Advertising staffs were always the best-looking and best-dressed people on any newspaper, and the surprising thing in retrospect is how little the journalists had to do with them, given that otherwise we were so easily led astray. “It has long been axiomatic in quality British journalism that the advertising department and editorial should be kept rigorously apart,” wrote Peter Oborne, resigning this week as the Telegraph’s chief political commentator in the belief that his paper had betrayed this important principle. Yet there was perhaps also something ignorant and hypocritical in the traditional journalistic view of advertising, which came out of our moral hauteur. As journalists, it seemed, we were curious about everything in the world around us, apart from the people on the floor below who brought in the money.
How they went about this vital job, reporters or subeditors usually had little idea. They were in trade whereas we were the aesthetes; to the cold-caller in classified, we might as well have worn green carnations in our buttonholes and kept smelling salts in our desks. Editors were usually the only journalists who had to deal with advertising staff directly, and then usually to quarrel over the flatplan, a document that showed the size and positions of the ads in the paper. Before newspapers began their steep decline 20 years ago, advertisers still knew their place – which, in the editor’s opinion, ideally took up no more than half of a left-hand page. Sandwich-style ads in which editorial appeared as a filling; wrap-around ads; right-hand full-pagers that stared the reader down on page three: none of these modern commonplaces was then imaginable. Page editors complained instead about the space split between ads and editorial breaking the hallowed ratio of two-to-three, or of small display ads for garden sheds and corsets that let the tone of the paper down.
Did we ever have a drink with a man or woman from advertising, or take them to lunch and discover the best way to hook the lucrative BMW account? I don’t think we ever did. The travel section of the Sunday Times, in its pre-Murdoch years, once sent me on a voyage round the Caribbean as the guest of a cruise line, and the piece I wrote as a result had the unkindness of a young, single man for whom this sort of holiday was not intended. The cruise line then cancelled the series of ads it had booked – all of them five columns wide and standing tall on the page. It never occurred to me to say sorry to the staff in display ads who must have put the deal together; in fact, to say sorry to anyone. The cost of my piece in lost revenue was considerable, but the separation between getting and spending on the paper stood absolute. Nobody suggested I wrote the piece differently.
This approach kept us honest in our inquiries and judgments, but perhaps it also bred self-righteousness and obscured the underlying economics of the business we were in. The Sunday Times in the 1960s and 70s was among the world’s most prosperous and distinguished newspapers; it could ignore or annoy advertisers if it had to. The Observer, then its chief rival, knew that less profitable papers took a graver risk; that fortune doesn’t always favour the brave, or even the brave and the popular. It discovered after the Suez crisis that when advertisers take against a newspaper, the effects can be complicated and far-reaching. As Richard Crockett writes in his biographical study of David Astor, the Observer’s celebrated editor, “the Suez episode provided an object lesson in the power of the advertiser over the western capitalist press”.
In 1956, the Observer reached its postwar peak. In September that year, it sold more copies than the Sunday Times for the first time in its history. Its writers and opinions – on the theatre, on books, on free expression and the anti-colonial struggle in Africa – both caught and inspired the mood of a new generation. Then came Suez. The Observer warned against an invasion, and when it went ahead in November, accused the government of “folly and crookedness” in its collusion with France and Israel. The strength of its condemnation caused a furore: the paper was denounced in parliament, half of its trustees resigned and 866 readers wrote to disagree with the paper’s position, nearly 500 of whom vowed never to buy it again. In the era of stamps and envelopes rather than comment threads, these were big numbers – big enough to suggest that the Observer’s staunch opposition to Suez damaged its circulation, or at least stopped its rise. In fact, this is a myth. Suez did the numbers no harm. The circulation continued to grow for another year or so, as younger and more radical readers replaced those in the paper’s older and more conservative audience who had left.
The trouble, as advertisers saw it, was that the new readers were of the wrong kind – students, not nearly as affluent as those they replaced. The bigger dissuasion to advertisers, however, was sentimental and political. “Patriotic” British companies wanted nothing to do with such an apparently treasonous paper; English Electric was still refusing to advertise in it 10 years later. Also, as Astor later wrote, “the loss of Jewish advertisers was very marked”. The paper had always been supportive of Israel, and according to Astor, had a higher proportion of Jewish readers than most newspapers; now the Observer’s implicit criticism of Israel for its part in the operation “caused the strongest possible agitation among Israel’s supporters”.
The loss of revenue came at exactly the wrong time, just as years of newsprint rationing were ending and newspapers began to expand their paginations and grow new sections. The Sunday Times, better resourced and better managed, had re-established its lead over the Observer by the spring of 1957, and then helped the nation forget the shame of Suez by serialising the memoirs of generals such as Montgomery and their remembrance of a more glorious war. The Observer, meanwhile, tried to restore its position among advertisers by converting its diplomatic correspondent into a “business manager” and sending him to lunch in gentlemen’s clubs, where as a colleague, the late Michael Davie, wrote, he would “explain that the Observer is not just a leftwing vehicle for … central European Jewish intellectuals [but] in fact rather smart and public school”.
In commercial terms, morality didn’t serve the Observer well. Its anti-apartheid stance sent South African advertisers elsewhere, and only in 1958 did it lift a ban on alcohol (with a decorous advert for dry sherry) after research showed that strong drink provided the Sunday Times with an extra 29 columns of advertising, enough to give it a four-page advantage over its rival. Today the Sunday Times outsells the Observer four-to-one. You can argue the merits of their journalism – which has the livelier, the better written, the less vulgar, the more politically appealing – but the roots of their relative success and failure lie in decisions made by newspaper advertisers 60 years ago. The reach is very long.