Changing one’s style of advertising can result in one’s sanity being questioned, but is still worth it.

A woman asked me to dance last night.

She turned out to be an excellent dancer who could cope with every one of the moves I have personally invented myself, without seeming to pause for breath.

The sort of lady, I realised, who at the country club could reduce one to pulp with sixteen sets of tennis and a few rounds of golf and then come down to dinner as fresh as a daisy, expecting one to take an intelligent interest in Sigmund Freud and the effect of the exchange rate mechanism on the price of butter.

It was thus with a certain dismay I heard her, as the music cascaded to a halt, ask if we might have a second dance immediately after the first.

All of which reminds me, if I needed reminding, that one should remember in writing an advert that one is writing to all sorts. The hail and hearty, the despondent and depressed.

Yet if one tries to write in a way that suits all of them, the resultant advertising becomes bland and middle of the road and generally pretty useless at bringing in the sales.

It is therefore better to strike out and address one person, and hope some of the others appreciate the style and tone. Of course one can readily be called a nincompoop by those who don’t fit the profile of the day, and schizophrenic by those who compare today’s output with yesterday’s, but I think that a small price to pay in order to knock up a few more sales.

Tony Attwood