Stephen King: Bridging the Great Divide

There are many excellent scientific journals devoted to neurosurgery. Month by month, they publish learned papers, each having been subjected to rigorous peer review, that chronicle the latest discoveries, hypotheses, case-studies and innovations in the neurosurgery world. And the shocking thing is this: they are never read by neurosurgeons.

Those very men and women who earn their livings in the operating theatres, holding scalpel and trepan and the lives of others in their hands, wilfully ignore the invaluable wisdom and teaching of others. There is a yawning gap between what is known and published about neurosurgery and the knowledge of those – if you'll excuse the phrase – at the cutting edge. Patients are put at risk because of the apparent disdain that the practitioners have for academic theory and the accumulated wisdom of others.

You'll have read the above with growing incredulity. That can't be true of neurosurgery, you think. And you're right, thank God. It isn't true. But in another trade, much closer to home, it very nearly is.

I know that advertising isn't neurosurgery; and I know that in the greater scheme of things, the consequences of an unprofessional approach to a marketing campaign are unlikely to be as terminal as an unprofessional approach to an operation on the brain; and I know that, whatever we'd like to pretend, advertising isn't even a profession. But it has always struck me as astonishing that virtually none of those at the cutting edge of advertising – those who create the ads on which the client's money is spent – has ever shown the slightest interest in advertising theory or the dispassionate analysis of accumulated experience.

What proportion of the readership of Admap, the International Journal of Advertising, or Market Leader, is made up of executive creative directors, I wonder? Or account handlers? Or even account planners?

It sometimes seems that both groups of people – the thinkers and theoreticians, and the movers and shakers – are not only content to live in parallel universes, divided by a common subject, but actually prefer it that way. Professors of marketing communications can publish their papers quite uncontaminated by any marketplace experience, while at exactly the same time, agencies know that it's all about raising the bar and pushing the envelope and that history has nothing of value to teach them.

These thoughts have returned to me as a result of the death of Stephen King. There have been several magnificent exceptions to the picture I paint above – and Stephen was the magnificent exception I knew best. He was also, by common consent, one of the most influential. He could occupy both universes with confidence and was fluently bilingual. He could act as interpreter from each to the other – and was as quick and as qualified to detect and expose academic marshmallow as he was vacuous creative work. His huge contribution to advertising thinking was rooted stubbornly in the practical. His unshaken belief remained that advertising was at its most irresponsible when it was least efficient; and that the only test of case-based theory was its ability to minimise advertising irrelevance and maximise its effectiveness.

In 1957, Stephen King had joined the marketing department of J Walter Thompson, then comfortably the largest agency in London. He came with a degree in modern greats, a mind that was incapable of fudge and muddle, a gift for parody and pastiche, a love of the arts – and all the practicality of the handyman he was: he gutted and rebuilt his first small London house almost single-handedly. He was also an excellent squash player, which is why I only played him once.

These were some of the things that immediately intrigued him: what was advertising for? How did it work? How did communication work? How many different roles could advertising have? What was the value of research? Could research predict the outcome of an advertising campaign? Did research research the right things – or only the things that were easy to research?

On every one of these thoroughly fundamental topics, and a great many more, he made great and original contributions. On his retirement in 1988 (he was by now a member of the worldwide board) JWT put together, for private publication, a small selection of his published writings. Called The King Papers, they span the years 1967 to 1985. Here are some of the titles: 'Can research evaluate the creative content of advertising?'; 'What is a brand?'; 'Practical progress from a theory of advertisements'; 'Advertising: art and science'. They remain timelessly potentially valuable but are an almost unexploited gold mine. Another 30 or so exist but languish in filing cabinets.

Looking back, it seems inevitable that all this digging, all this hard handiwork, would have led him to identify the need for a new specialised agency role. Coincidentally, Stanley Pollitt at BMP was reaching the same conclusion. As Stephen said a million times: they didn't invent account planning. You can't put pen to paper without some sort of rudimentary planning. What they did was isolate planning as a discrete discipline. They invented account planners and the account planning department.

The success of this controversial venture within JWT was crucially aided by the fact that Stephen himself was a brilliant planner. He earned the awed respect of clients such as Guinness, TSB, Kellogg's, Bowater Scott and dozens of others. When RHM innocently asked the agency how it might make more money from the flour it milled (to cut a three-year-long story short) he led the team that invented Mr Kipling: packs, name, ads, instore material, range: even a couple of recipes. Twenty years later, he was deeply amused by all this fancy new interest in something called integration: he'd taken it for granted, and practised it, from the beginning.

On all his accounts, the creative work was applauded, because the way that the planners worked didn't challenge creative people: it helped them look in the right direction, then liberated them to be inventive. I was head of the creative department at the time and had half-expected a bit of truculence. There was none.

What planning, at its best, can do is bridge that pointless gap between the better academics and the more thoughtful practitioners. That's not the least of the King legacies. He bridged that great divide in both his perceptiveness and his actions.

And he did it with wit – often mordant. His favourite fictional marketing director was Nick Thrust, whom he played himself on several memorable conference occasions. Nick Thrust was, as his name implied, obsessed with getting rid of stuff. Nick once wrote an entire marketing plan, full of forceful initiatives couched in impenetrable marcombabble, at the end of which you still had absolutely no idea what the brand was or what it was supposed to do. But, boy, was it impressive. And, boy, did the many Nick Thrusts in the audience squirm in their seats. Or at least the ones bright enough to understand it did; I expect the others just jotted it all down gratefully.

I was lucky enough to know Stephen King for a barely believable 60 years. There are hundreds of us around the world who know how much we learned from him, how much we owe him and how much we relished his company. There are thousands more who heard him speak and who read his papers and who keep them still.

David Ogilvy, deservedly a legend in India himself, once returned from a conference there looking unusually rueful. 'They seemed to appreciate that research chap of yours even more than me,' he said. They later got to know each other well – lucky, lucky them.

Stephen King was born on 25 February 1931 and died on 16 February 2006, eight days before his 75^th birthday. He and his wife Sally (a fine copywriter) have three grown-up children. He is survived not only by his family but by a body of work that demands to be disinterred, edited, published – and widely read and implemented. That pointless gap between the theoreticians and the practitioners is not yet closed – and Stephen King is still around to lead the charge to close it.

This article featured in Market Leader, Spring 2006.