PHILOSOPHY

Howard Gossage, his life, his philosophy and his works are wide ranging. Here was a man who operated inside the business, but thought outside it. As Jeffrey Goodby says, "To enjoy Howard solely on the basis of his advertising output would be like loving Paris because the subways seem to work pretty well" (Bendinger 1995). It was precisely his ability to think outside of the 'advertising box' that made him so successful. His multi-faceted persona and ability to assimilate new ideas from diverse fields made his advertising philosophy so enduring and far ahead of its times. Presented here are his Communication Philosophy and his concept of Extra-environmental man that was central to his thoughts about advertising.

[Communication Philosophy] [Extra-environmental Man]

Communication Philosophy

Dr.Rotzoll describes Gossage as eclectic, and his intense pleasure in the act of communicating with diverse people about diverse subjects predictably infused his approach to the advertising message (Rotzoll 1994). His deep-seated communication philosophy was ahead of its time, engaging and effective and here is the essence of it. According to Gossage:

1. Advertising should be involving for the audience. They should be offered some reward for partaking of the message, be it entertainment, information, or simply the satisfaction of message-producing curiosity.
2. To be involving it is better to plan carefully for one or a few truly arresting messages than to fight a war of attrition. "You don't have to bruise an elephant with 100BB guns to kill him. One shot in the right place will do." He thought of advertising as an 'organic' process- 'you do one ad and see what happens, then you do another'. He found the bulk of advertising to be intelligence insulting, banal, tasteless and repetitive.
3. Truly involving advertising begins when you can establish a 'conversation' with the audience via a response mechanism. That, as in any true conversation worthy of the name, the initiator should wait for a response before replying. Three decades before the word interactive became fashionable, Gossage was using coupons in his ads, partly so that he could measure their effect, but primarily because he wanted to initiate a dialog between his customers and his clients. Perhaps he was the first to express the ideal of "consumer participation" in advertising (Steel 1998).
4. An advertiser should divide his objectives into reasonable goals and suit his techniques to accomplish the task. The narrower and better defined the objectives are, the greater are the chances of accomplishing successful advertising.
   Today we hear speakers hailing the era of 'Integrated advertising/marketing communications,' which Gossage practiced effortlessly, with an élan long before it had a name. His advertising, both in theory and practice, had a quality about it that can only be described as transcendent. It looked and sounded better than other advertising because it set out so explicitly to hit you on a higher plane (Bendinger 1995).

To capsulize, his message philosophy's three-sentence credo was: "People don't read advertising. They read what interests them. And sometimes it's an ad"(Rotzoll 1980).

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Extra-environmental Man

Apart from his communication philosophy, central to the understanding of Gossage, is his philosophy of the extra-environmental man, the individual who is capable of breaking the bounds of his environment and seeing the world afresh. Somewhat akin to the man who, confronted with a herd of 99 horses and one zebra, remarks, "OK, here's what we are going to do with those 99 non-zebras."(Gossage 1967). He propounded that creativity comes best from 'extra-environmental man' in a talk given at the Art Directors Club in Frankfurt, then West Germany (He crammed German lessons daily for three weeks, and gave the talk in German).
Creativity according to him began with the ability to recognize what was already there, and those who were stuck with their load of 'experience' experience could not see it. He believed that the best art, the best ads came from people who tended to be extra-environmental. They were either from another culture, another country, or men who got into the business late in life after doing much else. Also they approached a problem from outside its environment rather than from inside. He called it generalism, as opposed to specialism. A generalist starts from the outside while a specialist works from the inside.
It is clear that Gossage thought of himself to be such an individual and later institutionalized his talents in this area by forming "Generalists, Inc." with Dr.Gerald Feigen, another multifaceted personality (Rotzoll 1980).

Gossage was a thinker unfettered by the conventional and liked to drown himself in the world of ideas that took him beyond advertising. Much as is evident from what Warren Hinckle wrote about his last few months:

"he adopted the Caribbean island of Anguilla and helped the natives declare a Quixotic independence, organized a publishing company, launched an environmental organization, developed the theory and structure of a new science for the middle-aged he christened 'Mediatrics,'agitated to make San Francisco a city-state, wrote a brilliant advertising campaign against the anti-ballistic missile in which he likened the ABM to the fallout shelters of the fifties, planned an academic seminar on the subject of hell,………… began compiling a massive 'Dictionary of first and last lines' of appropriate books and plays, discovered an obscure professor named Leopold Kohr whose recondite wisdom about the dynamic of bigness in society were such that Gossage handicapped him as the McLuhan of the seventies,………gave dozens of speeches warning advertising men to repent before it was too late for him to save them ……………"(Hinckle 1973, pp 353-54)

Gossage was beyond doubt a truly extra-environmental man, a human extraordinaire. Herb Caen, writing the day after Gossage's death in the San Francisco Chronicle entitled his tribute, "A Singular Man." And so he was, as is his multifaceted legacy to contemporary advertising thought and practice (Rotzoll 1994).

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