"DDB News" June 1974
The 25th anniversary of establishment issue
| Mrs.Phyllis Robinson | Copy-Chief | |
| Mr.Robert Gage | Chief Art Director |
INTERVIEWER: Did you have any idea that this kind of free thing would change advertising so much?
ROBINSON: Absolutely not. Maybe Bob did.
GAGE: No. I wasn't thinking in terms of 25 years hence. Actually, for the last 25 years it's been doing the next ad. You
just keep being involved in the job you're doing, and it keeps growing. I wasn't thinking in terms of taking over the world---I really wasn't.
INTERVIEWER: And what was the impact at the time on advertising?
ROBINSON: Well, we knocked the stuffiness out of advertising.
GAGE: The combination of the visual and the words, coming together and forming a third bigger thing, is really fundamentalit
was then and it is today.
ROBINSON: The whole being greater than the sum of its parts. This was something very new. Nobody was doing it. It seems astonishing to think about now, because it seems like the most natural thing in the world.
INTERVIEWER: A few years ago Madison Avenue was in the grip of a youth revolution. And there was a belief that creative
people burnt out after a few hot years. How come you two haven't burnt out?
ROBINSON: Because it isn't true.
GAGE: I know it can't happen to me, and it hasn't happened to Phyllis. But speaking for myself, I always think the last job I
did isn't good enough. So I have a certain built-in sickness that drives me on.
INTERVIEWER: Have you ever been analyzed?
GAGE: No.
INTERVIEWER: It's just as well. If you ever got analyzed, maybe you'd stop being driven to do it better.
ROBINSON: I have been analyzed and I think it's a built-in health. That's the difference. It cost a lot of money for that
difference.
INTERVIEWER: Phyllis, when did you become copy chief of DDB?
ROBINSON: From Day One. A copy chief without any writers. That was the question: Do you want to come along with us and be copy chief. Copy chief of me.
INTERVIEWER: There couldn't have been many women copy chiefs in those days.
ROBINSON: I don't know. But there were a number of quite successful women in advertising with terrific reputations. From the department stores---Bernice FitzGibbon, Margaret Fishback, and so forth. And a number who were big powers in the big
agencies. But I think in general they were probably not copy chiefs but were the heads of what were then called women's
divisions-babies and food and things women wrote about. There were women copywriters and men copywriters, and they worked on clearly distinct things then, which seems strange to us now.
