• AMP's Marketplace, Friday, September 11, 2009 10:44 AM

Doug Pray's new movie, "Art & Copy," takes a look at the best ads of the 1960s and the air directors and writers who not only created the so-called Creative Revolution but also had a lot of fun doing it. In this interview with Kai Ryssdal, Pray bemoans the loss of that playfulness and asserts that "98% of most advertising is pretty much garbage" today.

"A lot of businesses and certainly advertising has kinda fallen prey to this idea market research and analysis and everything is what it's all about," he says. "And if you can figure exactly what the customers are already buying, then you can figure out what exactly they're going to buy, and then you know how to advertise it."

The result is that we don't have, as we did in the days of Mary Wells and Braniff Airlines, for example, "blue planes, orange planes, yellow planes." But plain planes, and the fact that Pray feels bombarded by too much of everything, including commercials, is not the point of the movie. "The whole theory is if you hate advertising, make better ads," Pray says. First thing Monday morning.

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