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Creatively Speaking
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I knew before I ever left home for the University of Texas at Austin that I wanted to major in advertising. I just wasn’t sure why. I had written a column for my high school newspaper, The Jungle Beast Journal, and I was editor in chief of my high school annual, The Corsican. What I liked about advertising in the late sixties was its inherent ability to influence lots of people. What I didn’t realize was that advertising, at its core, is pure psychology. That’s where this story begins.
I was in my sophomore year at UT, enrolled in Psychology 101, which required an extracurricular experiment. I perused the list of experiments and was hypnotically drawn to one called The Black Hand. “How bad could it be?” I asked myself. How bad, indeed.
I soon found myself in the bowels of the psychology department, in a long corridor of windowless warrens. Inside one, I met the teaching assistant I would come to call Dr. Frankenstein. “Welcome to The Black Hand,” he said, grinning sardonically and ushering me to a chair opposite his army-issue metal desk. “I’ve been instructed to warn you that The Black Hand involves some physical discomfort,although that depends entirely upon whether you’re in the low-shock group or the high-shock group.” On his desk sat a small clamp wired to an ominous-looking electric rheostat that registered from 0 to 10 somethings—megawatts?
When I stammered that I wasn’t a big fan of electrocution, he informed me that I could sign up for another experiment, but that others often required several sessions, while this one required only one. Reluctantly, I agreed to be his lab rat. As he attached the clamp to my hand, he offered a good-natured warning: “The first shock isn’t all that bad. It’s more about the anticipaaaaaation.” After cranking the rheostat to 3, he reached toward a large red button, all the while carefully noting my expression. I don’t honestly remember him depressing the button,since my hand literally catapulted off the desk, straight up into air that now seemed to crackle with malevolent energy. “See, that didn’t hurt much, did it?” Dr. Frankenstein smirked. Like hell, it didn’t!
Before I could recover and lurch headlong out of the room, the maniac had already reset the rheostat to 6, his hand poised once again over the red button of death. “W-w-wait!” I bleated, but of course it was too late. The second shock sent my hand flying over my head to, crashing into the wall behind me. “Level 6 packs a little more wallop, doesn’t it?” the mad scientist sneered. Without waiting for my answer, he bolted from the room, saying he would return shortly to administer. The Final Shock.
As I sat there nervously considering my options, another teaching assistant poked his head in the room and asked where his comrade had gone. When I said he would return shortly, he asked me if I would help him with a simple test that required me to read a few paragraphs and answer a few questions. “It would really help me out,” he smiled. Addled by my shocking experience, I sheepishly agreed. I found I had trouble focusing on the stories, and even more trouble answering the simple multiple-choice questions. Just as I was struggling with the last question, Dr. Frankenstein returned, asked me what I was doing, and seemingly satisfied, told me I was free to go. “What about The Final Shock?” I quavered. “Won’t be necessary,” he replied.
“One question,” I asked, struggling unsurely to my feet. “Was I in the low-shock group or the high-shock group?” Without a moment’s hesitation he replied, “Definitely the high-shock group.” I scrambled out of the psych building, and once I’d recovered a bit, it occurred to me that The Black Hand wasn’t the experiment at all. The real experiment was seeing how I answered those simple questions under duress. Dr. Frankenstein later confirmed my suspicions.
What does all this have to do with advertising? Simple. What you think an advertiser is trying to tell you or sell you isn’t always obvious. A wise advertiser will follow the creative philosophy I introduced years ago at my advertising agency—something we call The Uninvited Guest. In essence, advertising is an uninvited guest in people’s lives. You must first intrigue them—as The Black Hand intrigued me. Then you must entertain them—encourage them to laugh, or cry, or sometimes simply to think. Finally, you must persuade them that what you offer is genuinely unique and valuable—the first step toward every advertiser’s ultimate goal, brand loyalty.
Did The Black Hand encourage me to spend the next 37 years of my life in advertising? I can’t really say. But I can tell you that it caused me to think long and hard about the electrifying science—the psychology—that powers all successful advertising.