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reach the button and the lift doors nearly closed on me. Downstairs, there were steps leading to the street.
    â€˜I might have been at Niagara Falls,’ Adams said. ‘I cheated and got out of the wheelchair and walked down the stairs, so people stared and me and probably thought I was trying to fool them that I was disabled. Then on the footpath, there weren’t ramps at the kerbs like there are these days and I had to get out of the chair again. It was an amazing day, but I learned what it is to be disabled and it helped us plan the ad campaign.’
    Adams undertook more and more ‘do-good’ campaigns because he enjoyed using advertising to do things other than sell products. The origin of one campaign was the fact that few women were presenting for breast-cancer examinations and research found they feared that neither they nor their men would be able to cope with a breast operation, in the same way that men feared losing their penis. Women complained that when they found a lump in a breast, their doctors often brushed it off. So a breast-cancer campaign planned by Adams and others used drama to show men how to treat women’s anxieties, friends how to be supportive and doctors how to be understanding.
    But not all the memorable campaigns were for not-for-profit organisations. Every time Adams sees the Qantas slogan ‘Spirit of Australia’ he remembers giving birth to it; now he wants to take it back because he says Qantas doesn’t deserve it.
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    As global brands reached Australia and started to dominate sales, their advertising agencies bought local agencies and began to dominate billings, which made it harder for local agencies to pick up anything except the crumbs. About eighty per cent of ad bookings were taken by international agencies, which made MDA’s success and continued growth even more remarkable. The agency that had started in one room generated an extraordinary client list and opened offices not only in all Australian capital cities but also in London, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Singapore and Auckland. Adams counteracted his feelings of guilt for working on commercial campaigns for global brands by planning social engineering campaigns against racism and smoking.
    In 1974, when he was only 35 and still at MDA, he said in the first of two oral histories recorded by the National Library, ‘Advertising is a despicable, irritating, shallow sort of business, but I think its history will be interesting. I think it’s going to eventually be used as an educational force against consumption, against the very things it’s been used for in the past.
    â€˜In a sense, what is advertising? It can be used to persuade people that racial prejudice is bad just as easily as to sell detergent. It can be used, as it is in America, to discourage consumption just as simply as it is used to encourage it. Sesame Street uses advertising technology for educational purposes — short spans of attention, lots of colour, and lots of technique as in television commercials — to keep people interested.’
    Adams’ criticism of advertising must have made his partners and workmates squirm and point out that he made a lot of money from it. He continued in his oral history, ‘Advertising has to be cleaned up and the sooner the better. I’d like to see stringent government regulations not only on cigarettes but also on alcohol and some other products. I am against advertising being used in politics because it is dangerous. Although I’ve done a number of political campaigns, I’ve also lectured and written against applying advertising techniques to politics. I’d like to see Australian laws preventing political advertising, mainly because it makes parties so vulnerable to business interests funding the campaigns. It’s not the case in Britain, where there is televised free political program time but no such thing as televised political