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

  New competitors were on the horizon. One of them, BDO, opened its doors in 1919. It was founded by three young veterans of the World War I propaganda machine: Bruce Barton, Roy Durstine, and Alex Osborn. All graduates of prestigious colleges, and nearly a generation younger than Albert Lasker, the three principals at BDO took for granted some of his innovations—such as “reason-why” advertising—and moved beyond them. Focusing less on the manufacturer’s perspective and more on the psychology of the consumer, they met with almost immediate success. Thanks to the prodigious personal connections of Barton, Durstine, and Osborn, BDO had thirty-three corporate accounts the day it went into business, and quickly added more. General Motors and the National Biscuit Company came into the fold in 1922, Macy’s and General Electric in 1923, and Union Carbide in 1924. In only a few short years, BDO had surged to fourth on the list of biggest agencies.6

  The rise of powerhouses and dynamic upstarts in New York must have worried Lasker. The small office that he had put together there in 1910 was foundering. As the industry became increasingly concentrated in New York, Lasker’s agency was at risk of becoming marginalized. It had a healthy office in Los Angeles (opened in 1916), a San Francisco office (that had opened in 1919, closed briefly for underperformance, and reopened in 1922), and a small London operation (also opened in 1922). But New York remained problematic.

  Lasker acknowledged that Lord & Thomas had lost ground during his absence, although he preferred to put it the other way around: other agencies had caught up. “I was out five years in public service,” he told his staff members in 1925, “and during that period . . . advertising began to be so widely understood that we no longer stood out.”7 Lasker claimed that he held the company back from soliciting new accounts during his absence, fearing that Lord & Thomas might spin out of his control: “In all the years I was gone, we were not anxious for new business. I knew I had a machine that could give good service to those I had and that would hold them, but I was afraid of the machine if it took on new business . . . so we were not aggressive.”8

  But by 1923, Lasker had decided it was time to change the formula, especially in terms of shoring up the agency’s Chicago base. If this meant starving (or even closing) the New York office, he told Hopkins, then so be it. Reinforcing Chicago’s operations would be “profit and glory enough,” he wrote to Chicago officer manager Herbert P. Cohn. At the same time, he intended to strengthen his agency’s hand at selling, especially to larger national accounts.9 Within months of returning to Lord & Thomas, he secured two enormously important clients, with whom—over the course of the next decade—he would dramatically change the consumer habits of America.

  It is not clear exactly when Lasker decided that Claude Hopkins had to go. The correspondence between the two men in the early 1920s was mutually respectful, and even warm. But one tiff that erupted in June 1923, just before Lasker left the Shipping Board, suggests that Lasker had to handle the sensitive Hopkins with care.

  Hopkins evidently took to heart some passing comments by Lasker to the effect that Hopkins was not one to do “unselfish favors” and didn’t place much stock in cultivating friends. In what must have been a blistering letter, Hopkins objected furiously to Lasker’s comments. After waiting a few days for passions to cool, Lasker responded in a warmly emotional tone:

  I never in the world could have meant that you did not cultivate friends and that you never do unselfish favors, speaking in the larger sense of intimate friends in a close circle, because no such thought could find lodgment in my mind or in my heart. No one could have ever been the recipient of a finer friendship than I have always had from you, but jealously I aver that I have always reciprocated that friendship in the fullest.10

  At Lasker’s urging, Hopkins in 1922 began work on a manuscript called Scientific Advertising. The book, published a year later, is a classic on the fundamentals of the industry in its founding era. Was Scientific Advertising an effort to lend even more luster to Hopkins’s name and burnish Lord & Thomas’s reputation by extension? Or was it, perhaps, Lasker’s way to begin easing Hopkins out the door?11

  By the fall of 1923, with Lasker barely reinstalled in Chicago, he and Hopkins began differing fundamentally on how to recruit clients. Caught up in his entrepreneurial visions, Hopkins wanted to buy companies and mount advertising campaigns for them. But Lasker, who knew the discomforts of doing business with companies in which he was also a major shareholder, opposed this approach. Ultimately, they failed to resolve these differences, and in the spring of 1924, Hopkins left to start his own copywriting service. The two were now competitors, and Lasker took Hopkins’s moves as a personal betrayal. He fought Hopkins over the rights to Scientific Advertising, and told Hopkins that writing the book was the mistake of his lifetime.12

  Hopkins’s agency was not a resounding success, and it didn’t take him long to change his strategy. Although this reversal helped bring about a rapprochement with Lasker, the two never worked together again. Hopkins published the highly readable My Life in Advertising in 1927—annoying Lasker once again, who felt that the book underplayed his role in Hopkins’s success—and died five years later.

  One of the first major clients to come into the Lord & Thomas fold after Lasker’s return was the International Cellucotton Products Company, makers of a new women’s sanitary product called “Kotex.” The product presented major challenges to Lasker and his agency.

  Cellucotton was first produced in 1915 by the paper products company Kimberly-Clark, and was a result of the diversification of the pulp and paper industry in the early ’teens. Originally, the company hoped to market the wood-based product as a substitute for cotton surgical dressings, but demand for the substitute cotton remained weak until the American entry into World War I in 1918. Kimberly-Clark—on the defensive because of its founders’ German roots—announced that it would provide cellucotton to the War Department and the Red Cross at cost.

  But even as cellucotton began to be used to dress wounds, enterprising Army nurses found another use for the product: as the raw material for a homemade sanitary napkin. When the signing of the Armistice led the Army to cancel a 375-ton order for cellucotton, Kimberly-Clark scrambled to find new markets for the product.13

  The strongest advocate at Kimberly-Clark for the use of cellucotton as a sanitary napkin was a Chicago-based salesman named Walter Luecke. Luecke convinced Kimberly-Clark to start manufacturing sanitary napkins in 1919, and in September of that year, soon after the name “Kotex” was coined, an initial shipment was sent to Woolworth & Company. A full month passed before the first box sold—not surprising, given that the product was unknown, unadvertised, and wasn’t even described on its packaging. (The boxes carried only the Kotex name and the Kimberly-Clark logo.) Luecke and his six assistants began visiting retail shops in New York City in October, pushing Kotex hard—but ran up against the enormous challenge of promoting a new product that, for all practical purposes, couldn’t be talked about.

  This effort was followed in 1920 by a more prolonged campaign, again aimed at retailers rather than consumers. Luecke worked with Kimberly-Clark chemist Ernst Mahler to place ads containing a history of the product and basic technical information in a series of specialized trade journals and magazines. Once again, the response was disappointing. In the same year, Kimberly-Clark established International Cellucotton Products Company (ICPC), a wholly owned subsidiary, in part to distance the parent company from its unmentionable product.

  Finally, in 1921, ICPC began advertising Kotex directly to consumers. The first text, written by Nichols Advertising, shied away from describing the actual purpose of the product, citing instead its wartime origins and talking obliquely about a “new use” for the product discovered by nurses. By late November 1921, the ads finally contained the words “sanitary napkins,” and throughout the following year, the Nichols agency continued to experiment with different marketing approaches.

  ICPC was paying heavily for all of these different mar
keting attempts—$173,000 in 1921, and a projected $200,000 in 1922—but still, the ads failed to produce results.14 It was time to look for a new agency.

  According to the Lord & Thomas account history, ICPC hired Lasker’s agency “because we created a new style of copy, franker, inspiring greater confidence through trained nurses’ recommendations.”15 This summary was true enough, but it was by no means the whole story. Lasker acknowledged that the copy that had been generated by Nichols was quite good—even outstanding. A new Lord & Thomas campaign written by Frank Hummert (hired into the New York office in 1920 at a princely $50,000 a year) was better still.16 But a huge barrier had to be overcome before even the most effective copy could do its job: mainstream magazines had to be persuaded to carry the “franker” advertisements. Edward Bok—publisher of the Ladies Home Journal and other leading magazines—had banned the ads from his family of publications.

  Bok was then considered the nation’s leading authority on women’s manners and morals; most advertising executives, upon hearing that his decision not to run an ad was final, would have given up. Not Albert Lasker; instead, he hopped on the Broadway Limited with Hummert’s ads in hand and went straight to Philadelphia to meet with Bok. He later recalled the arguments that he made to the publisher:

  I don’t agree with your reservations about the Kotex advertising, Mr. Bok, but I respect them, of course. I know they’re based on your vast knowledge of what American women are thinking and what appeals to them. Because of that, I’d like to ask you if you’ll let me put that knowledge to the test, right here in your office. Would you be willing to call in your secretary and have her read this first Kotex advertisement that we’d like to place in the Journal? If she’s embarrassed or repelled by it, I’ll accept your judgment. There’ll be no further argument.17

  Bok summoned his secretary. The door opened to admit a “dignified, white-haired lady, seemingly around sixty”—the very personification of propriety—and Lasker’s heart sank. Bok explained the situation and handed her the copy, which she quietly began to read. About halfway through Hopkins’s text, the woman looked up. “Why, Mr. Bok, this is a wonderful thing,” she exclaimed. “I certainly think we should run this in the Journal. Women deserve to be told about it.”

  In those few short minutes, the biggest obstacle to the distribution of a product vitally important to millions of women vanished.18

  A second formidable hurdle arose: women were reluctant to ask for Kotex at their local druggist. The solution turned out to be the “wrapped box” approach, which (again citing the account history) both reflected and protected the “typical 1923 modesty of women.”

  At that time, most retail stores still used a full-service model, in which customers would ask clerks for specific items. But asking a male clerk for a sanitary napkin proved too embarrassing for many women. Talking to his staff several years later, Lasker recounted how Lord & Thomas had identified and solved this seemingly intractable problem. “Now, we didn’t have to make investigations among millions of women,” Lasker said. “Just a few of us talked to our wives and asked them if they used Kotex, and we found out they didn’t, and in almost every case it was because they didn’t like to ask the druggist for it.” The solution, Lasker continued, proved to be relatively simple: “We developed for Kotex the simple idea of putting wrapped packages on the dealer’s counter and of advertising in dailies as well as in magazines—diverting part of the appropriation from the perfectly wonderful magazine copy they had been using before and simply saying something in dailies about Kotex and that you could walk into your dealer and walk away with a wrapped package without embarrassment.”19

  In fact, the self-service concept for Kotex had been pioneered several years earlier by a Wisconsin druggist, who had discovered that women would buy more Kotex if the boxes were “wrapped in plain white paper and tied with blue string and then piled on the counter in a pyramid surmounted by a small neat card reading, ‘Kotex—Take a Box—65 cents.’”20 The enterprising Wisconsin druggist had been uncovered by a Nichols Agency copywriter during his travels, and the innovation was promptly reported to ICPC. In 1922, a full year before Lord & Thomas was retained, the wrapped-box model was implemented widely among retailers carrying Kotex.

  Lasker’s assertion that Lord & Thomas invented the self-service idea is, therefore, fiction. Nevertheless, retail sales didn’t jump until 1923, when Lord & Thomas began advertising the unorthodox distribution scheme in daily newspapers as well as magazines, so Lasker can claim some of the credit for the wrapped-box approach—and much of the credit for Kotex’s subsequent success.

  The Kotex ad budget increased from $400,000 in 1923 to more than $1 million in 1925. Soon, “Kotex” was in the enviable position of being synonymous with “sanitary napkin,” and although the formidable Johnson & Johnson entered the sanitary napkin market in 1926, ICPC continued to control something like 70 percent of the market through the late 1920s.

  Hard on Kotex’s heels was another cellucotton product destined to make history. Its origins can also be traced back to World War I, when researchers at Kimberly-Clark began working on an ultrathin form of cellucotton to line gas masks. It never made its way into production gas masks, but in 1923, one of chemist Ernst Mahler’s assistants suggested using the material as a makeup remover. Lasker and sales agent Luecke met to brainstorm, and came up with the name “Kleenex.”21

  At first, the advertising strategies for the new product were closely related to that of its sister product, Kotex, but Kleenex soon developed a distinct identity. This was a necessity more than a plan: the amazing success of Kotex conferred almost no “halo effect” on its sister offering. Initial sales of Kleenex fell well below the company’s expectations. Lasker’s unscientific market research suggested that the tissue’s 5-by-6-inch size was hurting the product: “I personally asked half a dozen women who I knew spent a lot of money on cosmetics to use the Kleenex, and these half dozen all said, ‘It may be all right, but I can’t use it, it is too small; it ought to be the size that is now being put out in paper by Elizabeth Arden and the Dennison Company’ . . . So I went to the Cellucotton people and told them, and they changed the size to 9 x 10.”22

  Sales started to grow. In 1930, Lasker and Luecke recommended to ICPC that they make a survey to discover how people were using Kleenex, and the results were surprising. Many more people, it turned out, were using the tissue to wipe noses than to remove makeup. This presented a potential boon to ICPC: the market for the product might well triple if it weren’t purely a makeup-related purchase. Quickly, the product’s name was changed to “Kleenex Disposable Handkerchiefs.”

  By 1931, Kleenex and Kotex—products that were effectively unknown a decade earlier—were generating nearly half of Kimberly-Clark’s profits. At the same time, the habits of American consumers, and especially female consumers, changed dramatically. Thanks to the combined efforts of inventive manufacturers and creative marketers, people’s lives—and especially women’s lives—became easier, healthier, and happier. Kimberly-Clark’s grateful management invited Lasker to become a stockholder in the private company, and he happily accepted the offer.

  The year 1923 also witnessed the arrival of another influential client on Lord & Thomas’s doorstep: the American Tobacco Company.

  American Tobacco was a dominant remnant of the American Tobacco Company owned by James Buchanan Duke, which had enjoyed a near monopoly on tobacco production at the turn of the century. In 1911, at about the same time that Standard Oil was broken up, a Supreme Court decision ruled against the tobacco conglomerate—which then held a 92 percent market share—and broke it up into a number of smaller pieces, including R.J. Reynolds, American Tobacco Company, Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company, and Lorillard. American Tobacco emerged from the breakup with a distinct advantage over its sister companies, with 37 percent of the market, compared with 28 percent for Liggett & Myers and only 15 percent for Lorillard.

  R.J. Reynolds retained 20 percent of the t
hen-thriving plug tobacco trade. But it lacked a cigarette line, which it immediately began developing. After a six-month advertising campaign called “The Camels Are Coming”—aimed at building momentum for the new brand—Reynolds introduced Camels: a blend of piedmont bright tobacco, flavored Kentucky burley, and Turkish leaf. The blend proved an immediate hit, capturing a third of the market by 1917.23 Camels were soon followed by another Turkish blend, Chesterfields, produced by Liggett & Myers.

  American Tobacco, headed since 1911 by a mild-mannered Harvard graduate named Percival Hill, remained oddly passive in the new blended cigarette department, concentrating instead on marketing the fifty-odd brands that the company already owned. In 1916, the company finally introduced Lucky Strike, a name previously used by a popular American Tobacco brand of pipe tobacco. The famous Lucky Strike motto, “It’s toasted!” appeared on the first package, as the company tried to differentiate Luckies from the other (also toasted) blends. Over the next year, Lucky Strike helped American Tobacco make up some lost ground, but by the time the United States entered World War I, R.J. Reynolds still enjoyed greater market share than either American Tobacco or Liggett & Myers. This proved especially important when the U.S. government used prewar market-share figures to allocate its cigarette purchases for the armed forces fighting in World War I.

  The wartime experience (and especially the generous cigarette ration provided to each soldier) turned out to be a boon to all tobacco companies, dramatically increasing consumption among those who served, and—after the doughboys’ return—among the entire wartime generation. All cigarette companies benefited, but the market leaders benefited most. In 1922, R.J. Reynolds captured the lead in the industry from American Tobacco for the first time; by 1923, the Camel brand dominated the market with a 45 percent share. A relative newcomer, Philip Morris & Co., incorporated in 1919, also began to capture market share with its popular Marlboro brand.