by Steve Harrison and Dave Dye
200 pages, softcover, $45
Published by Adworld Press

The advertising industry is one that can do a lot of navel gazing, sometimes creating ads for ad people. But authors Steve Harrison and Dave Dye aim to remind us of what can happen when advertisers don’t take themselves too seriously in their latest work The Howard Gossage Show: and what it can teach you about advertising, fun, fame, and manipulating the media. Among advertising legends like David Ogilvy or William Bernbach, there’s Howard Gossage, the Mad Men–era adman who didn’t shy away from leveraging exuberance and humor in his ads, championed cause-related advertising, and encouraged audience participation to pioneer what we today call direct response advertising.

Harrison and Dye capture this in The Howard Gossage Show, which reads part biography, revealing how a man like Gossage came to be, and part textbook, chronicling the iconic work Gossage created for his commercial clients. Consider it a case study in Gossage’s work, each supported with a mix of the ads themselves, photos, and thoughtful correspondence between Gossage, his colleagues, illustrators and talent he discovered—and even an appreciative publisher of a newspaper that survived because of Gossage, according to the book.

Gossage’s story, like others, is one of a creative genius gone too soon, a point Harrison and Dye close the book with. But in the digital age, when advertisers solely focus on return on ad spend and shoppers unconsciously ignore anything that looks like an ad, The Howard Gossage Show proves a timely read. —Kimeko McCoy ca