Detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers worked at S.H. Benson’s (later Ogilvy & Mather) from 1922 to 1931. She is credited with coining the slogan “It pays to advertise!” and also worked on the iconic Guinness ‘Zoo’ ads. But while she spent her days selling, she spent her nights plotting.
Murder Must Advertise is a detective novel Sayers published in 1933. The book, in which five people die before the mystery can be unravelled, features her famous detective Lord Peter Wimsey: an English aristocrat with the background of a Bertie Wooster and the smarts of a Jeeves. To solve the case, Wimsey goes undercover as a new copywriter at “Pym’s Publicity” (based on Sayers’ real-life agency) for a salary of £4 a week.
After seven days, Sayers wrote in one breathless long paragraph, Wimsey had learned a great many things about advertising…
He learned the average number of words that could be crammed into four inches of copy… that the word “pure” was dangerous, because if lightly used, it laid the client open to prosecution by the government inspectors, whereas the words ‘highest quality’, ‘finest ingredients’, ‘packed under the best conditions,’ had no legal meaning and were therefore safe; that the expression ‘giving work to umpteen thousand British employees in our model works at so-and-so’ was not by any means the same thing as ‘British made throughout’… that The Morning Star would not accept any advertisements containing the word ‘cure,’ but there were no objections to such expressions as ‘relieve’ or ‘ameliorate,’ and that, further, any commodity that professed to ‘cure’ anything might find itself compelled to register as a patent medicine and use an expensive stamp; that the most convincing copy was always written with the tongue in the cheek, a genuine conviction of the commodity’s worth producing – for some reason – poverty and flatness of style; that if, by the most farfetched stretch of ingenuity, an indecent meaning could be read into a headline, that was the meaning the great British Public would infallibly read into it; that the great aim and object of the studio artist was to crowd the copy out of the advertisement and that, conversely, the copy-writer was a designing villain whose ambition was to cram the space with verbiage and leave no room for the sketch; that the layout man, a meek ass between two burdens, spent a miserable life trying to reconcile these opposing parties; and further, that all departments alike united in hatred of the client, who persisted in spoiling good layouts by cluttering them up with coupons, free gifts offers, lists of local agents and realistic portraits of hideous and uninteresting cartons to the detriment of his own interests and the annoyance of everybody concerned.
Happy birthday Murder Must Advertise, 80 years old this year. How some things change and others stay the same!