With Silvio Dolci goes one of the most important figures in the history of Italian advertising.
Many stories could be told about Silvio Dolci, starting with the founding of the advertising agency that still bears his name in 1962 in Turin.
Adventurous, amusing, and striking anecdotes, many of which date back to the golden age of Italian advertising, highlight his capacity to take risks and innovate, as well as the countless important advertising campaigns for numerous significant companies operating in our market (among many, just mentioning the campaigns for Orzo Bimbo and Simca is enough), and his love for France, which led him to open an office in Paris in the fateful year of 1968, also responsible for campaigns for major names like Philips and J&B.
Stubbornly (and for this stubbornness, we are grateful), his agency has remained over the years one of the few proudly Italian realities, never yielding to the temptations and allure of large international networks.
But perhaps the most fundamental aspect concerning his story and professional life, his deep relationship with this profession, can be told by Silvio himself better than anyone else, and in doing so, he offers us a greatly revealing insight into his attitude.
In a book released a few years ago, which gathered some of his aphorisms and long-standing reflections, Silvio Dolci describes the inextricable intertwining that has marked his life as an advertiser: “Advertising has worked for osmosis with the events of my life. (…) Every event, public or private, I have experienced as an advertiser.”
And the title of the book represents the perfect synthesis of this approach and this bond: If I Hadn’t Been an Advertiser, I Would Have Been an Advertiser. Advertising, as a profession (an activity, as Silvio Dolci defines it), is not only passionate but also has, or can have, solid dignity, as well as a very relevant economic and social function and utility. Advertising, therefore, as a choice, as urgency, we might say.
Some might argue that this is a romantic view, probably born from a season in the history of advertising that has now definitively passed.
We prefer to think instead that the teaching of Silvio Dolci can accompany and guide us even in the stormy seas we are navigating these days. In addition to leaving us with a great void, Silvio Dolci hands us the thread of a passion that must be preserved and not broken, along with a deep sense and ethics of our work, and all this represents an extraordinarily precious legacy and at the same time a challenge for those who have taken up the baton of this great story, starting with Marco David Benadì, Partner & CEO of Dolci Advertising.
For more information: martina.mancini@dolciadv.it 348/1508950
