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  Barton had started out as a journalist on the magazine Collier’s Weekly, where he occasionally turned his hand to writing copy for advertisers such as Harvard Classics, with its series of educational books. Later, he was involved in First World War sloganeering, which is how he met advertising men Alex Osborn and Roy Durstine. The trio served together on a panel planning the United War Work campaign. In 1918, Osborn and Durstine invited Barton to join their start-up agency. Although he thought of himself as a writer, Barton agreed – figuring he could still be a man of letters in his spare time.

  In its early years BDO won a succession of cornerstone accounts, such as General Electric, General Motors and Dunlop. It moved to spacious new offices at 383 Madison Avenue, where it was not the only advertising agency: the other was the George Batten Company.

  Like many advertising pioneers, George Batten had started a one-man agency towards the end of the 19th century. However, his was the first operation to offer in-house printing, as he believed in the use of plain, simple type to attract the attention of readers. Batten died in 1918, having built an agency to reckon with. By the time it shared a headquarters with BDO, in 1923, the Batten Company had 246 employees. It merged with BDO in 1928 to form one of the industry’s largest players, with billings of US $32 million.

  The unprecedented success of agencies like JWT and BBDO demonstrates the extent to which the 1920s were boom years for advertising. In London, the decade had kicked off with an International Advertising Exhibition at White City. The poster for the event showed a London Underground platform crammed with cross-track advertising, while the waiting passengers included many familiar advertising characters: Monsieur Bibendum (better known in Britain as The Michelin Man), the Bisto Kids, Nipper the HMV dog and the red-coated striding man found on bottles of Johnnie Walker Black Label (he was first drawn in 1909 by the cartoonist Tom Browne). Brands had definitively entered the public consciousness.

  Back in the States, the introduction of hire purchase made costly goods available to a raft of new consumers. Sales of radio sets rose from US $60 million in 1922 to US $850 million by the end of the decade, while the number of cars on the road rose from 6 million to 23 million in 10 years. In 1928 Ford replaced its Model T with the Model A, with the NW Ayer agency handling advertising for the launch. Just as JWT’s overseas expansion had been accelerated by General Motors, so Ayer’s was driven by Ford, with the agency opening offices in London, São Paulo and Buenos Aires. Slowly, the big agencies were going global.

  This period also saw the strengthening of an industry that was to remain a reliable source of income for advertising agencies for years to come: tobacco. In the United States, rival firms RJ Reynolds (Camel), Liggett & Myers (Chesterfield) and American Tobacco (Lucky Strike) had been fiercely competing for the traditionally male market of cigarette smokers. But now they noticed that a new generation of young, liberated women was starting to smoke – even though this was still considered socially unacceptable. The tobacco companies made contorted efforts to target women: a poster showing a woman gazing at a Camel poster was a typical example; or a woman saying to her Chesterfield-puffing guy, ‘Blow some my way.’ Despite this oblique approach, the number of women smokers in the United States rose from 5 per cent of the total in 1923 to 18 per cent 10 years later.

  But the profits that the advertising agencies reaped from this new market were not enough to protect them from the approaching financial maelstrom.

  Rubicam versus the Depression

  An image provided by the ad agency D’Arcy, of Santa Claus dressed in the red and white livery of Coca-Cola (his traditional attire from then on), was one of the only cheerful sights on the wintry streets of America in 1931. Unemployment had risen to 8 million, having doubled in a year. The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 had ripped the floor out of the US economy and sent a shudder through the entire Western world (with the shockwave hitting debt-ridden Germany particularly hard). By 1932 the Dow Jones Index had lost 89 per cent of its value – and would not fully recover until 1954.

  As one might have expected, the advertising agencies adopted fixed grins and preached optimism. Things would get better soon, they said. But, as Stephen Fox reports, Albert Lasker was forced to cut salaries at Lord & Thomas by 25 per cent, ‘and then later had to fire over 50 employees… BBDO tried to carry its people through the hard times and so consequently was overstaffed’. The hard sell got harder; more sex appeared in advertising. The bitter public glanced disdainfully at ads for products they could no longer afford. With the glory days of the 1920s at an end, advertising would never regain its coquettish charm.

  And yet, a couple of famous agencies rose from this mire. One of them was Leo Burnett, which opened in 1935 with a bowl of apples on its reception desk (see Chapter 5, The Chicago way). Another was Young & Rubicam. Although the agency had been around since 1923, it was one of the few to wrench a profit from the Depression, when it also developed the techniques that would have a lasting impact on the industry.

  Raymond Rubicam was another frustrated writer in a sector littered with them. Born in Brooklyn in 1892, the youngest of eight children, he was just five years old when his father died of tuberculosis. With his mother unable to look after him, he was shuffled around surrogate parents in Ohio, Denver and Texas. A bright yet undisciplined child, he left school at 15 to work in a diverse variety of positions – from salesman to hotel porter – hitching illegal rides on the railroad as he made his way slowly east. Finally he pitched up in Philadelphia, where his family had its original roots. Here, aided by relatives, he made ends meet with short stories and journalism.

  Then he fell in love, and realized that his finances would need a boost if he was to become a family man. After a short, unsatisfactory period as an automobile salesman, he turned his attention to the nascent advertising industry. He wrote some sample tobacco ads and took them along to the offices of F Wallis Armstrong, the first agency in the phone book and, unbeknown to Rubicam, a notoriously cantankerous adman. Initially agreeing to see the budding copywriter, Armstrong then let him ‘warm a bench’ in the lobby for nine days in a row. On the final day, Rubicam went home and wrote an angry letter explaining exactly what he thought of such treatment. It was, he recalled, ‘designed to produce an immediate interview or a couple of black eyes for the writer’ (‘Leaders in Marketing’, Journal of Marketing, April 1962). Rubicam’s talent must have blazed off the page: Armstrong called him back into the office and hired him.

  Even so, Rubicam was unlikely to shine at the antediluvian Armstrong operation, and stayed just long enough to learn the rudiments of copywriting before moving on – this time to NW Ayer. Here, for the Steinway piano account, Rubicam hit the right note, with an ad describing the piano as ‘The Instrument of the Immortals’. Later, he wrote another winning line for the pharmaceutical company ER Squibb: ‘The priceless ingredient of every product is the honour and integrity of its maker.’

  Rubicam’s closest friend at Ayer was James Orr Young, an amiable account man seven years his senior who had also moved over from the Armstrong agency. At a certain point they began to feel that there wasn’t enough room for manoeuvre at Ayer, which had grown stuffy and complacent. While taking a stroll across Independence Square one afternoon, they decided to launch their own agency.

  At its peak, Y&R was the closest adland had so far seen to the kind of freewheeling agency that would later spark ‘the creative revolution’ of the 1950s. Reflecting his own lack of a formal education, Rubicam recruited talented oddballs and rebels rather than intellectuals. Hardly anyone turned up before 10 in the morning, but the agency specialized in late-night creative sessions, fuelled by coffee and cigarettes, known as ‘gang-ups’.

  Ironically, the agency’s first successful campaign was for a caffeine-free coffee substitute called Postum. Previous campaigns for the product had taken a vaguely medicinal approach, placing coffee in a negative light and talking up Postum as a solution for anxiety, insomnia and poor digestion. But
the ads had never caught on, so Rubicam commissioned research to find out what consumers really thought of the beverage. It turned out that many of them were attracted by a factor nobody could have guessed – Postum’s flavour. So Y&R’s new magazine campaign threw that in to the mix too, portraying the drink as a soothing and tasty bedtime beverage. Postum’s sales took off. The brand’s owner, General Foods, promised the agency more work if it could relocate to New York – which it did.

  Y&R had got itself a reputation as a creative agency, but Rubicam was keen to stress that even its wildest flights of fancy were based on solid research. ‘Ideas founded on facts’ became his mantra. He said the aim of every advertiser should be to ‘try to know more than your competitors do about the market, and put that knowledge into the hands of writers and artists with imagination and broad human sympathies’.

  To help develop this idea, Rubicam hired an academic with a research background. George Gallup was a professor of advertising and journalism at Northwestern University. He had become something of a star in the advertising world after publishing his research into magazine readership habits and – crucially – the aspects of magazine advertising that had the greatest impact on readers. He discovered that while the largest percentage of ads focused on the economy and efficiency of products, those that pushed the right buttons with readers concerned quality, vanity and sex-appeal. Other agencies tried to poach the researcher, but Rubicam convinced him by promising greater room for experimentation and freedom from financial constraints.

  Once established at Y&R, Gallup built up a marketing research department that was the envy of other agencies. At one point, no fewer than 400 people around the country were involved in field research work for Y&R, all sending back information about which ads were working and why. Later, Gallup and Rubicam devised a procedure for monitoring reactions to radio shows, recruiting listening panels from ‘churches and women’s clubs’. At the beginning, listeners’ likes and dislikes were recorded with the aid of a notepad, a pencil and a questionnaire – but later General Electric provided Y&R with a machine adapted to the agency’s needs. In 1935, while still at Y&R, Gallup established the American Institute of Public Opinion. This later broke away to become the Gallup Organization, in 1958.

  Meanwhile, in 1934, Young had left the agency, effectively acknowledging Rubicam’s dominance over the firm. Somewhat older than his partner, Young had always been less passionate about the advertising business, preferring to spend time with his family.

  Rubicam, however, continued building the agency for another decade. His winning formula of strong creative ideas driven by solid research seemed impervious to recession and war. Billings continued to climb: US $6 million in 1927, US $12 million in 1935, US $22 million in 1937. By 1944, when Rubicam began contemplating an early retirement, the agency was billing US $50 million a year. He left without remorse, hoping to finally write that book. But after toying with journalism, he came to the conclusion that writing was ‘a life of drudgery’, and that years of working in the exciting surroundings of an advertising agency had spoiled him for such a solitary existence.

  New sights, new sounds

  European artists were occasionally embraced by the United States. In 1938, NW Ayer commissioned the French poster artist Adolphe Mouron – better known as ‘Cassandre’ – to come up with an image for the new Ford V8. Cassandre was already a legend, having transformed poster advertising in France with his bold, minimalist Art Deco designs. By 1936, he merited his own exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Solicited after this event by Ford, he provided a surrealistic eye with ‘V8’ imprinted on the pupil. Staring down at the scurrying pedestrians, the giant eye might have been the inspiration for Big Brother. It was also a plea in defence of illustration, which was slowly being superseded by the glaring eye of photography.

  Some of the most groundbreaking work in that field was done by J Stirling Getchell. An influential figure in the thirties who barely survived the decade, Getchell died at the age of 41 when his chronically weak heart finally succumbed to his frantic lifestyle.

  After stints at Lord & Thomas and JWT, among others, the restless Getchell started his own agency in 1931. His method was to hire the most talented photographers and create ads around their images, favouring a high-impact, tabloid approach, with staccato copy and blazing headlines. Probably his best-known ad was for the 1932 launch of the Chrysler Plymouth. It featured a photograph of Walter P Chrysler, foot resting firmly on the car’s fender, above the bold statement: ‘Look at ALL THREE.’ Chrysler appeared to be encouraging readers to compare his automobile to two rival vehicles – from Ford and General Motors – before making a well-informed decision. This unorthodox ‘honesty’ appealed to consumers, with a positive result for sales of the Plymouth.

  Getchell even briefly launched a magazine called Picture. ‘Widely reputed as a pioneer user of news-style pictures in advertisements… Mr Getchell… goes in for illustrated expositions of topics like the life of a chorus girl, the dangers of lightning, ‘Strange Animal Diets’ or what happens to you in a Turkish bath…’, sniffed the rival Time magazine (‘Getchell’s Picture’, 27 December 1937). It was typical of Getchell that he promised to run the magazine in his spare time in order to continue serving his clients at the agency. Three years later he was gone – leaving behind a bold new style of ad for a harsher era.

  But if photography was an evolution, the industry was also dealing with a technological revolution. In a few short years it had mastered an entirely new method of diffusing its messages. This was to be joined in short order by another, even more powerful medium. And, as is the case today, the biggest rewards went to the agencies that were the quickest to adapt.

  In the United States, radio was a commercial business almost from the start. As early as 1922, a New York radio station called WEAF, owned by American Telephone & Telegraph, had begun offering 10-minute advertising slots for US $100. By 1926, WEAF had evolved into the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) launched the following year. While in the United Kingdom the BBC, launched in 1922, remained ad-free, in the United States radio became the almost exclusive domain of advertisers, who sponsored and produced shows. Dark mutterings about advertising ‘intruding on the family circle’ were drowned out by the sound of the Lucky Strike Dance Orchestra.

  The new medium also made a couple of agencies’ reputations. Radio men were considered unconventional and modern, the dotcom pioneers of their day. An agency called Benton & Bowles, which had been teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, became known for its radio expertise when it launched a variety show called The Maxwell House Showboat, which spurred an 85 per cent rise in sales in a single year.

  But the leading name in radio was Frank Hummert, creator of ‘soap operas’ (so called, as if you didn’t know, because they were frequently sponsored by detergent brands). Though ironically reticent and uncommunicative in person, Hummert had a genius for radio advertising. He’d begun creating campaigns for the medium at Lord & Thomas before joining Blackett & Sample (soon to become Blackett-Sample-Hummert) in 1927. At that point, the standard format for a sponsored radio show – particularly if it was aimed at women – was a selection of chatty household hints. But Hummert decided to experiment with something more like the cliff-hanging serials in newspapers. Along with his co-worker and eventual wife Anne Ashenhurst, he created, wrote and produced ‘serial dramas’. Some of these stayed on the air for years. The Jack Armstrong adventure series, sponsored by the breakfast cereal Wheaties, started its run in 1931 and continued airing in one form or another until the early 1950s. Even more impressively, a soap opera called Ma Perkins, for Oxydol detergent, ran for no fewer than 37 years. Thanks to his radio royalties, by 1937 Hummert was the richest man in advertising.

  The end of the beginning

  Advertising went back to war. As well as being deployed for the purposes of boosting morale, advertising agencies rushed to give the impression that brands we
re in the thick of the fighting. In a manner that seems even more distasteful today than it did at the time, products were linked to the war effort. For instance, Cadillac claimed to be ‘in the vanguard of the invasion’, as Cadillac-built parts could be found in the engines of fighter planes. Texaco assured motorists that the gasoline they were forced to do without was ‘being turned into war products to speed our forces to victory’. The tasteful accompanying image was the bright flash of a bomb exploding, with Germans running for cover.

  In the UK as elsewhere, the government’s voice was heard through advertising. Familiar slogans on the British home front concerned fears of espionage (‘Careless talk costs lives’) and the need to grow vegetables for ration-starved citizens (‘Dig for victory’). Britons were warned to take care in the blackout and keep gas masks close at hand.

  Stephen Fox estimates in The Mirror Makers that the US advertising industry donated about a billion dollars’ worth of space to the war effort. He quotes Bruce Barton, who said: ‘We did not tell the truth, of course. We simply set forth in pictures and copy the Administration’s argument… This was sound and patriotic and moral while the war lasted.’