Until the mid-1960s, a full-page ad might typically include a maximum of 8–10 lines of effusively positive copy. An ad was expected to be uncritical … and catchy! Once the creative revolution in Swedish advertising caught hold, however, a new approach emerged, borne up by a credible, reasoning tone. Writers tried to speak to the target audience the way you might speak with a good friend in a bar, not just presenting the positives but discussing things in a more balanced way, maybe even bringing up concerns and objections … sometimes even in the headline! The many complex social issues of the era probably contributed to the shift in tone.

This new familiarity had a notable consequence. Copy not only grew better – it grew longer. It took a certain text volume to achieve the desired familiarity, provide the desired insight. If you wanted to get people to gradually change their minds, to nod in recognition, it wouldn’t do to climb up on the bar counter and shout. Instead, people’s attitudes towards a product or service were changed by carefully poking rhetorical holes in preconceived ideas. The idea was to start a conversation, to get people thinking.

If you browse through the Platinum Academy website chronologically, you will quickly notice this new type of full-page advertisement. The flagship example dates from 1967: Sören Blanking’s copy for an ad celebrating the 100th anniversary of Svenska Telegrambyrån. His elegant prose, accompanied by a sepia photo of some children of farm labourers, argued that advertising had contributed to Sweden’s incomparable success in improving social conditions. Its message was intended to make participants in the constant anti-capitalist demonstrations of the era stop, if only for a moment, and question their attitudes towards the devil’s commercial agenda. (The full text of the advertisement can be found here.) Many more classic examples were to follow, such as Lars Falk’s copy for Uplandsbanken in 1973, which arguably addresses the descendants of farm labourers who had come up in the world and moved into the high-rises of the Swedish Million Programme in the 1960s and 70s: “If your bank doesn’t recognize you when you come to make a deposit, it won’t recognize you when you come to take out a loan, either.”

The trend towards long copy only accelerated in the 1980s. Clients for such ads were often special interest groups and major industrial companies. Unfortunately, the writers wielding the pen were not always seasoned stylists. Not that that was the end of the world. People who couldn’t be bothered to read the ads, instead giving them a quick glance and turning the page, still got the message that interesting ideas were in play, since the copy was so long.

The full-page ad gained extra power from the format of morning newspapers at the time, which were still full-sized broadsheets. The evening papers came in smaller tabloid format. At the agencies, there was no question about what was the Rolls-Royce of print advertising slots. It was page three of Dagens Nyheter. Not just because of its size, its location next to the editorial page and its paper’s wide circulation, but because placement in the morning paper, as opposed to one of the sensationalist evening tabloids, generally lent advertisements a higher degree of credibility.

The era of familiarity lasted a little less than three decades. By the late 1990s, its days were numbered. New commercial television channels captured the lion’s share of advertising budgets. The internet began nibbling away as well. Morning broadsheet circulation dropped, and the morning press reasoned that they better start adapting to their market. “If people are reading less, let’s make the paper half as big.” In 2000, the second-largest daily, Svenska Dagbladet, switched to tabloid format. As long as Dagens Nyheter held firm, the agencies shrugged their shoulders. But in 2004, DN and three other morning broadsheets went tabloid, too.

Twenty years on (i.e. today), neither the morning nor the evening papers have the circulation to enable a full-page ad, no matter how brilliantly written, to make enough of an impression to get large groups of people to change their minds. Nor do long-winded ads work online … and certainly not on television. Brochures are too expensive to print, never mind distribute. What can one do but accept the situation? We have entered a new era. And our era has its motivating emotions, its strategies and its channels of communication, just like the late 1960s did.

And yet, say a cadre of experienced, as yet active (and slightly naive) stylists who still recall the halcyon days, “To be sure, it’s another time now. Yet sweeping, complex issues of monumental importance are again dominating social discourse. Is it not once again time to reintroduce long, elegant, questioning, credible advertising copy that pokes holes in preconceived ideas? That takes people seriously?” To which they are met by silence … and a smattering of likes from agency folk. Absolutely, of course, certainly we could do it! But what client is prepared to stand behind an attitude like that today? And where would such truths be published?