Wayne Garland, Quadrant, October, 1976, pp. 27-29.

Wayne Garland recently left Sydney for a job in New York as an advertising copywriter. Before he left, Quadrant asked him what he thought about the present state of Australian advertising. This is what he wrote.

My first job in advertising was as ninety-ninth in charge of not rocking the boat at USP-Needham in Sydney.

I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, but I did read the trade magazines a lot and barely a week went by without Bryce Courtney having his photograph in it.

Bryce was creative director of McCann Erickson then and he was always shown with a pipe out the side of his mouth.

I never did work out what Bryce was saying but at the time he was “it.”

Bryce just spent three months in hospital this year having a very serious back operation.

No one knew about it until it appeared in the corner of a two bit trade magazine.

Which is really sad, because he is one of the nicest guys in the dirty business of Australian advertising and has done more than most in trying to make it respectable.

But no one knew.

John Singleton had a two week stint in hospital, too, around the same time, with a bad cold virus.

But this time, sadly enough, everyone knew about it.

Depending on who you spoke to, John was the long-lost carrier of bubonic plague or had had a massive coronary and was having Dr Christian Barnard fly in to operate on him.

That, dear friends, is The Penalty of Leadership.

Australia is not the land of the ocker, it’s the land of the knocker.

If John Singleton’s car gets a flat tyre, it’s around town that night that an attempt has been made on his life.

It is that bad.

Having been away for a good few years, it struck me as particularly sad that our preoccupation with others’ achievements and the resentment of them had not faded away but only gained in venom.

As you read this I’ll be taking a rather frightening step for a coal miner’s son from Newcastle.

I’ve landed a staggering job, at an even more staggering salary, with one of the dynamite new advertising agencies in New York.

This is Mecca to a copywriter.

It’s like climbing Mt Everest. And the only reason I think I can do it, is someone called John Singleton.

You see, when I was striving, stumbling, trying to get along in this business, unlike everyone else who put me down or got in my way or laughed, John instead taught me everything he knew.

He taught me about the reasoned genius of Claude Hopkins and the calculated soundness of John Caples.

How if it didn’t sell it didn’t work.

He taught me how 90% of an ad is the headline and to ever strive to find the right one.

Never to write cleverly because most people aren’t clever and everyone is wary of clever people anyway.

He taught me about the inherent drama that exists in every product, be it sheep dip, tampon or baked bean.

He and Peter Kenny introduced me to eyeball-to-eyeball research where a writer and art director worked with the consumer in a deliberate search for a believable proposition about a product instead of a shoot-from-the-hip award-winning-overnight cliche.

And he taught me, most of all, that a copywriter owes a piece of himself, not just to the company he works for, but more importantly to the industry he works in and to never slacken for total saturation of yourself in the success and furtherment of your industry.

One of the best things he ever did was to give me a book to read one night long after his wife had nodded off with the boredom of us talking about advertising.

We were sitting on the run-down porch of a seedy house he rented in Paddington long before Paddo became the place where the Leo Schofields of this world flocked in.

(Now he gases alternately from his beachhouse, luxury town-house or harbour-front mansion when he isn’t swishing through town in his drophead Rolls. How times change.)

It was titled The One Hundred Greatest Advertisements.

On page 23 was the one that I love most of all.

“The Penalty of Leadership.”

It ran for the Cadillac Motor Company in 1915 and is possibly the most famous advertisement ever written.

Yet here in the land of the ocker-knocker we have the critics of Singleton shouting out when in return they can only offer such drivel as “Qantastic,” possibly the worst advertisement of all time.

“The Un Usual” for 7 Up which is just plain dreadful and took up half a page in a trade magazine being explained by some out-of-touch account man.

“Shell Oil,” which I don’t know what is about at all.

“Dukes,” which again is so totally out of touch with reality.

“The 2GB-Son of Wireless” campaign, and look what happened there.

“The Glad Bag Horseface.”

The list is endless.

The list is as endless as the list of John’s critics.

To all of them, next time your mouth opens to criticise, condemn and shit-can, remember The Penalty of Leadership.

And to John himself, thanks mate.

Thanks for everything.

IMG_20140526_155220