Education for advertising Eighty-seven American universities offer undergraduate courses in advertising, and some even give degrees in it. With a few conspicuous exceptions, the teachers lack the practical experience to be relevant. All of them are handicapped by the poor quality of the textbooks, and very few do research of their own. Most of their graduates get jobs with small agencies, the big agencies preferring to recruit people who have furnished their minds by studying history, languages, economics and so forth. The fashion for recruiting at schools of business administration seems to have passed its peak. Give or take a few stars like the Baker Scholars at the Harvard Business School, their alumni are more remarkable for stodginess and arrogance than imagination. Social status When I was a door-to-door salesman for Aga cooking stoves in Scotland, I paid a cold call on an aristocrat. He threw me out. What right had I to invade his privacy? ‘Sir,’ I said, ‘you are a Director of two companies which sell their products door-to-door. How dare you insult me for doing something which your own salesmen do every day?’ His disdain for salesmen is mirrored in the snobbish attitude of the British establishment towards advertising. Not so in the United States. Moonlighting If you need more income than your agency is willing to pay you, make up the difference by moonlighting. I have been moonlighting for 30 years. The Curtis Publishing Company gave me two magnificent china lamps for writing an advertisement for Holiday magazine. They had been bullying their editors and I had reason to believe that they were about to fire Ted Patrick, the marvelous editor of Holiday. So I persuaded the heads of the 12 biggest agencies to join me in a testimonial to Ted, applauding him for his ‘indifference to the heckling of publishers.’ The Curtis people were too dumb to realize that this would make it impossible for them to fire Ted, and ran my advertisement. The Reader’s Digest gave $10,000 to the Scottish school which had educated me, in return for an advertisement I wrote for them.