Got B.S. To Sell? Take It Elsewhere.

Steve Simpson of Goodby Silverstein & Partners is using Adweek to spread the Gospel of Howard.

Howard Gossage is one of advertising’s first postmodernists, one of its earliest greatest ironists and the original provocateur in a business that always claims to prize them, but never does, really.
To the hippest, most cynical creative of today, he had this over you: he hated advertising. So much so, he refused to do the ordinary kind. His response was to perform a kind of public apology with every ad he made; to be so original the public would forgive the thing for being an ad.

I’m not hip, but I do hate advertising. Yet, like Gossage, I’m compelled to create it and write about it.
Compulsions are so odd sometimes. I used to say things like “advertising is too important to leave to the hacks.” Yet, I’ve put myself in situations where I had to play the hack to survive. I suppose if I hated advertising as much as Gossage, I wouldn’t have done that. I wouldn’t have been able to. I would have upchucked all over the brief, the unreasonable timeline and the general cluelessness in every direction. Hold it, I forget myself….I have upchucked all over the brief, the unreasonable timeline and the general cluelessness in every direction.