Obvious Adams

In a Chicago restaurant, two diners point out a quiet, ordinary-looking man: Obvious Adams, the most talked-about figure in advertising. They are unimpressed by him. Yet Adams is already at work, sketching notes on the back of a menu, and soon he telephones an Iowa businessman with a plan that the man admits he should have thought of himself.

The story then goes back to the beginning. Oliver B. Adams, a poor New England boy, works in a grocery store until its owner dies, then goes to New York, working in a market by day and studying at night school. After a talk by James B. Oswald, head of a famous advertising agency, he decides to work for that man and goes to tell him so. Oswald refuses him kindly, but Adams simply says he will find a way to prove himself. Oswald cannot forget how plainly Adams saw and did the obvious thing, and hires him to file periodicals.

Adams improves the filing system, then writes a canned-peach advertisement that impresses the copy chief, and he is moved to the copy department. When a cake campaign fails despite brilliant copy, Adams, who had worked on the account privately, proposes a plan built on sampling, colorful cards and a new carton. It succeeds. Oswald then sends him to a Southern city to discover why one of two hat stores loses money, and he finds that the store is hard to find and its big window faces the wrong flow of passers-by. Next he wins a bond-paper account by telling the plain facts of the product to the buyers. The nickname "Obvious" spreads.

Adams's later ideas include close-up pictures and long, readable advertisements. Interviewed at home, he explains that the obvious requires hard thinking, cites Vail's night letter as an example, and predicts that opera, libraries and railroads will one day do the obvious and advertise. He leaves for Chicago on a new case, and the narrator concludes that there is no secret: it is obvious.