Adland (4 page)

02

From propaganda to soap

‘We sold the war to youth'

W
ith 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 informal 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).

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.