The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century

by Jeffrey L. Cruikshank

  Although in later years he preferred to work out of his house in Spring Lake—only coming into Chicago every ten days or so—Hopkins exerted a huge impact on the firm. His presence and his success changed the status and stature of copywriters at Lord & Thomas. Before Hopkins’s arrival, copywriters proposed, but the solicitors—the salesmen on the street—disposed. Under Hopkins, the copywriters became kings.

  He also worked effectively with Lasker in a process they called “staging.” A solicitor would get a foot in the door and speak glowingly of “Mr. Lasker,” the magical, driving force behind the Lord & Thomas phenomenon. Then Lasker would take the next round with the prospective client, living up to his own advance billing and all the while singing the praises of the astounding “Mr. Hopkins.” By the time the client met the master himself—the Merlin of Lord & Thomas—the effect could be intoxicating.

  After the account was landed, Lasker and Hopkins continued to work the client. Lasker recalled how he and Hopkins played their own version of good cop/bad cop:

  I always said [to Hopkins]: “We will divide up this way . . . Whenever I find you are going to differ with them, I am going to agree with them, not to be the diplomat, but so we can explore the difference . . . You stand for our viewpoint, Mr. Hopkins, and I will get on his side. As it develops, I will make up my mind . . . If I think he is right, I will argue it up with you, and I will have no trouble convincing you. If I finally think he is wrong, I will turn to him and say, ‘Mr. Blank, I guess we are both wrong.’”83

  And what of Lasker’s own role? Even more than in the Kennedy era, Lasker was the extraordinary manager of an extraordinary talent. He grasped Hopkins’s unique gift for identifying the Big Idea and nurtured that gift. He went in ahead of Hopkins, and—as in the case of Goodyear—also stood behind him.

  At the same time, he was quick to point out that Lord & Thomas had even greater successes after Hopkins left the company in the 1920s. He was offended by Hopkins’s account of his years at Lord & Thomas—in a book that he claimed, implausibly, he never read—because he felt that Hopkins had slighted him in it: “He mentioned me casually, just like ships that pass in the night . . . [but in] all that period of Lord & Thomas where he says he did it, it was Hopkins and myself. No doubt that he created all the creative part. [But] there is also no doubt . . . that I did the selecting, and told him what to develop . . . and what not to develop in the creative end.”84

  “Creating all the creative part” was an indispensable factor in Lord & Thomas’s success, and Lasker compensated Hopkins accordingly. Although Hopkins’s stated starting salary was a staggering $52,000 a year—a figure that Lasker trumpeted far and wide—Hopkins in many years made at least three times that amount, counting bonuses. In fact, Lasker had to steer accounts away from his prodigious copywriter so that there would be work and bonuses for others in the shop.

  Despite their falling-out in the 1920s, Lasker always gave Hopkins full credit for his enormous contributions to Lord & Thomas. “I never knew a finer, more earnest man than Mr. Hopkins. No greater advertising man lived or ever will live.”85

  Arguably, Lasker could have claimed that distinction for himself. But of the several master copywriters whom the master of Lord & Thomas discovered and nurtured, Hopkins was far and away the most versatile, productive, and durable.

  Chapter Seven

  Orange Juice and Raisin Bread

  TOWARD THE END of 1904—the year Albert Lasker bought his initial stake in Lord & Thomas and the gifted but erratic John E. Kennedy arrived on the scene—a delegation from the Southern California Fruit Exchange (SCFE) made its way to the Trude Building. They were there to hear Lord & Thomas’s proposal for a campaign to promote California citrus products.

  By that time, Lasker was the leading rainmaker in the agency, so it is safe to assume that he helped shape the presentation that was made to the SCFE that day. Perhaps he also helped deliver it.1 If so, it was one of his rare failures.

  That day, Lord & Thomas proposed a test campaign aimed at promoting oranges in Iowa. The choice of target was not as arbitrary as it might sound. More than the residents of any other Snow Belt state, Iowans took winter vacations in California and were accustomed to eating the relatively exotic fruits that the SCFE hoped to promote. Perhaps Iowans would respond to an effort to build demand for oranges on their home turf.

  The $30,000 price tag for the campaign struck the SCFE delegation as far too high. The Californians said no and went home, temporarily giving up on their dream of persuading Midwesterners to eat oranges.2

  Oranges and lemons had come to California along with Spanish missionaries in the 1700s. During the Gold Rush of the 1840s and ’50s, interest in citrus fruits was spurred by the discovery that they could prevent scurvy, a vitamin-deficiency disease that in this case erupted when the incoming stampede of miners overwhelmed the local food supply. But the first real boom in orange production came with the introduction into California of the navel orange in the 1870s. Sweet, seedless, and visually striking, the navel quickly swept across Southern California. The summer-ripening Valencia orange came next, complementing the November-to-May harvest season of the navel.3

  This move toward year-round production appealed not only to the growers, but also to the railroads. The 1885 arrival of the Southern Pacific and the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe lines in Los Angeles linked that city by rail to Eastern markets for the first time. Technological advances—such as the ventilated freight car (1887) and the “ice-bunker” car (1889)—further promoted the shipment of citrus fruits and other perishables. Land-rich railroads like the Southern Pacific had another compelling reason for promoting Southern California: they wanted to sell some of their landholdings to easterners. The depiction of California as a veritable Garden of Eden could only help the cause.

  But from the grower’s perspective, all was not well in paradise. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, agents and shippers had transferred most of the risk inherent in the citrus trade to the growers. Prices were set at daily auctions in major cities in the Midwest and East, and—because demand was relatively flat—those prices were driven entirely by supply.

  Beginning in the late 1880s, California’s orange growers began organizing into cooperatives to enhance their bargaining power, increase their financial returns, and—from their perspective—share risks more equitably. The economic recession of 1893 put enormous pressure on farmers across the nation, and in August of that year, the Southern California Fruit Exchange was born to advance the interests of California’s orange growers. Lemon growers joined in 1896, and in 1905, growers from the San Joaquin Valley north of Los Angeles joined the exchange. At this point, the cooperative changed its name to the California Fruit Growers Exchange (CFGE).

  Several of the CFGE’s leaders were convinced that better marketing was critical to the Exchange’s long-term success. By 1907, something like thirty thousand boxcars of oranges (or about 10 million boxes) were being shipped out of California—five times the 1893 total—and in peak harvest seasons, oversupply was pushing prices so low that many growers were operating at a loss.4 And the future looked worse: past success had led to the planting of thousands of acres of new groves, and as these new trees began to bear fruit over the next several years, the orange supply might well double.5 Either supply would have to be reduced—a difficult task in a cooperative made up of some six thousand independent-minded farmers—or demand would have to be increased through advertising.

  But what, exactly, was to be advertised? The “California Fruit Growers Exchange” would not be an easy sell. Of course, one could sing the praises of California oranges, but (as skeptical CFGE directors pointed out) this would also benefit the growers who were not CFGE members—and who would have a cost advantage because they weren’t advertising.

  Cost remained an issue, as well. The CFGE was a tightfisted, low-overhead operation. With this constraint in mind, the CGFE’s president approached his counterpart at the Southern Paci
fic Railway in the early months of 1907. The Southern Pacific was not a natural ally, given its history of price-gouging on freight rates. Nevertheless, the two presidents struck a deal: for every dollar the CFGE spent on advertising to promote citrus products, the Southern Pacific would throw in a dollar to support the campaign. With this incentive in hand, the CFGE board authorized an expenditure of $10,000 to test the effectiveness of advertising. This meant that up to $20,000 would be available to run a bold experiment: the first large-scale advertising of a perishable commodity.

  Lasker’s agency was a natural choice to run the experiment, since Chicago was a major terminus for railroads running to and from the west coast, and it was there that the CFGE maintained its General Eastern office, responsible for its marketing efforts. In the spring of 1907, Lord & Thomas and the CFGE struck a deal for an exploratory campaign. It was a relatively small effort, but it got Lasker’s attention:

  I remember vividly my first contact with the California Fruit Growers Exchange, over thirty years ago. The vice president in charge of traffic of the great Southern Pacific Railroad came into our office and said that the railroad was interested in seeing the demand for oranges and lemons increased, so that they could get the added tonnage . . . This railroad official introduced us to the head of the newly formed Citrus Cooperative . . . An initial venture of $3,000 in Iowa—a test campaign—marked the entrance of Sunkist oranges into advertising.6

  Lasker’s account compresses several stages in the new account’s evolution. In July 1907, for example, copywriter R. C. Brandon proposed using the name “Sunkissed” to bring the many CFGE brands under one marketable umbrella.7 A month later, the agency had a revised recommendation: Sunkist, a made-up word that would be easier to defend as a trademark. The CFGE’s growers were intrigued, but couldn’t bring themselves to embrace a single trademark that would subsume all of their individual orchards’ trademarks.

  Once again, the campaign was aimed at California-friendly Iowa, and was scheduled to roll out in early March 1908, coinciding with the peak of the navel crop. Still lacking a compelling brand to market, Lord & Thomas fell back on pushing the generic concepts of “California” and “oranges.” For its opening salvo, the agency prepared a full-page ad for the Des Moines Register that declared the first week in March to be “Orange Week in Iowa,” supposedly coinciding with a week of parallel festivities in California. (The truth, of course, was that most orange growers were far too busy that week, as their valuable crop came in, to stop and celebrate anything.) “Now,” the ad proclaimed, “Iowa will celebrate ‘Orange Week’ . . . by receiving direct from the beautiful groves of California hundreds of carloads of the choicest oranges grown in the world.”8

  In a departure from most of Lord & Thomas’s work, the centerpiece of the ad was a cartoon by the then-popular J. N. (“Ding”) Darling. (Lasker—who disdained illustrations of all sorts—lost this argument.) The cartoon depicted a little girl in a bonnet and summery dress (labeled “Miss California” on the hem) feeding a half-peeled orange to a second little girl wearing a winter hat, leggings, gloves, and a heavy coat labeled “Iowa.”9 Also surprising was the fact that the ad was published in three colors—orange, green, and black—an almost unheard-of luxury, for newspaper advertisements of the day.

  The ad appeared on Monday, March 2, 1908, as part of a larger campaign of advertising and public relations. Reflecting its two sponsors, the campaign had two distinct but complementary themes. As the Sunkist corporate history puts it: “Fruit was shipped to Iowa in special bannered trains, and prizes were offered for articles that could be used in advertising California oranges and lemons. Southern Pacific posted billboards throughout Iowa to display such slogans as, ‘Oranges for health—California for wealth.’ A prominent lecturer was employed to tour Iowa’s larger cities to elaborate on California’s many advantages, especially its orange industry.”10

  Estimates of the cost of this initial campaign vary, ranging from Lasker’s $3,000 to a $15,000 estimate made by a former CFGE manager. But there was no confusion about the success of the campaign. While the Exchange’s business increased by an average of 17.7 percent elsewhere in the country during 1908, it shot up by 50 percent in Iowa.11

  Could perishables be advertised on a large scale? The answer was a resounding yes.

  Thereafter, the CFGE began taking Lord & Thomas’s advice more seriously. In April 1908, it formally adopted the Sunkist brand to identify the best fruits produced by its member growers.12 The growers still weren’t ready to give up on their colorful and distinctive packing labels, which had evolved into a high form of commercial art. But they were ready to compromise. According to the cooperative’s official history, some 6 million “Sunkist orange” stickers (and 1 million “Sunkist lemon” stickers) were ordered in the fall of 1908, to be pasted on top of the growers’ own labels.

  Everyone agreed that the advertising had succeeded beyond all expectations, and—in anticipation of the 1909 growing season—the CFGE’s board increased its advertising budget to $25,000, and instructed Lord & Thomas to begin blanketing the northern half of the country with ads for citrus products.13

  Now Lord & Thomas had a brand—Sunkist—that it could work with. At this point, though, a strange wrinkle arose: there was no easy way to attach the product’s name to the product. The CFGE’s growers wanted to make sure that their advertising dollars generated returns for them, rather than for rival growers in California or much-despised Florida. But once the grocer took the oranges out of their separate boxes, who was to know which fruit was the Sunkist? What was to prevent a grocer from selling a cheaper Florida orange as a Sunkist, and pocketing the difference?

  Lord & Thomas argued for a paper wrapper, stamped with the Sunkist logo, that would accompany each piece of CFGE-packed fruit from the packing house to the merchants’ counters, and the growers agreed to this solution. During the 1909 season, however, it became clear that unscrupulous merchants were throwing away the wrappers and calling all of their oranges “Sunkist,” in an effort to unload inferior products (as well as Sunkist oranges) at premium prices.

  A Lord & Thomas publication recounts the solution that the firm hit upon:

  To force the retailer to retain the wrappers on the fruit, we suggested to the Exchange that they advertise that they would give a Sunkist Orange Spoon to any one who would send them twelve Sunkist wrappers and 12 cents to partly pay the cost. In this way, the consumer would ask for the wrappers from the retailer and force him, whether he wished to or not, to keep the wrappers on the fruit. The trade was also circularized on this fact, impressing on him the value of keeping the wrappers on for the benefit of his trade, and also that fruit kept in wrappers was more salable and held its appearance much longer than if left unwrapped.14

  The spoon gimmick proved an immediate and astounding success. No matter that the flatware (“in the exclusive new ‘California Blossom’ pattern,” according to one ad15) was not particularly distinguished. In the first year of the promotion alone, consumers snapped up a million spoons, with orders coming in at the rate of five thousand a day. At Lord & Thomas’s urging, Sunkist expanded the flatware line to fourteen pieces, comprising everything from gravy ladles to iced-tea spoons. “The entire planning of this premium feature,” Lord & Thomas recorded a few years later, “the designing of the individual pattern and all negotiations were made by us.”16 By 1910, more than 2 million pieces in the California Blossom line had been distributed, making the CFGE the largest single purchaser of flatware in the world.17

  Even Lasker’s self-confident firm had failed to anticipate this volume. Lord & Thomas had guessed that the twelve-cent cash payment would offset some of the costs of the premium. But when volumes soared, and the CFGE began buying silverware by the carload, the flatware trade began making money for the CFGE—something like a $40,000 profit, in the first year—presenting a welcome sort of problem for the Exchange, which by the terms of its charter was supposed to be a nonprofit.18

 
Meanwhile, the real business at hand—selling oranges at a profit—continued. Lord & Thomas developed a second brand, Red Ball, for lesser-quality fruit produced by CFGE growers; Red Ball produce was marketed in sections of the country that proved unwilling to pay a premium for the highest-quality produce. In 1910, Lord & Thomas noted, there was “not a single shipment of Sunkist or Red Ball oranges on which the grower has not made a profit”—a dramatic turnaround for an industry that often failed to find a way to make money.19 The firm also developed plans for particularly tough or competitive markets, and these, too, met with success. “We have devised plans and carried same out which has produced results in such territory,” a Lord & Thomas publication proclaimed in 1911, “and out of 400 towns in which their advertising appears, but four of them do not show a handsome profit.”20

  The growers rewarded Lord & Thomas by increasing their advertising budget dramatically: from $40,000 in 1909 to $100,000 in the following year. Because of the ever-increasing volume, the per-box cost of advertising remained relatively low—something like one of the seven cents per box that the Exchange charged its members. “During the last three years,” the CFGE’s general manager told his directors and members in August 1912, “your advertising campaign has added about one cent to your expenses which, in my opinion, is the best investment you have ever made.”21

  The evidence for this assertion was compelling. By 1914, Americans were consuming forty oranges apiece per year: up almost 80 percent from the comparable 1885 figure.22 In 1915, the Exchange increased its advertising budget to $250,000.23

  It would be a mistake to conclude that Lord & Thomas had all the answers and that the CFGE simply blessed and paid for the Chicago firm’s insights and innovations. In fact, the Exchange had an extensive and sophisticated distribution network, which included a number of talented marketers.