the great campaigns, the great practitioners, the era when copywriters were respected and craft was valued and the industry took itself seriously without taking itself too earnestly. I invoke Ogilvy and Bernbach and Burnett. I cite "Think Small" and the Hathaway Man and the Marlboro cowboy. I describe an industry that was rigorous, inventive, and committed to excellence. And most of what I say is true. But not all of it, and the parts that are not true are worth examining, because nostalgia is a liar, and it lies most convincingly to the people who indulge it.
The so-called Golden Age of advertising — roughly the 1950s through the 1970s — was a period of extraordinary creative achievement. This is not in dispute. The work produced during those decades set standards that have not been surpassed, and in many cases have not been equalled. But the Golden Age was also a period of extraordinary narrowness, exclusion, and ethical indifference, and anyone who celebrates the era without acknowledging these realities is either ignorant or dishonest.
Who Was Missing
The most obvious problem with the Golden Age is who was not part of it. The creative departments of the great agencies were overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male, and overwhelmingly drawn from a narrow band of social backgrounds. Women worked in advertising, but they worked primarily in the research and account management departments. The creative department — the department that made the work — was a male preserve, with rare and notable exceptions. This was not an accidental feature of the era. It was a structural one, reinforced by hiring practices, workplace culture, and the unspoken assumption that creative genius was a masculine quality.
I entered the industry in the early 1990s, and even then the creative departments I worked in were heavily male. The change has been slow, uneven, and incomplete. But it has been real, and any honest assessment of the Golden Age must acknowledge that the brilliance of the era was produced by a talent pool that was artificially and unjustly restricted. How much more brilliant might it have been if the talent pool had included everyone?
The same applies to the people represented in the work. The advertisements of the Golden Age were made by white men for white audiences. The consumers who appeared in the advertisements were, with rare exceptions, white, middle-class, and suburban. The products were marketed to this audience because this audience had the purchasing power, and the agencies saw no reason to look beyond it. The Volkswagen campaign was brilliant, but it spoke to a specific demographic — young, educated, urban, white — and it did not pretend otherwise. The Marlboro Man was iconic, but he represented a vision of masculinity that was narrow, racialised, and ultimately harmful. These are uncomfortable truths, and they do not diminish the craft of the work, but they do complicate the narrative of the Golden Age as an era of uncomplicated excellence.
What Was Actually Being Sold
There is another aspect of the Golden Age that is rarely discussed by its admirers, and that is the nature of the products being advertised. The great agencies of the era made their reputations — and their money — selling tobacco, alcohol, and automobiles. These were the prestige accounts, the accounts that attracted the best talent and produced the best work. Leo Burnett built his agency on Marlboro, and the Marlboro Man became one of the most recognisable advertising icons in history. The craft was impeccable. The strategy was brilliant. The campaign sold billions of cigarettes to millions of people, many of whom became addicted and many of whom died.
I do not say this to condemn Burnett or his colleagues. They were working within the ethical norms of their time, and it is easy to judge the past by the standards of the present. But the fact remains that the Golden Age of advertising was, in part, a golden age of persuading people to buy products that were demonstrably harmful. The same craft that produced the Rolls-Royce headline produced decades of cigarette advertising that was designed to make smoking look sophisticated, masculine, and desirable. The same techniques that sold Volkswagens sold Lucky Strikes. The craft is neutral. It can be used for good or ill. And in the Golden Age, it was used for both.
The Myth of the Craftsman
There is a myth about the Golden Age that I have helped to perpetuate, and I want to correct it here. The myth is that the era was populated by craftsmen — by serious, dedicated professionals who held themselves to exacting standards and who would rather resign than produce mediocre work. This myth contains a grain of truth. The best practitioners of the era — Ogilvy, Bernbach, Mary Wells Lawrence, George Lois — were indeed serious, dedicated, and exacting. But they were the exceptions, not the rule. The great majority of advertising produced during the Golden Age was mediocre. It was formulaic, uninspired, and indistinguishable from the competition. It was, in other words, exactly like the great majority of advertising produced in every era, including our own.
We remember the Golden Age as golden because we remember the exceptions. We remember "Think Small" and forget the thousands of forgettable car advertisements that ran alongside it. We remember Ogilvy's Rolls-Royce headline and forget the thousands of bland, interchangeable headlines that filled the rest of the newspaper. Survivorship bias is a powerful force, and it operates with particular strength on people who are already inclined toward nostalgia. The Golden Age produced perhaps two dozen campaigns that are still remembered and discussed today. It produced tens of thousands that are not. The ratio is not fundamentally different from the ratio in any other period.
What Was Genuinely Better
Having catalogued the flaws of the Golden Age, I want to acknowledge what was genuinely better about it, because I believe in honesty even when it complicates my argument. What was better was the status of craft. The great agencies of the era believed that the quality of the work mattered — not just strategically, not just commercially, but intrinsically. They believed that a well-written headline was better than a poorly written headline, independent of its commercial performance. They believed that a beautifully designed layout was better than an ugly one. They believed, in short, that standards existed, and that it was the responsibility of the practitioner to uphold them.
This belief has eroded. I have written about this erosion at length in other essays, and I will not repeat myself here. But the erosion is real, and it is the one aspect of the Golden Age that I mourn without reservation. Not the homogeneity. Not the ethical blind spots. Not the nostalgia-tinted glamour. The commitment to craft. The belief that the work should be good — not just effective, not just on-brief, not just approved by the client, but good. That belief was the best thing about the Golden Age, and it is the thing we most need to recover.
Moving Forward Honestly
I write these essays from the perspective of a man who spent three decades in the industry and who has a deep affection for its history. But affection must be tempered by honesty, and honest history requires acknowledging the full picture — the brilliance and the blindness, the craft and the compromise, the excellence and the exclusion. The Golden Age produced work that I admire and principles that I try to uphold. It also produced inequities and harms that I cannot excuse. Both things are true. Both things must be said.
The lesson of the Golden Age is not that we should return to it. The lesson is that excellence is possible — that with sufficient talent, sufficient commitment, and sufficient courage, our industry can produce work that is genuinely great. The challenge is to pursue that excellence without reproducing the narrowness that accompanied it. To take the craft and leave the exclusion. To honour the standards and reject the limitations. This is harder than nostalgia, because nostalgia requires only remembering. Progress requires both remembering and choosing.
The Golden Age was not golden. It was human — brilliant and flawed, pioneering and blinkered, worthy of study and unworthy of uncritical worship. The sooner we accept this, the sooner we can build something better.