We’re in the business of forgetting, not remembering. Our industry is blessed with a deep, salving amnesia. How else to explain our collective ability to ardently pitch a new piece of business mere days after having had our hearts ripped out over losing another we were so sure we’d nailed? Or to explain our deeply held faith when presenting new concepts to a client who had only days ago killed an entire round of our best thinking.

Advertising is head-over-heels in love with tomorrow. Today is old news. And Mad Men notwithstanding, yes­terday never happened. So, on the occasion of our ad agency’s 50th anniversary, we find ourselves in an awkward position: stepping out of the tornado, and pausing to look back. 

Like any hardworking, enduring shop, we’ve enjoyed our share of creative and business victories. So, unaccustomed as we may be to the act of reminiscing, we roll up our sleeves and delve into the archives.

The past half-century has been unkind to filing systems. The massive leather-bound scrapbooks we used to preserve our early campaigns are yellowed and dusty. Still, the pages reveal their share of noteworthy campaigns. Most of the ads look like they belong to the early 1960s, but a few surprise us with art direction cues that might have been taken from today.

The slides that followed, which once hung proudly in cabinets lining our studio before being shipped off to basement storage, are daunting in quantity. Like Indiana Jones, we pick through them, holding favorites up against a window to better evaluate them. We would use the light table, but cracked and long ago unplugged, it’s now a side table for spare change and iPods. During the ’70s and ’80s, we did a lot of tourism work, and the photo­graphs here don’t fail to impress. There is none of the visual trickery that makes up so much of what we do today; simply sumptuous images of Canada’s finest scenery.

The digital files that replaced our slides in the mid-’90s aren’t old enough to be made charming by time’s passage. Not yet novel, these ads are merely dated.

Setting aside the task of gathering the work, what should we do with the selected campaigns? Do we share them with current colleagues? Every time we attempt to rehash an old war story, people’s eyes glaze over, and they search for the exit.

We have a framed political cartoon of our founder, Dalton Camp, hanging in a hallway. Camp was a major player in Canadian politics in the 1960s, and I find it cool that he was of sufficient profile to be lampooned in the nation’s major newspapers of the day. But people never notice it, much less ask about it. It might as well be a framed menu from the sushi restaurant across the street. (On second thought, ad people would look at that.)

Likewise another framing. We commissioned a poster to celebrate our 30th anniversary, when we were known as Camp Advertising. We invited the best illustrators of the day to interpret our name however they wanted, and it makes for a striking piece. But that too, as much as it may tickle my partners and me, collects more dust than glances.

All of which begs the question: What is an ad agency’s legacy? Or is it insane to even ask such a thing? Apart from the few obvious game changers like Bernbach, Ogilvy, Crispin and Droga5, what about the rest of us? The mere mortal shops that will never attain icon status? In a business so fixated on tomorrow, what do we leave behind?

The blogs and tweets devoted to breaking campaigns make those same campaigns ever more ephemeral. Everything is breaking, but nothing is sticking.

Against this reality, I imagine how the conversations might play out in the event we’re stubborn enough to take a walk down memory lane and drag our associates along with us.


Us: Check out this print campaign we did for Clairtone Stereo. Clairtone was a Canadian electronics company founded in 1958, a year before we were, and their stereos were the hottest thing in North America. They even made a tiny transistor that was the iPod of its day. America’s biggest celebrities swore by their sound and design. Sinatra appeared in an ad, and the film The Graduate featured one. Look at all that white space in the ad. This is the ’60s! The ad could run today!

Art Director (glancing away from 24" computer monitor): Nice cabinet. Terrible font.