Hey, we weren't born yesterday.

     Typically, when guys turn fifty they start spewing kids-these-days statements.  You know, “Kids these days have it easy,” “Kids these days don’t listen to lyrics,” “Kids these days are going to the dogs.” Well, a friend of mine who falls into this category recently remarked, “Kids these days think advertising began with Crispin.” He’s got a point. Except I’d go one step further. I think a lot of older folks, as well as all the darn kids, go along as if advertising is suddenly new.

     Why would we want to ignore what happened before the world went digital? History is how we make sure we are better than we were yesterday – you can only be sure you have evolved unless you know where you’ve been, right? History gives us perspective.

     When you take the time to dust off those old ads and get beyond the old fonts and the illustrations, you see the thinking that went into them. If you look again, you extract the principles of that thinking. If you look harder, you learn the fundamentals for change. You also understand that the people claiming that ‘Advertising Is Dead’ must be short-sighted, because you’ve seen the thread that’s woven to the present.

    Who didn’t watch the movie Lincoln and draw parallels to today’s issues? When I saw it, I wished we could send Daniel Day Lewis in full Lincoln cragginess into the Capitol to knock some sense into those Congressional numb nuts. We’re still worried about the enormous political divisions that pit one American against another and we still look back to Lincoln for inspiration – not because we’ve got a thing for his long coat and the altitude of his hat but because we’re drawing principles from his actions.

     Way back in 1914, the John Wanamaker stores had been revolutionizing marketing. They had created educational, artistic and very specific newspaper ads, and by all indications, they were effective. Wanamaker had become the largest business in New York and Philadelphia. Of course, these ads would nowadays be considered impractical – these ads were really long, sometimes six columns long. They were often imposing, even for 1914. In fact, there’s this story about how Mr. Wanamaker was questioned about his advertising. According to Earnest Elmo Calkins in The Business of Advertising (1915), Mr. Wanamaker was frequently asked, “Does it pay?” Risk-averse advertisers wanted to know, “Does it pay?” And his nerdy bookkeepers demanded, “Does it pay?” But, as his marketing manager, Joseph H. Appel, wrote, ““Does it pay?” is never asked by Mr. Wanamaker. “Does it serve the public?” is his only query.”” And here’s the thing, if you read a couple of those ads, you can’t help but warm to their sincere charm and authority. You discover a wonderful skill for creating the excitement of possibility for commodities. Who knows what would happen if a little of that rubbed off. Maybe it would help us with those pop-up ads and pre-roll ads that offer us nothing and annoy the hell out of us, the public.

     Sometimes, you can go back to stuff that doesn’t even look like ads and learn something. Think about how, for centuries, folktales and fables were created to impart the lessons of life and were passed on in families and villages and royal courts. They were part of an intricate oral tradition long before they were ever put down on paper and made their way into our anthologies. If we want to know how to convey an important lesson or piece of information via word-of-mouth, if we want to know how to sell it so it will stick, if we want a little perspective about social media, why not learn from these stories, why not create better stories than the ones we are currently creating and imbue them with a flavor of magic and adventure?

     Without history, we roam about dazed, amnesiac, and blind to the world around us. Fortunately, there are tons of lessons out there. History is chock full of them. And we need the perspective, the larger trend, and we need the proof that at least some of our thinking has worked before, because we’re not getting enough answers from the here and now. I’m just saying: maybe we should spend less time looking to the technologists, the trend forecasters and the kids. Maybe we should be a little less forward thinking.