Fay Weldon’s death is a reminder of advertising’s golden age

Fay Weldon, who died last week aged 91, was so much more than a revered novelist. She was a revered advertising copywriter for Ogilvy & Mather. Or, to quote a joke from another former Ogilvy’s copywriter, Salman Rushdie: “Her great legacy to the world of literature is the slogan ‘Go to work on an egg.’ After that, she wrote novels.”

There’s an inbuilt contradiction between making up stories and earning money, and many gifted writers have solved it by producing adverts. For Raymond Chandler, advertising agencies were the acme of the “waste of human intelligence”. But the century-old tradition may have died with Weldon.

Weldon’s predecessors include F Scott Fitzgerald, who invented slogans for streetcar signs, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, who wrote radio commercials for a coffee company. The future detective novelist Dorothy L Sayers, as a copywriter in London from 1922 until 1931, created the undying Guinness ad starring a toucan: “If he can say as you can / Guinness is good for you / How grand to be a Toucan / Just think what Toucan do.” (Like “Go to work on an egg”, “Guinness is good for you” was eventually banned in public efforts to improve diet.)

Such was the profusion of advertising talent that in the late 1940s, future novelists Joseph Heller and Mary Higgins Clark briefly worked for the same New York agency. This was the era when many ads featured hundreds of words of “long copy”. Imagine all the potential great novelists who spent their days creating ads, then couldn’t be bothered to spend weekends creating literature, and died happy but forgotten in the Hamptons.

Rushdie joined Ogilvy’s in 1970, towards the end of the long-copy era. Speaking at an Irish advertisers’ awards event in 2017, he recalled the boss, David Ogilvy, who “would prowl around the agency and open people’s drawers to see what was in there. Of course, everyone there had sitcoms and novels and first drafts of plays, all kinds of unsuitable things.”

Rushdie dreamt up the famous cream-cake slogan, “Naughty. But nice”, which the client rejected, saying, “You’re telling people that cream cakes make them fat.” A year later the slogan suddenly appeared on hoardings. “Maybe the client changed,” reflected Rushdie.

Advertising taught him about writing, he told the Irish audience, including how “to write like a job. I sit down in the morning, and I do it.” It taught him concision (when he felt like practising it): “You have to try to make a very big statement in very few words or very few images.” 

The constant rejection of ideas by clients also taught writers to accept editing, though Weldon forever mourned her unused slogan for a Dior perfume: “Yes.” 

But even in Rushdie’s advertising days, the job was shifting from verbal to visual, says Simon Veksner, author of 100 Ideas that Changed Advertising. By then the big money was in TV ads. Rushdie wrote three a week advertising the Mirror newspaper, concocted another for John Cleese (“As you can see, you can’t see this invisible new Scotch tape — unlike ordinary tape which, as you can see, you can see . . .”) and shared an office with Franc Roddam, who would create the TV series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and MasterChef. In 1973, the future film director Ridley Scott made the beloved “Boy on the Bike” TV ad for Hovis bread.

Then advertising changed again. Today’s copywriters create ads lasting a few seconds that run on Facebook and TikTok and barely require text. Their drawers contain sketches of apps rather than screenplays or novels, says Veksner.

Advertising copywriting no longer involves much writing. So where are today’s Dorothy Sayers wasting their talent? Magnus Mills continued to drive buses after becoming a successful novelist, but the staple writer day-jobs are in journalism, publishing and academia. As wages in those sectors slide, novelists will be tempted by the latest iteration of the “long-copy” tradition: “content blogs” written for consumer companies. (Kurt Vonnegut produced similar stuff for General Electric in the late 1940s.) This very morning, the next Fay Weldon is probably crafting an advertorial for Louis Vuitton.

simon.kuper@ft.com