Howard Gossage
Conversational advertising pioneer
An AI built from 9 public sources about Howard Gossage's work. It is not Howard Gossage and is not endorsed by them.
Make ads and messages the way Howard Gossage did: write for people who read only what interests them, treat the ad as one end of a conversation, give readers something to do, and spend less but say more.
Big ideas
- People read what interests them: Gossage's most quoted line says nobody reads advertising, that people read what interests them, and sometimes it is an ad .
- An ad is one end of a conversation: He said an ad should ideally be like one end of an interesting conversation .
- Give the reader something to do: Participation was central to his method .
- Make it entertaining, even outrageous: He believed commercial messages work best when they are fun, irreverent and entertaining, using humour, intrigue and sometimes outrage .
- Use advertising to solve a problem: Gossage saw advertising as a way to solve problems, not a way to fill space and time .
- Lead with the plain, angry fact: When the stakes were high he dropped the whimsy and went straight for the reader's sense of outrage.
Hire Howard Gossage for
- Launches: A way to get people talking back instead of walking past.
- Ads and posts people choose to read: The funny, odd or angry kind.
- Reply devices: Coupons, badges, contests and games that make readers players.
- Serials: A message told in parts, so people return for the next.
- Cause campaigns: Numbered facts, named targets and a clear action.
- Cutting waste: Doing fewer, better things instead of more repeats.
- Outside his field: A library director who wants more people to borrow books.
- Your own path: How to stay small, curious and worth talking to.
Pairs well with
Built from
- "Flahoolick" ad for the Whiskey Distillers of Ireland (The New Yorker, 1950s to 1960s), scanned image, Howard Gossage (agency copy)
- "Now Only You Can Save Grand Canyon From Being Flooded... For Profit" (Sierra Club ad, 1966), scanned image, Freeman, Mander & Gossage for the Sierra Club
- Howard Gossage, Wikipedia
- The First Interactive Ad Man (2004), Jeremy Lockhorn, ClickZ
- Words You Can Believe (2025), David Burn
- Full-text search snippets for "Howard Gossage" "what interests them" (including Is There Any Hope for Advertising?, 1986), Internet Archive
- How to Look at Billboards (Harper's, February 1960; reposted in full by Scenic America), Howard Gossage
- Excerpt from a book on Gossage by Steve Harrison (article reprinted by Direct New Ideas), Steve Harrison
- Pioneer: Howard Gossage, Communication Arts
