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The People, Creative Movements, and Legendary Work That Shaped the Modern Craft of Advertising

David Burn
3 min readFeb 26, 2020

Advertising is an industry with a short but significant history.

Illustration by Jason Walton

The more we know about what happened before and how we arrived in this state of digital disruption, the more prepared we will be as individuals and as in industry to solve today’s and tomorrow’s communications challenges. To this end, I created a new workshop for ad agencies or in-house teams, specifically designed to strengthen the creative department’s muscles.

During the workshop, I run through the significant industry epochs, historical figures who worked to shape the industry that we inherited, and the legendary ads that continue to serve as guideposts for today’s ad makers. The business is now ours to mold and to remake, but to properly do this and effectively break the rules, we must first know the rules, and why and how they were put in place.

The workshop introduces a cast of charters from the past including Mary Wells Lawrence, Howard Luck Gossage, Bill Bernbach, David Ogilvy, Leo Burnett, Helen Lansdowne Resor, Hal Riney and others who have made significant contributions to the craft. For instance, ad geeks may know, but not everyone working in advertising today knows who Hal Riney is, or the role he played in helping to elect Ronald Reagan as President of the…

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David Burn
David Burn

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