"It's like *******.  You don't have to keep doing it nine months to have a baby. You do it right first time and, after that, it's tender loving care." 

Howard Gossage

"In most agencies, the creative work was merely a functional job. The power within the organisation rested with the account people. Not even creative directors had much say.  It

was the account men who were the judge and executioner on all creative work, with the

power to reject, edit and even personally rewrite if they so wished."

Andrew Cracknell

"Howard's clients understanding of him was if he presented them an ad, they were not to

change it. It was not an invitation to edit.  And it was not a choice of ads.  It was 'This is the right thing for you right now. Let's do it.' And it was never any

question of them altering the ads."

Jay Conrad Levinson 

“Howard hated the way advertising was used as a

bludgeon ... the one talking to the many.

How it talked down to people and pushed them around.”

Jerry Mander

Cybernetics

The idea that man and machine work best together when immersed in

flowing loops of information that give feedback on past performance and

guidance on future direction.

“Cybernetics became what today's internet guru's call a 'meme', a very

viral idea that suddenly spread around post war society revolutionising

American science, manufacturing and business.”

James Harkin 

"We do one ad at a time.  Literally, that's the way we do it. We do one

advertisement and then we wait to see what happens, and then we do another

advertisement."

Howard Gossage

"If you say something as interestingly as you can, you can then expect the other party to make a response.  So the next

time you run an ad, develop the dialog. It makes the conversation much more

interesting. And rewarding."

Howard Gossage

“He had a term for this type of advertising. 

He called it ‘interactive’.”

Jerry Mander

"He put coupons on all his press ads, even when it wasn't necessary to have one.  He

would spring off of things that people wrote in and write another ad that said 'Bob from Dallas just wrote us'.  He would make an ad out of the last thing that happened.  It was very interactive and very much like what

happens on the internet."

Jeff Goodby

“The ads were different from anything I'd seen in that they lived at a level just above advertising.  They were conversations with an audience and

often designed to let the audience speak back.... You can't overstate the influence Gossage had on the early work of Crispin Porter + Bogusky. 

As our work moved online we used to sit around and wonder, ‘What would Gossage do?’”

Alex Bogusky

“Let the audience in on the gag.  Better still, let them know you know they know. This makes it cozier and much more involving.  You see, the objective is not fun and games but

warmth and community of interest.”

Howard Gossage

"He was friending people long before anyone friended anything.... It's like he was communicating to the world

through The New Yorker as his Facebook page."

Jeff Goodby

"Howard put together organic communities, he let people want to opt in.  He understood that we all

want to belong to something, some kind of club."

Professor Greg Pabst

"Howard Gossage discovered Marshall McLuhan as far as I can see.  He launched

Marshall McLuhan. He'd read that book and he said, 'Mander, look at this. This guy's

fantastic.... This is the best book on media that's ever been done' and he called him up on the 'phone and his opening line was 'Dr

McLuhan, how would you like to be famous?'"

Jerry Mander

"Marshall McLuhan was the most significant internet thinker.... and an incredibly prescient prophet.  Here we are 50 years after he wrote much of his work and it turns out, in fact, that

many of us spend much of our time in places like Facebook, on Twitter on blogs constantly sending out information and learning to rapidly respond

to feedback until we've all become the cybernetic creatures he wanted us to become."

James Harkin

"Without Howard Gossage no Marshall McLuhan, and without Marshall McLuhan, no social media the way we think about it

today."

James Harkin

“The Congress had already passed the Bill saying the dams would be a part of

the Grand Canyon and Stewart Udall, the Secretary of the Interior, was a supporter

of them and it was a done deal.  It was all over.”

Jerry Mander

"Gossage did the important, brilliant thing with those multiple coupons. That

had never been done before.  They were very important because in those days people used coupons; they were

their internet."

Jerry Mander

"Stewart Udall, the Secretary of the Interior, credited those ads with changing the

movement and I think many people since have said that they changed the character of what

was formerly a kind of 'companions on the trail' club to an activist, mainstream

organisation with real political clout. It put the environmental movement very much in play."

Jerry Mander

"These ads focused this campaign, they brought a lot of activist people in. The people who sat down in the Grand Canyon, held up placards, wrote to their congressmen. This

really was the first time that Americans confronted government in this way and I

think the ads were crucial."

Kenneth Brower

"I was in the Firehouse standing next to Howard when David Brower came up and

said, 'I'm leaving the Sierra Club.' Which was a shock to me.  He said he was going to

form his own organisation and he needed a name for it.  So Howard thought for a

second or two and said, 'Why don't you call it Friends of the Earth?'"

Sally Kemp Gossage

ostevharrise@googlemail.com