Simplicity Is Not Obvious

And it is deceptive

Obvious Adams by Robert R. Updegraff

Obvious Adams was originally a short story in one of the magazines of mass literacy, mass culture that made the United States hum with activity as it began to reach the beginnings of its industrial and cultural zenith. And then it was a book, a very short book, easy to read, not all that demanding.

One might think that because it’s simple, and because it’s hokey, there’s not much to be learnt from this one. The story begins largely as it carries on: do you see that man there? It’s Obvious Adams. Doesn’t look like much, does he? And yet he is in great demand; the businesses, they line up to court him, to hear his advice. And what is that advice, you ask? It is simplicity, simplicity itself. Obvious Adams – and of course that is not his real forename – believes that if there is a problem in business, it is because there is something that everyone has missed.

Something simple. Something easy to spot – but only when you’ve been told it’s there.

Adams grows up working in his family’s grocery business and attends night school. He is taken by a talk given by an advertising man and decides that he wishes to work not only in advertising but also for the man whose lecture he attended. He tells the man this, and he, deciding Adams is a simple sort, really, declines.

Adams therefore, by a mix of a little luck but mostly judgement, gets his way in being hired – initially, he is sent off doing something menial. And then particular client accounts come along – common or garden things – and the people who are at the top of the totem pole do what it is they can to satisfy them.

One of the copywriters has the most exquisite style imaginable. To read his description of the cakes that are a candidate for advertisement, one is transported into the heavens to repose on clouds, eating crumbs of the cakes in question between pinched fingertips.

But his highfalutin style does not sell. The Obvious Adams solution is straightforward; he wants the packaging not to be pretty but to be cake-coloured. And he wants the public to have one or two free samples of the product, so the man on the street knows it is apt to be good the next time around.

Adams is unfortunately one of that species of hyper-productive American do-gooder types. In his time off, especially at the beginning of his working life, he dreams about advertising campaigns. He designs them for his own satisfaction; he prays to be given the account that he had been working on (as if it were formally his) for some time. One of those instances is a campaign for tinned peaches.

Obvious Adams educates himself profoundly on the business of growing peaches, on the business of picking peaches, of the business of canning peaches. He designs a campaign around this fact. Obvious Adams is clear: he wants the copy to describe simply how the peaches are grown, picked and tinned. Then the people will know what it is they may want to buy.

Some of the copy Adams proposes for the peach account and the cake account are quietly inspired. The book does not come from ignorant speculation. It has some substance.

Another Adams excursion sends him to a city where there are two stores: one making money, the other failing. The one that’s failing defies logic. Any bid to advertise the stores means the one already winning does better; the languishing one continues its slump. Adams takes a walking tour. He notices that the store which is losing money is hard to find: that people walk by it on the wrong side of the street; that its frontage is very small, despite it being expensively situated. Naturally, he thinks the shop ought to shut.

And it is shut.

At the end of the book, Adams is discoursing to the point of view character. People ought to think, he says, not about advertising the latest thing about their product to their possible customers, but instead about advertising the very thing they are in the business of selling. The opera house ought not to advertise a star – something only opera-lovers would care about – but instead the idea of music in the first place. Public libraries are too often half-full. Why not make people who do not visit them aware they exist? Just imagine how many more people might read a good book.

This is all enjoyable enough to read and there is some wisdom there; the advertising guru Rory Sutherland is a great enthusiast of this book. I personally enjoyed this short volume. And I think others may too. But pleasure might depend on whether the reader can tolerate quaint turn-of-the-century language and occasional lumpen, parabolic sentences which bend only slowly towards a point.

Not everything is obvious, after all.