Gossage Revisited: Reflections of Advertising's Legendary Iconoclast

Abstract

Abstract From the mid-50's to his death in 1969, Howard Luck Gossage served as advertising's resident gadfly. A successful practitioner through his own unorthodox approach to advertising messages, Gossage above all attempted to raise his colleagues' consciousness to what he saw as advertising's clear abuses — its basic philosophy of overkill fueled by the poisonous commission system, the subsequent tasteless and irrelevant messages, the clear disregard for the well being of the media, etc. This legacy of theory and practice is, it is contended, clearly relevant to contemporary concerns.