> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.howardgray.net/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Groove Theory #38 - Please Clip These and Mail Them - URL: https://www.howardgray.net/groove-theory-38-please-clip-these-and-mail-them/ - Published: 2026-11-01T07:45:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-01T07:44:59.000Z - Description: An adman who didn't like advertising much, and the coupon that helped stop a plan to flood the Grand Canyon. - Author: Howard Gray - Tags: Groove Theory 🥁 You're tuned in to ****Groove Theory** \- a newsletter about the less-known part of how something got made, and what you could borrow from it. New here? [Subscribe](https://www.howardgray.net/groove-theory). I'm your host, Howard Gray - founder of [Wavetable](https://www.wavetable.net/groove-theory?ref=howardgray.net). Currently: making mixtapes again; the new [Wavetable website](https://www.wavetable.net/?ref=howardgray.net) is live. In 1966 the US government wanted to build two dams on the Colorado River, which would have flooded part of the Grand Canyon. The Sierra Club, one of America's oldest conservation groups, set out to stop them. Its director, David Brower, had hired a small San Francisco agency, Freeman, Mander & Gossage. He'd also written an ad of his own, a straightforward open letter to the Interior Secretary, Stewart Udall. On 9 June the Club ran both, on the same day in the same newspapers: Brower's letter in some copies, the agency's ad in the rest. The agency's ad, written by Jerry Mander (yes, you read that correctly), came with seven coupons to cut out and post: to the President, to Udall, to the congressman chairing the committee, to the reader's own congressman and both their senators, and one to the Sierra Club ("that's us," the ad added). According to Mander, the coupons were Howard Gossage's idea. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d8/1a/d81abdb4-b001-4d5e-9a22-7d2a3d72df17/content/images/2026/10/gt38-headline.jpg) The headline of the coupon ad, **New York Times*, 9 June 1966\. Written by Jerry Mander at Freeman, Mander & Gossage, designed by Marget Larsen, for the Sierra Club. Scan: Yale Energy History. The coupon ad brought in more mail than the open letter: three to two by Brower's count, three to one by Mander's. Congress was swamped. The day after the ads ran, 10 June, at four in the afternoon, a letter arrived by hand from the IRS, America's tax authority, threatening the Club's tax-deductible status. A later ad reported the threat in a footnote and asked for more letters. Neither dam was ever built. --- ## The Tension Gossage, who ran the agency with Mander, sold advertising for a living and didn't like it much. ![Howard Gossage laughing, seated in his firehouse office](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d8/1a/d81abdb4-b001-4d5e-9a22-7d2a3d72df17/content/images/2026/10/gt38-howard-gossage-mid-1960s.jpg) Howard Gossage at the agency's firehouse office in San Francisco, mid 1960s. Photo: Ashpollakwrites, [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Howard%5FGossage%5Fportrait.jpg?ref=howardgray.net). Of billboards, he said: *"I like outdoor advertising; I just don't think it ought to be outdoors."* His objection was that billboards are coercive. They take something from you without asking, in a way a page you can turn past doesn't. That made the Canyon job harder. No ad of his was going to grab anyone, and agreeing that the Canyon should be saved doesn't stop a dam. Mail on the right desks in Washington might, if strangers could be got to write it off the back of an ad. Gossage knew the odds: *"Nobody reads advertising. People read what interests them; and sometimes it's an ad."* Advertising has always been full of people who are both good at it and uneasy about it. Dorothy L. Sayers wrote copy at S.H. Benson in London for nine years, set a murder mystery, *Murder Must Advertise*, in an ad agency, and still wrote the rhyme for the Guinness toucan afterwards. David Ogilvy, who thought an ad was there to sell and nothing else, still had to remind his own trade that *"the consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife."* Outsiders have been less polite. In 1924 the Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock called advertising *"the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it."* Gossage would probably have agreed with Leacock, and stayed in the business anyway. --- ## Step Into It I worked in ad agencies for a while, and came out with contempt and reverence in about equal measure. Like Hollywood, the advertising industry loves to congratulate itself (they do have Cannes in common). The ones I was at were also full of wildly talented people. Many of them spent their energy chasing awards and the next campaign. Several looked pretty tired by it all. I was a project manager. When The O2 opened in London in 2007, I spent a run of crazy late nights sending millions of text messages to O2 customers about Prince's 21 nights there, out of some huge, complicated Excel files. At one point we very nearly sent the wrong copy to a very large batch of people. I'd love to have the talent of a great writer or art director, and I worked next to some brilliant ones for years without spending enough time learning from them. John Wanamaker, the American department-store owner, supposedly said half his advertising was wasted and he didn't know which half. Half my time in advertising was wasted. I now know which half. --- ## The Groove: Signal Coupons weren't new. Companies had been using them since the late 1800s to get you to buy something. Gossage's coupons asked you to write to Washington. ![Coupon No. 2 from the 1966 Sierra Club ad, addressed to Stewart Udall](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d8/1a/d81abdb4-b001-4d5e-9a22-7d2a3d72df17/content/images/2026/10/gt38-udall-coupon.jpg) Coupon No. 2, one of seven down the right-hand side of the 9 June page. Scan: Yale Energy History. You read about the Canyon. You cut out the coupon. You put it in a postbox. And now you're somebody who wrote to Washington about a dam. You gave a dam(n). (I know, I can't help myself. Sorry.) The agency's ads gave people a job to do. For a shirtmaker, Gossage offered a free scrap of shirt fabric with a buttonhole cut into it and asked readers to write in and say what it was for. Thousands did, and the letters became a book: *Dear Miss Afflerbach, or The Postman Hardly Ever Rings 11,342 Times*. For Qantas, he asked people to name its new plane, with a live kangaroo as first prize. Second prize was a stuffed koala. ![1961 Fina ad: a hand fills a tyre with pink air, headline PINK AIR!](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d8/1a/d81abdb4-b001-4d5e-9a22-7d2a3d72df17/content/images/2026/10/gt38-fina-pink-air-1961.jpg) Another Gossage ad that asked readers to play along: Fina petrol stations, 1961\. The copy promises to mail you a sample of Pink Air "if we can just figure how to keep it from leaking out of the envelope." Via **Communication Arts*. A coupon would have told John Wanamaker which half of his advertising worked. Gossage built his ads to make people write back. Most people who like a newsletter never reply to it. I still count the ones who do. --- 🎹 ****Groove Notes** ****1) Run their version too.** Brower had his own idea for the ad, and the agency had theirs. Both ran on the same day, in different copies of the same papers, and the mail showed which worked. Next time a client likes their version and you like yours, see whether you can run both and let the response decide. ****2) Give people a job.** The billboards Gossage hated took your attention without asking. His ads asked outright: write to Washington, write to a shirtmaker, name a plane. People said yes. It's fine to ask for something that matters, as long as doing it takes a minute. ****3) Write the letter for them.** The coupon came addressed, with the letter in place. The reader added a name and found a stamp. Most asks leave the who, what and where to the reader, who has other things on. Today the letter might be a two-minute demo they can play, or an email they can forward to their boss without changing a word. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d8/1a/d81abdb4-b001-4d5e-9a22-7d2a3d72df17/content/images/2026/10/Groove5Elements_Sq.png) Signal is one of the five elements of [Groove Theory ->](https://www.howardgray.net/groove-theory/) --- ## The Release Winning cost the Sierra Club. The IRS followed through and took away its tax-deductible status. Donations fell. But membership doubled in two years, to nearly 80,000 by the Club's count. The campaign and the IRS, in three minutes. From **A Fierce Green Fire*, PBS American Masters. Howard Gossage died in 1969, at 52, the same year Brower set up Friends of the Earth with his help. Jerry Mander took Gossage's doubts about advertising further. He left the business, and in 1978 published *Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television*. Of the adverts and media he'd spent fifteen years creating, he wrote: *"In the end, I became horrified by them."* I'm a touch less horrified than Mander was, mostly because the two things Gossage was best at work outside advertising too. He had a feel for why people do what they do. That has a name now, behavioural science, and Rory Sutherland at Ogilvy is its best-known champion. And Gossage had ideas good enough that people wanted to join in. The best ad people still have both. I could use both for my own company right now. Perhaps you could too. Video podcasts get noisier by the month. LinkedIn changed its algorithm and my style of post doesn't do much there. Everyone's inbox is full. In person is still the best, but nobody wants to commit to a date. Maybe the answer is a coupon. Today's version of one, anyway. Howard --- ## Extended Mix - **Under thirteen people, on purpose.** Gossage turned down or resigned business to keep the agency that size. Wavetable is 2.5 people (going up to 7 on occasion), and I get a range of reactions when I say so. More of them are positive these days. - **He helped make McLuhan famous.** A friend, the doctor Gerald Feigen, put Gossage onto Marshall McLuhan's *Understanding Media*. In 1965 the two of them took McLuhan round New York's editors, then threw a "McLuhan festival" at the agency in San Francisco. Tom Wolfe came and wrote "What If He Is Right?" Gossage and Feigen reckoned they'd "probably speeded up the recognition of his genius by about six months." - **The books.** Gossage's essays are collected in *Is There Any Hope for Advertising?* For the fuller story, there's Steve Harrison's biography, *Changing the World Is the Only Fit Work for a Grown Man* (2012).