Larry Gordon

Art director, Vickers and Benson

I’ve always felt endangered. It’s a performance industry and it’s a performance business, regardless of what medium you’re talking about. Most of my work these days is tv, but I’ve always felt the pressure to perform.

I’m hugely optimistic about the business in general, and television advertising specifically. It’s a great medium – it always has been a great medium. It’s unfortunate there’s so much crap on it, from a programming and advertising point of view.

There’s always a lot of pontificating about the death of television advertising, and certainly it’s under siege, money is being put elsewhere. I have no idea what the numbers are, but I know it’s substantially less than it used to be.

It’s still a wonderful medium to create for and I believe it’s still a very effective medium if used properly.

There’s the need to isolate your customer and find him or her and where they live. And often that’s television.

Life in this culture has been that of rapid consumerism, and we embrace that as North Americans. We’re electronic junkies. We embraced television in the ’50s like we’re embracing the Internet in the ’90s.

It’s always been the game. There’s always been a new place to go with your message. What I deal with is the art of persuasion. The more mediums the better. It makes it a lot more difficult to evaluate where to spend your advertising dollars.

Television advertising is not an industry, it’s a medium. I’ve always believed that we have to use it more effectively. I think there is probably a fair amount of waste, i