Good!s: Shaking the Canadian Advertising Tree

Eleanor Boyle is a community college psychology instructor and a
journalist in Vancouver.

He’s opinionated and brash. But Goodis knows the advertising business,
as he shows us in this personal account of the realities and unrealities
of the business as he has lived it for 40 years. A successful
Toronto-based marketer and advertiser, Goodis has owned numerous
companies; he helped develop such slogans as “At Speedy You’re a
Somebody” and “We Care About the Shape You’re In.” As befits a
feisty corporate street-fighter, Goodis has written a book that, while
it is not great literature, is nevertheless a valuable and down-to-earth
look at his industry, from an insider who is not afraid to be critical.

Throughout his book, Goodis takes ad professionals to task for merger
mania, lack of creativity, and an overarching profit motive that results
in various wasteful practices—such as companies’ responding to
competition by repackaging products under numerous different names.
Goodis frequently departs from majority opinion in advertising, such as
on the issue of cigarette marketing. Refusing himself to take cigarette
accounts, Goodis challenges the claim of cigarette manufacturers that
they are merely trying to influence brand loyalty, not hook new smokers.
Not so, argues Goodis: “The true target group in such advertising is
not really present smokers. It is to try to convince the impressionable
young to take up the habit by any means possible.” Despite imperfect
grammar, Goodis offers hope that not all ad agencies are driven solely
by the bottom line.

Goodis recognizes the frequently negative social implications of
advertising, and addresses many important issues in a manner that is
thoughtful if occasionally glib. Yet he also loves the industry, and has
written a book that will be fun and inspirational for those in the
business. Most of his criticisms of the ad industry are directed at its
strategy and tactics: the book is based on the belief that advertising
is good and useful, despite occasional abuses. Goodis may be shaking the
Canadian advertising tree so a few rotten apples will fall. But he’s
not about to chop it down.