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  Initially a bookkeeper, Hopkins took it upon himself to rewrite the company’s brochure, which he felt showed limited knowledge of the product. Ironically, it was written by that other copywriting pioneer, John E Powers, then at the height of his fame. But Hopkins was not daunted by Powers’ reputation. ‘He knew nothing about carpet sweepers. He had given no study to our trade situation. He knew nothing of our problems. He never gave one moment to studying a woman’s possible wish for a carpet sweeper.’ Hopkins considered that only with a thorough understanding of the product, its benefits and its potential customers could a copywriter pen a convincing ad.

  The success of Hopkins’ early promotional efforts for Bissell led him to the Chicago offices of Swift & Company, a marketer of meat products and derivatives. In his book, Hopkins describes how he applied for the job of advertising manager, only to be told during an interview that he was 106th on a list of 106 applicants. Undaunted, he asked all the advertising agencies that had approached him with job offers to send references to Swift confirming his talents as a copywriter. Next, he convinced his local newspaper to let him write a column about advertising, free of charge, in return for a byline with his photograph above it. Each time the article appeared he clipped it out and sent it to Swift. Finally, the man who had interviewed him – a Mr I H Rich – called him back and offered him the post.

  One of his greatest triumphs at Swift was the promotion of a beef suet brand called Cotosuet, used in baking as a substitute for butter. To demonstrate the product’s effectiveness, Hopkins ordered that a giant cake be baked and displayed in the window of a department store. His newspaper ads pulled in customers while emphasizing the colossal cake’s key ingredient. The stunt was a perfect example of dramatized selling.

  It was while he was freelancing in Chicago that Hopkins honed another of the techniques that was to leave its mark on advertising history. Hired to promote the beer brand Schlitz, he discovered that its bottles were steam-cleaned – just as they were in every other brewery. But no other brewery had thought of including this nugget of information in its advertising. When an ad penned by Hopkins pointed out that Schlitz bottles were ‘washed with live steam’, it gave the impression that the brand cared more about purity and hygiene than any of its competitors.

  This was the essence of the Hopkins approach. For each product, he would find the unique factor that set it apart from its rivals. ‘You cannot go into a well-occupied field on the simple appeal “buy my brand”,’ he wrote. ‘That is repugnant to all. One must offer exceptional service to induce people to change from favourite brands to yours.’ Hopkins called this the ‘pre-emptive claim’. Later, in the hands of Rosser Reeves, who worked for Ted Bates & Co in the 1950s, it became the Unique Selling Proposition. Reeves pushed the idea to an extreme, turning each USP into a simple slogan that he punched home with repetitive ads.

  For the time being, though, it was Hopkins who attracted attention with his quasi-scientific methods of advertising. His work for Schlitz caught the eye of magazine publisher Cyrus Curtis – a teetotaller. Bumping into Albert Lasker of the Lord & Thomas agency on a train, Curtis advised him to hire the copywriter who could turn the thoughts of abstemious men towards beer.

  Lasker took Curtis at his word and lured Hopkins to Lord & Thomas in 1907. This was not an easy task, as Hopkins was happy freelancing and had no intention of returning to ‘serfdom’, as he called it. Lasker initially lured Hopkins with an unusual freelance contract: ‘Give me three ads… and your wife may… select any car on the street and charge it to me.’ Finally, Hopkins agreed to work for Lasker at the remarkably high salary of one thousand dollars a week, later rising to US $185,000 a year.

  This comfortable new position did nothing to slow the workaholic copywriter’s output. He experimented with direct response advertising, becoming a sorcerer of cut-outs and coupons, realizing that it was an invaluable way of assessing readership of an ad. While researching dental hygiene for a product called Pepsodent, he ‘discovered’ plaque, and wrote the first advertisement offering a means of combating it. Clearly convinced of the power of his imagery, he bought a stake in Pepsodent and made a fortune when it took off – thanks to his own copywriting skills.

  But although Hopkins was an advertising genius, for the rest of his career he always deferred to his boss: Albert Davis Lasker.

  Lasker’s second choice

  There were other contenders for the title, but few historians would disagree that Albert Lasker was the true father of modern advertising. Ironically, it was not his first choice of profession. He originally wanted to be a journalist – and continued hankering after that trade throughout his career, despite (or perhaps because of) his seemingly effortless ability to sell things to people. ‘So far as I know, no ordinary human being has ever resisted Albert Lasker,’ wrote Claude Hopkins. ‘He has commanded what he would in this world. Presidents have made him their pal. Nothing he desired has ever been forbidden to him.’

  Lasker’s father had emigrated from Germany and, after years of struggle, built up a prosperous grocery business in Galveston, Texas. Albert, then, was born into a wealthy family on 1 May 1880, the third of eight children. Showing a journalistic bent early on, he launched a weekly newspaper when he was only 12 years old, and worked for the local Galveston title while still in high school. His dream was to work on a big city paper, preferably in New York.

  In a series of reminiscences published by American Heritage magazine in December 1954 (and more recently unearthed by a business website), Lasker describes his unlikely entry into the advertising business. ‘My father had a dread of my becoming a newspaperman, because in those days (and this is no exaggeration) almost every newspaperman was a heavy drinker… I was very devoted to my father, and he proposed instead that I go to a firm in what he considered a kindred field – Lord & Thomas in Chicago, an advertising agency… He wrote to Lord & Thomas, and they wrote back that they would give me a three months trial. Then they would see whether they could keep me on’ (‘Wall Street History’, StocksandNews.com, 4–18 February 2005).

  Established by Daniel M Lord and Ambrose L Thomas in 1881, the agency had moved with the times, graduating from placing ads to creating them. Among its biggest clients was the brewer Anheuser Busch. But the young Lasker was given menial tasks that would make even the most mundane modern internship seem thrilling, such as sweeping floors and emptying ashtrays. Unable to take the job seriously, he turned his attention to big-city living. Perhaps in order to augment his meagre 10 dollars a week salary, he started gambling, and lost several hundred dollars in a crap game.

  ‘Then I had to think, and think fast, so I went to Mr Thomas, who was a very sympathetic man… and I told him what I’d done. I had never before sold anything to anybody, but I did a salesmanship job that day. I talked Mr Thomas into advancing me five hundred dollars – which was a fortune in those days. He went with me, and we settled with the gambler. I had to stay with Lord & Thomas to work out the five hundred dollars. I never got back to reporting.’

  In fact, in order to speed the repayment of his debt, he convinced Lord & Thomas to give him the sales territory of Indiana, Ohio and Michigan, which had just become free following the departure of a colleague. Encouraged by the fact that Lasker offered to continue working for 10 dollars a week unless he brought in business, Ambrose Thomas accepted the proposal. Now Lasker had to go out and literally prospect for clients.

  In the interview with American Heritage, he recounts: ‘I had three assets: energy, dedication, and luck. I was a success from the first – from the time I was nineteen… The first town I covered, after Mr Thomas gave me a territory, was Battle Creek. There was a prospect there who was going to spend $3,000… a big account… I was lucky. I was full of energy and determination. I was a young boy – and that intrigued people. The first day I was out… I was awarded this order of US $3,000… which my predecessor could have landed any time before. He was a fine man, but he wasn’t a “closer”.’

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p; Albert certainly was, and he continued to bring in business, despite his later modest protestation that this was ‘largely as a result of the good work done by my predecessor’. Helped by a gift for spotting talents like John Kennedy and Claude Hopkins, Lasker rose smoothly to the top of the agency. Along the way, he began to change the advertising business. While most advertising firms still had only two copywriters, Lasker created a department of 10. He closely monitored the efficiency of the agency’s campaigns, tracking his clients’ sales curves against media placements to determine which mix of newspapers and magazines was the most successful. In 1904, Lord & Thomas made him a partner. Immaculately dressed, fast-talking and sparking with ideas, Lasker seemed to sweep aside all in his path like a snowplough. By 1912, he had bought out his former employers and become head of his own agency. With Lasker at the helm, advertising was well on its way to modernization.

  In Europe, however, events were taking shape that would cast the advertising industry in a new and sinister role.

  02

  From propaganda to soap

  ‘We sold the war to youth’

  With the outbreak of the First World War, advertising was used to attract volunteers. In 1914, Lord Kitchener, the British Minister of War, appeared on a poster urging young men to ‘join your country’s army’, with a steely gaze and a pointing finger. In 1917, the US army adopted an almost identical approach, with a stern Uncle Sam pointing the finger: ‘I want YOU for U.S. army’. Everywhere, it seemed, the same guilt trip was required: ‘You too should enlist in the army of the Reich’, said a German soldier, with the inevitable accusatory digit. On Italian posters, it jabbed out yet again.

  The US propaganda machine was cruelly efficient, with the establishment of a Committee on Public Information and its ‘four minute men’, who would deliver encouraging speeches to potential volunteers. In The Mirror Makers, Stephen Fox writes that the committee’s advertising division placed US $1.5 million worth of advertising.

  After the war, though, some of those who had fuelled the propaganda machine were stricken with remorse. James Montgomery Flagg, the artist behind the Uncle Sam ‘I want YOU’ poster, said: ‘A number of us who were too old or too scared to fight prostituted our talents by making posters inciting a large mob of young men who had never done anything to us to hop over and get shot at… We sold the war to youth.’

  A hint of light in the darkness: in neutral Switzerland, Zurich became known as ‘the grand sanatorium’ – a gathering place for pacifists, deserters, iconoclasts and of course artists, who often combined all of the above. This loose band collected around the paternal figure of German poet Hugo Ball. He created the Cabaret Voltaire, a nightly event held in the back room of a tavern. It comprised art exhibitions, readings, dance and amateur theatricals in a liberating and faintly anarchic environment. These soirées spawned the artistic movement that became known as Dada, a word supposedly chosen at random by Hugo Ball from a French–German dictionary. (It means either ‘wooden horse’ or ‘see you later’, depending on whether you are French or German.)

  But wait a moment: other sources suggest that the name may have been lifted from an ad for a product called Dada, the name of a popular hair tonic made by Bergmann & Company of Zurich. After all, it was suitably absurd – not to mention a sly indictment of vanity at a time of human suffering. An advertising campaign inspires one of the most influential art movements of the 20th century? The jury is still out – but it’s an attractive idea.

  The legacy of J Walter Thompson

  After the First World War, society on both sides of the Atlantic had been twisted and broken – and the structure that emerged to take its place was radically different. This did not mean that advertising had lost any of its momentum. On the contrary, the admen seemed determined to improve on the techniques of persuasion they had deployed so successfully during the war, and to put them once again at the service of brands.

  The agency that rose to dominate this era in the United States was J Walter Thompson. Although its achievements in the twenties overshadowed everything that had gone before, it had its roots in the 19th century.

  James Walter Thompson was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1847 and grew up in Ohio. After serving in the navy at the end of the Civil War, he strode down a gangplank in New York determined to carve out a career in the big city. In 1868 he was hired by a tiny advertising agency run by William J Carlton, at that point still involved in the primitive business of placing advertisements in newspapers and magazines. It was the latter that interested Thompson, who noticed that they ran few advertisements while staying longer in the family home than newspapers, thus making them potentially a more effective medium. He began to specialize in magazine advertising, gradually building up an exclusive stable of publications available only to his clients. Ten years after joining the agency, he bought it for a total of US $1,300 (US $500 for the company and US $800 for the furniture) and put his own name above the door.

  Mild-mannered and good-looking – with blue eyes and a trim brown beard – ‘The Commodore’, as he became known, charmed clients. He hired staff specifically to look after clients’ needs, creating the account executive role. Soon he began to offer a ‘full service’, designing as well as placing ads. He opened offices in Chicago, Boston, Cincinnati and even London – the first US agency to expand abroad. In these ways and others, J Walter Thompson created the first modern advertising agency.

  In 1916, after 48 years in the business, with both his health and his enthusiasm failing, Thompson handed over the reigns to the man who would take the agency to even greater heights: Stanley Resor.

  Cincinnati-born Resor had tried his hands at a number of jobs – from banking to selling machine tools – before he stumbled into advertising thanks to his brother Walter, who worked at Procter & Gamble’s in-house agency. It was here that Stanley met Helen Lansdowne, a young copywriter who was to have an enormous impact on his professional and personal life. Meanwhile, Resor took to his new milieu like a natural, soon becoming respected for his drive, his keenness to innovate and his way with clients. At a certain point he attracted the attention of J Walter Thompson, who hired him in 1908 to open the Cincinnati branch of the agency. Helen Lansdowne was taken on as copywriter.

  Lansdowne was the first woman to make an impact in a profession that remains overwhelmingly male-dominated to this day. In a previously unheard-of development, she presented campaigns to major clients, notably Procter & Gamble. Working for an agency whose clients made a great many products aimed at women, she possessed market insight as well as natural copywriting flair. Stephen Fox reports that, for Woodbury’s Soap, ‘which came to JWT in 1910, she made ads that increased sales by 1,000 per cent in eight years’. These were among the first to refer obliquely to sex, promising to deliver ‘the skin that you love to touch’ alongside a picture of a young couple. Helen married Stanley Resor in New York in 1917 – one year after the pair had effectively taken control of the agency.

  JWT was a modern environment in many other respects. It has often been noted that Resor was the first agency boss with a college degree (from Yale, at that) and as such he did not accept the view that advertising had to ‘talk down’ to consumers. His kind of advertising was aimed at a wealthy, educated target audience. He hired researchers and psychologists with the aim of creating a ‘university of advertising’, which would ensure that the agency’s sales pitches worked with scientific precision. In JWT’s ads, doctors and scientists testified to the efficacy of products along with the usual movie stars.

  The hierarchy of the agency was also a break with what had gone before. Resor was literally the kind of boss whose door was always open. At the same time, he consciously resisted meddling in the day-to-day work of the agency, assuming that people would come to him if there was a problem. Instead, account handlers were overseen by a core of high-ranking executives known as ‘backstoppers’. Any urgent matters that arose during the week were discussed with senior management at an i
nformal Thursday lunch.

  With Stanley Resor’s administrative skills perfectly balanced by Helen’s creative genius, JWT became the most successful advertising agency to date (although it was some years before it became the first to pass the US $100 million billings mark, in 1947). Thanks to the General Motors account, of which it held a chunk until the Depression, the agency followed the example of its founder by opening branches around the world: Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America… a pioneering network that would fuel future growth.

  Symbolic of its status was its move in 1927 to the monolithic Graybar Building, next to Grand Central Station – the largest office building in the world at the time. This daunting Art Deco skyscraper, with vaguely nautical embellishments, features gargoyles in the form of steel rats scurrying up the ‘mooring ropes’ that support the canopy above the front entrance.

  The interior design of JWT’s offices was overseen by Helen Resor. Work spaces were divided by wrought iron grilles, instead of walls, so the entire staff could admire the view from the 11th-floor windows. The walls that remained were adorned by a growing art collection, and Helen established her own department among an all-female team of copywriters. Meanwhile, the quietly authoritarian Stanley Resor ruled over the agency from a baronial panelled office. But the executive dining room was modelled on the kitchen of an 18th-century Massachusetts farmhouse, suggesting that, despite everything, the couple had rather provincial tastes.

  An onomatopoeic agency

  The comedian Fred Allen famously observed that the name BBDO sounded like ‘a steamer trunk falling down a flight of stairs’. By then the agency had entered the 1940s. Its original name was even more of a mouthful: Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn. But that’s rushing things a bit. Before BBDO, there was BDO. Still with me?

  The simple fact is that Bruce Barton became the most famous adman of his day. The son of a church minister, in 1924 he wrote a ‘modern’ biography of Jesus Christ, called The Man Nobody Knows, which was the bestselling book in America for two years in a row. In it he described Jesus as the ultimate adman, who had ‘picked 12 men from the bottom ranks of business and transformed them into a world-conquering organization’. Barton advised his clients to get in touch with the ‘souls’ of their companies before they began communicating to the public. After all, if they didn’t have faith in their own organization, how could they preach it to others? ‘Barton had a regard for business that crossed the border from respect to reverence,’ notes an article in Advertising Age (‘Advertising’s true believer’, 3 August 1999).