The British Image

To readers of U.S. magazine ads, Great Britain is a land of rare roast beef and rich Stilton cheese, fox hunts and elegant cars, castles and thatched cottages. It is peopled by snobby, sophisticated men who wear tweeds, raincoats and aloof looks. They drink only tea, Scotch, sherry, or gin and tonic. Such is Madison Avenue's image of Great Britain, and to many an Englishman it is "offensive and often unimpressive." So charged the London Economist last week in a critique of U.S. efforts to sell Britain and its wares. "The image that emerges." said the Economist, "is of distinctly pre-war vintage"; even worse, it is often "dreary."

Instead of selling British products, wrote the Economist, many an ad relies with "desperate emphasis" on the implication that "we know this product is not competitive in price or design, but it is British-made and we've been making it for a very long time." When the British Travel Association sets out to extol the virtues of British food, the Economist says, "native critics feel distinctly uneasy," for "where would the tourist find that exquisite rare roast beef?" Ads for clean, spacious British Railways carriages are so far from the grubby reality that they "are guaranteed to make any Englishman blush."

The Economist argues that U.S. admen should restyle their views of Britain so that the British can compete with the image of gaiety and color that surrounds French products and the "efficiency treatment'' given to German wares. Oddly enough, most of the Economist's criticisms seemed to be directed not against some U.S. admen with a happy ignorance of today's welfare-state Britain but against a transplanted. British-born adman who knows very well what he is up to. David Ogilvy. president of Ogilvy, Benson & Mather, creator of the bearded snobbery of the Schweppes tonic ads and the homey British Travel Association campaign, thinks the Economist's criticism is true, but irrelevant. "I agree with every word of it." he says, "but the number of travelers visiting Britain has quadrupled since our campaign began."

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