Last week I heard an interesting programme on a Chicago radio station.
The famous copywriter Julian Koenig is still very upset that George Lois has take credit for some ads he did in the 1960s.
These are “Think Small” for Volkswagen, and “If your Harvey Probber chair wobbles, straighten your floor”.
Both, really terrific ads.
Personally I’ve never seen George Lois’s name anywhere near the VW ad.
Everyone knows that was Helmut Krone.
(The VW and Avis campaigns being the two most important case histories you learn when you start in advertising.)
But I have read several times George Lois taking credit for the Harvey Probber chair ad.
Lois says it was his idea and Koenig just changed some words.
Koenig, however, says Lois wasn’t even in the room when he wrote the ad.
My attitude to these questions is always that you look at the track records of the people involved.
Who’s done more great work?
For instance, supposing there are two guys.
One has been involved in dozens of great pieces of work with lots of different people.
The other guy has only been involved in one famous piece of work, and that’s the one that’s in dispute.
The weight of credibility has to favour the first guy.
So that has to be the focus of a career in this business.
Do as much great work as you can, with as many different people as you can, on as many different clients as you can, as fast as you can.
That way the weight of credibility is on your side.
You haven’t just proved yourself in one situation, but over and over again.
Of course this means moving a lot faster and only dealing with the big picture.
If you spend your time worrying about details you have to go slower.
Then you get bogged down.
There’s a famous old Zen story about two monks walking alongside a river.
A woman is standing there crying.
The older monk asks what the problem is.
She says, “I need to cross the river, but if I do I’ll ruin my kimono.”
The older monk says, “Hop on my back.”
And he carries her across, and puts her down.
The younger monk is furious, and for hours the two monks walk on in silence.
All day he rages inwardly, until at sunset he can’t stand it anymore.
He turns to the older monk and says, “You broke the rule that says we aren’t supposed to have anything to do with women.”
The older monk says, “I left her at the river, you’re still carrying her.”
So I think the thing is, you might be right but what is it costing you?
While you’re stuck with the detail you can’t move on.
Everyone knows Julian Koenig was the writer on probably the most influential ad ever: Volkswagen’s “Think Small”.
Then he opened an ad agency with George Lois, called Papert, Koenig, Lois.
Then he and Lois split up, no one’s heard much about him since.
After George Lois left that agency he set up another agency, called Lois Holland Callaway.
He did two decades of covers for Esquire that changed magazine covers for ever.
Today all magazine covers are still pale imitations of his originals.
He was involved in so many advertising campaigns, I can’t even list them here.
And he was too full of ideas to be limited to just advertising.
He designed logos, restaurants, books, cars, interiors, anything he could get his hands on.
He’s done at least ten times as much as the entire output of anyone else.
He’s also probably a bully, and certainly an egotist.
So was Picasso.
If you go to the Musee Picasso in Paris, you’ll see paintings by Van Gogh, Gaugin, Lautrec, Manet, Degas.
Except they aren’t.
They’re all by Picasso, while he was young and looking for his own style, he copied everyone.
Later he stole from everyone: Braque, Modigliani, Matisse, African art.
Until eventually it all came together to be Picasso.
One of the most prolific artists ever.
Julian Koenig’s position is that George Lois was a better showman than an art director, and was better at promoting himself than he was at doing ads.
Well the same could be said of Picasso.
It’s a fine line between charlatan and genius, even a blurred one.
You haven’t got time to slow your life down to a speed at which you can gain everyone’s approval for everything you do.
Do it, get on to the next thing.
Do it, get on to the next thing.
Do it, get on to the next thing.
After I’d left BMP someone called me up to say they understood John Webster had stolen some of my ideas, and they were having the same problem.
I said I didn’t think John did any of that on purpose.
John was just so concentrated on whatever he was into he wasn’t worried about details like that.
He was like an absent-minded professor.
He just took anything from anywhere to get the job done.
In fact sometimes he forgot and gave me credit for ideas he’d come up with.
So it worked both ways.
Ideas I’d come up with would never have seen the light of day without John.
I wouldn’t even have recognised them as ideas without John.
So I got back ten times from John whatever he took.
I learned to forget the details and look at the big picture.
I’m not still carrying the woman.
I left her at the river.
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Some years ago I worked with an art director who effectively claimed authorship of a joint idea by saying it was based on their personal experience of being a parent. This despite the fact that they didn’t have their first child until two years after the ad ran.
Yet this person is someone who I know to be honest and decent in every way.
I wonder if there’s a psychological mind game we play that convinces us of something even when it’s not true. Koenig-Lois syndrome?
Hell, I might even have done it myself. In which case I’m just glad I was left at the river rather than thrown in.
Dave how do you fell about sites like:
http://www.joelapompe.net/
Picasso obviously borrowed influences from across the globe and then eventually arrived at his own style. That’s clear (especially the influence of African art).
However, in advertising there is that idiom of ‘been done before”. Now that we are all globally connected, the lifting of ideas and thoughts can be dangerous.
There is also of course the debate surrounding the “influence” of art in advertising (the famous case of Honda Cog).
Do you feel it’s becoming increasingly difficult to be original and thus that’s why we’re seeing a lot more cases of oddvertising? Especially with the rise of youtube as a reference point.
Michael Jackson:
didn’t write the hits
didn’t direct the videos
Quincy Jones did the production
copied his moon walk from street kids who got it from Marcel Marceau
called his ranch “Neverland” after JM Barrie’s Peter Pan
had plastic surgery to look like Diana Ross
…so did a lot of copying but was still original
Brand Republic. Dave Trott’s Blog. 27 March 2009 11.40am. Copied or stolen?
apparently he did write the hits…
Jack.
Think of it as an homage. As in Ronnie Biggs and ‘The Great Train Homage’.
Why is everyone so wound up by posterity? You’ll never know and who really cares anyway? Get on with life.
You mean that copying and stealing are just polite words for robbery? I’m surprised you didn’t say that you was a bit of a tea leaf.
When I was a junior I once had a an ad stolen from me by a senior team. It went on to win three Cannes Golds, a One Show Gold and a D&AD nomination, things which would have helped my fledgling career no end.
When I complained about it, the ECD’s argument went that X and X don’t have to steal ads to win awards. Mine went, ‘Do you really think that I would claim the ad of a senior team as my own if I hadn’t done it? I’d have to be insane to think that would work. Or have giant balls of steel’.
Anyway, I was made to apologise to the senior team.
The situation taught me a valuable lesson about how to treat younger teams, and it taught me that some people are just desperate to cling to what they have.
So it’s not just about leaving things behind. It’s about taking something positive from something negative.
great post dave. i’d been meaning to post on the Koenig/Lois kerfuffle. now i don’t have to. here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI54VVo2DqI&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theadclass.com%2Fcreative%2Fjulian-koenig-george-lois-origin-story&feature=player_embedded
In the software design world I live in there is a lot less of this ownership issue.
For the most part, short of “look and feel” facial issues, there is a real sense that an idea doesn’t belong to anyone.
It’s that whole (right brain!) mathematical/realism bit.
There could be a rip-snorting argument going on, then someone comes up with the right solution and all the light bulbs go off and the argument is off.
The “owner” of this solution maybe takes pride in finding their way to the idea first, or fastest, but the idea itself clearly stands on its own.
Dave, like Koenig, Terry Butcher is another great woman-carrier. He’s been lugging the poor lass around since 1986. Because he’s gone on and on about Maradona’s “hand of god” goal.
But, that said, when geniuses are cheats (and Maradona proved to be both in that quarter-final) it doesn’t make their actions any less dishonest than if they were mere mortals.
And to have given him the benefit of the doubt - to say that he would never have handled the ball deliberately because such a great footballer didn’t need to cheat - would’ve been plain wrong.
Oh, Lois is no eccentric absent-minded professor.
Chris,
I think you’re right on both counts.
Maradonna (certainly) and Lois (probably) both knew what they were doing.
I just think the world doesn’t stop while the wronged party achieves justice.
The winner will be the person who can park the dispute while they do more stuff.
Unlike Terry Butcher the Germans didn’t spend forever grumbling about England’s third goal at Wembley.
They got on with winning the world cup twice instead.
Apparantly Braque was pissed off that Picasso stole Cubism from him, so the answer for Picasso was to move on quickly, do more stuff so the argument becomes irrelevant.
http://ex-blank-page.blogspot.com/2009/06/in-reply-to-daves-great-posts-54.html
There’s a story I heard once about the great songwriter George Gershwin. He and his lyric writer brother Ira were on on holiday in Europe. George was particularly inspired during that trip, writing song after song after song. One day they came back to their hotel rooms to discover they had been broken into and every one of George’s new musical scores had been stolen. Ira was heartbroken thinking of all that beautiful music lost forever. The theft didn’t bother George at all. “Don’t worry Ira,” he said. “There’s more where they came from.” He subsequently went on to write his greatest and most loved songs afterwards.
Check out this conversation with George Lois on the legendary Volkswagen ads “Think small“ and “Lemon“ and who really did them: http://www.vimeo.com/5339850
Theft is theft.
Just because Lois, Picasso and Webster did it does not make it right.
I am with the poster Ben on this issue.