Re: The Importance

of Humility

During the recent AMA and 4-A conventions I have been exposed to a lot of advertisers and agency men who refer to us as being “hot,” to the point where it has become embarrassing.

In the advertising trade press recently there has been a lot of publicity about our agency, the new accounts we have taken and the work we are doing for various clients.

All of this is gratifying and makes you feel like throwing out your chest.

The feeling has just hit me like a ton of bricks, however, that herein lies our greatest danger, our greatest vulnerability.

I was reminded of the big shot who started down hill when he began to believe his own publicity. I realize that nothing succeeds like success, but I know also that pride goeth before a fall.

The reasons we have achieved our present size and reputation are pretty obvious. Here are some of them.

1. We started with and have maintained a creative point of views as we have grown we have developed a lot of specialized services, but rather than featuring these services as such we have regarded them as converging toward the central objective of selling goods through ideas — planning the sale when you plan the ad. That applies to research, media, merchandising and all of our other services. Few agencies have this same passionate urge for ideas and the finest possible execution of them. They are much more apt to be dominated by a strictly business point of view.
2. We have tried to be completely honest with ourselves and with each other.
3. We have worked like hell.
4. In our creative work we have endlessly sought for the power of great simplicity and truth that lies in a product or a company, presented with imagination and interruption. We have shunned extraneous, clever devices, analogies, etc. We have tried to avoid being cute on the one hand and dull on the other. We have sought the earthy type of expressiveness that comes right out of the mouths of people.
5. Over and beyond this, however, I like to feel that we have given the advertising world an impression of modesty and humility and a sense of gratitude for the respect we have earned to date,

If we act as though we want to be a $50,000,000 agency, or one of the first ten, the first five, or anything of that sort, we’ll probably never get there, If we think and act and feel the way we did when we were a $5,000,000 agency and continue to learn to work together with mutual respect, I am sure we have nothing to worry about as far as the future is concerned.

I hope you will take this to heart as I have.