Once upon a time, voice, plot points, characters and themes filled our days. But now, we authors—sorry authorpreneurs­—spend them muddling through the acronymic jungle of our ad campaigns, stuff like CTR and ACOS. That’s what counts now, not all that literati tosh.

Luckily, I am Mad Men certified, fully accredited in Adland’s Golden Age. My induction began early in the summer of 1968. I was stoney broke, an important training module in any author’s life, and desperately seeking employment. Opposite me, on the 5^th floor of Gillow House in Oxford Street, sat the lantern-jawed Paul Buckley, dressed in a sharp gray suit with chalk pinstripes. “Haymarket is a great company,” he said. “We promote people based on merit regardless of age.” He was, I would later learn, 24 years old, so 5 years my senior and Group Advertising Sales Manager of its business magazines.

Michael Heseltine MP, the big boss, he explained, had acquired World Press News, a sad old rag read by Fleet Street hacks, a worthless readership. So it was being relaunched as Campaign, modeled on the American magazine Advertising Age, and its readership broadened to include marketing. The job on offer was Advertising Sales Executive, and with hunger churning my belly, I talked my way into it.

I was one of the magazine’s first recruits. But as the summer passed, both the display and classified ad offices swelled, as did the editorial office next door. The place was burgeoning with talent, far too many gifted souls to enumerate here. But as my topic is advertising, Maurice Saatchi comes to mind. He showed up at the empty desk next to mine for a month or two that summer, although contrary to the guff¹ on Wikipedia, he was not involved in the launch of Campaign and certainly wasn’t hired by Heseltine to rebrand and relaunch it. His title was Promotions Manager, and that summer he was working on one of Haymarket’s many directories and running a rag trade business on his own account part-time.

One day, over a liquid lunch at The Green Man pub in Berwick Street, as I downed my pint and he sipped his Diet Coke, he said, “Do you think people would drink more or less beer if the head was bigger?” I had no answer to that. But I had an unasked question… what kind of man asks a question like that? History has since delivered its answer. He was fresh out of college then and far from the advertising mogul he would become. But he was a bright spark all right, and inadvertently, he’d given me an Advertising 101. Marketing success is all about questions and answers, testing details and getting the answers right.

Campaign’s D-Day was not the launch issue on September 12, but a month or so earlier when we got the mock-up and kicked off its ad sales. We all assembled at first light to get pumped (I’m kidding, we were Mad Men, try 9:30). And with a tally-ho, the room emptied. But as I went to leave, Paul stopped me. “I’ve a good mind not to let you go,” he said. The problem was my attire. I was wearing slacks and a seersucker jacket. “Why aren’t you wearing a suit?” He went on and on. He had a point. I was part of the Campaign brand now and there was no room for scruffy. I was ashamed. I couldn’t tell him the truth. But in the end, I had to. “I don’t have a suit. I can’t afford one.” It was true. Paul came from a privileged background. He was a Sussex graduate and a bit of a lefty. The idea that anyone couldn’t afford a suit had obviously never crossed his mind. He glowed red and let me go.

The rest of the team were pitching the big dogs, the top media outlets and advertising agencies. But I had the dross—below the line, the guys who clutter supermarket checkouts with cardboard, uglify cityscapes with billboards, and stuff junk through your letterbox. I closed Campaign’s first ad sale on my first call, a premium spot on page two, and while I was at my second appointment, the company’s CEO called it in. Paul Buckley took the reservation. I so wish I’d been there.

Wilton Dixon, an affable Australian, was my second appointment. He didn’t give a fuck about my jacket, but he loved my pitch. Lounging on sofas in his office and looking down on the traffic hurrying around Hyde Park Corner, we drank beers and swooned over the glossy pages of the dummy magazine. “I’ll take a color page,” he said and we chinked our cans to seal the deal. Weeks later, when the artwork showed up, Paul hurried to my desk. “It’s sensational,” he said, thrusting it in front of me. “Call him and tell him we’ll put it on the first right-hand color page.” And so we did. It was a shot of a female model from her knees to her belly button. She was wearing only a skimpy bikini bottom, her tanned legs posed perfectly, both coy and provocative. The copy line was: “Everyone’s interested in below-the-line. Ritchie Dickson are experts.” So there it was, my Mad Men Course Module 102. Nail their eyeballs on your ad. And come September 12, 1968, there wasn’t an eyeball in Adland that missed it.

At close of business on D-Day, the troops assembled for the postmortem. Campaign’s Ad Manager, Michael Goodrich, and the rest of the team were excited as they emptied pockets full of promises. I sat quietly. There were only two ads sold that day. So I let the tabs on the sales board speak for me. In the middle of their performance, Heseltine walked in, somewhat refreshed from a long lunch with the Chairman of Crawford’s, a major ad agency. “I just sold the first color page in Campaign,” he announced, beaming. Lindsay Masters, the Publisher, looked at him expressionless. “No, you didn’t.” He pointed at me. “He did.” Heseltine towered over my desk, looking down at me. No one spoke. They all just stared at the lad in the scruffy jacket. It was eerie, but special. Right then and there, I was a Made Man, and it wasn’t long before I had a closet full of fine suits.

¹ Wikipedia’s source was a biography written by Alison Fendley, a PR executive, in 1996. The 1968 Campaign masthead had an exhaustive list of its staff. Everyone mentioned in this blog (including me) was listed there, but no Maurice.