WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT – COPY OR PIC?When, some little time ago now, I first descended upon
advertising scene, we were a good deal more concerned than most people seem to be today about nature of business we found ourselves in. We were always holding debates – in saloon bar of Coach & Horses in New Bond Street, to be tiresomely precise – about meaning of advertising, significance of advertising, and past, present and future of advertising. And an unconscionably serious lot we no doubt were. Not to mention drunk.
Among hardy perennials of our debates was relevance of sex in advertising, and also question of whether copy element in ads was more important than visual or vice versa.
Of course, these were days when it was possible for agency personnel to slope off round pub during working hours and nobody on management side of things turned so much as a hair at our absence. Just so long as work got done on time, nobody gave so much as a tinker’s cuss whether you were doing it in office or down at dog track. These days, agencies are a little more sanguine in their approach to creative people; and I recently heard of a designer being sacked on spot for turning up at a client meeting wearing jeans – and I kid you not.
But back to our hardy perennials. The ‘sex in advertising’ question was a hotly debated topic, mainly because copywriters and designers in my milieu were always anxious to attend relevant photo-shoots, and not because sex was liable to help sell anything. Thus, we were constantly coming up with speculative ad campaigns that featured semi-clad females so that we might catch a glimpse of a naked thigh or better. Few of these concepts saw light of day, but it was always worth a try.
As to copy versus pic argument, this has still not been resolved to this day. Then, as now, I was on side of angels, holding that around 80 per cent of ads could, at a pinch, do without illustrations, whereas only about 2 per cent could do without words. (In regard to other 18 per cent, you can make your own arrangements.)
Such an argument, as you’d expect, was met with widespread alarm by designers, who saw that I was presaging their redundancy. Then as now, they would do everything they could to give their illustrations prominence they thought they deserved. This usually resulted in a design in which pic took up four-fifths of ad, while copy was relegated to eight-point solid and rendered practically illegible.
