What the inventor of the teddy bear has to remind us about advertising

'The best things in these sermons are as old as the hills,' wrote Seymour Eaton 103 years ago. These are the opening words of the prologue to a very slim volume called Sermons on Advertising which was published by the J Walter Thompson Co in 1908 as an advertisement for itself. Seymour Eaton was a schoolteacher, a prolific writer of business-related textbooks, a serial entrepreneur, the holder of more than 300 copyrights and the inventor of teddy bears. He seems not to have been a J Walter Thompson employee but an adviser.

Both Eaton and the agency thought and wrote about the principles of effective advertising with depth and clarity. They both believed in the priceless value of experience: 'There is no business on earth where experience is more valuable than in the business of advertising,' wrote Eaton.

And in 1908, the agency could already boast: 'The J Walter Thompson advertising service can draw on 43 years of experience in giving expert counsel to the new advertiser.' Then later: 'If this little book pleases you, give its publishers an opportunity to show what they can do for you in planning and preparing good advertising.'

So planning was not invented in 1968. Account planners may have been christened in 1968 but planning has been recognised as essential to good advertising for as long as advertising has existed.

The strongest reason to revisit Sermons on Advertising is the familiar woods-and-trees one. Advertising has become too much like the medical profession, though for far less respectable reasons. Good agencies used to be like the best general practitioners: they could both diagnose and prescribe, almost irrespective of the ailment.

Now both clients and patients increasingly find themselves engaged with specialists; and as specialists proliferate, generalists decline. The client, like many a patient with multiple problems, is left impressed by the detailed knowledge of those specialists yet disconcerted by the myopia with which too many seem to be afflicted. Where are the physicians who can understand the whole man? Where are the advertising counsellors who can understand the whole brand?

Today, even the word advertising is under threat. We're asked to differentiate between viral and ambient and another dozen bits of unhelpful jargon. Digital has got us all confused: isn't everything digital? These are some of the many trees of modern marketing communications – but step back a little and what does the wood still look like? Seymour Eaton helps remind us. Although writing on behalf of a single agency, he constantly reminds his readers not of this one agency's proprietary skills but of advertising's generic values. Not many agencies do that these days, which is one good reason why those values get forgotten.

Here he is on the need to earn the participation of your audience: 'An advertisement of one hundred words should make the reader think five thousand words; and herein lies the secret of good copy. It isn't what you say that counts but the chain of thought which your advertising creates.'

Had we all remembered that over the past hundred years, our ads would have been a great deal more effective and we'd never have been as misled as we were by the irrelevance of advertising recall. 'Engagement' became a hot new thought a few years back. Eaton preferred to say: 'It isn't what you say that counts but the chain of thought which your advertising creates.'

FLATTER THE TALKER RATHER THAN THE GOODS

What we call word-of-mouth, he calls mouth to mouth. 'Mouth to mouth can be made a hit on almost any line of goods … but it must be done in some indirect way; in some way that will flatter the talker rather than the goods.'

And with that he perfectly skewers the secret of the successful viral word-of-mouth's latest offspring. No one's going to oblige a commercial product by forwarding its boring old advertising to 50 close friends. Unless a viral shows the forwarder to be witty and discerning (so flattering the talker rather than the goods) it will spectacularly fail to breed.

A century later, even the academics concede that the emotional content of advertising may be at least as potent as the rational. Read Eaton: 'It is safe to say that 9 out of every 10 advertisements … are as dead as Egyptian mummies. They have eyes and nose and mouth but they neither see nor speak. They don't even smell. There is no throbbing pulse. This in a nutshell is what I mean by the personal element in advertising.

'Advertisements are written to appeal to live people and nothing can get into the heart of humanity so easily as another heart. Sentiment is a tremendous advertising magnet and must be reckoned with. The secret of copy is personality; red hot hustling life.'