By 1923, American Tobacco’s leaders were anxious. R.J. Reynolds had been pouring money into advertising (notably the 1921 campaign which introduced the slogan, “I’d walk a mile for a Camel”).24 More and more aggressive players were coming on the scene. Meanwhile, American Tobacco’s advertising budget was stretched across a wide range of products, leaving only a modest amount to promote Lucky Strikes, the company’s top seller.
The advertising accounts were dispersed as well: different brands were handled by different agencies. One of these brands, Blue Boar smoking tobacco, had come to Lord & Thomas by way of Lou Hartman, a Lord & Thomas employee who had previously run his own agency and brought the account with him when he joined Lord & Thomas. Hartman came up with a clever scheme for Blue Boar whereby American Tobacco would reimburse to consumers the price of the government tax on a tin of tobacco. The plan enjoyed immediate success, and American Tobacco head Percival Hill took note. He asked Hartman to arrange a lunch with Lasker, and within weeks, the group was lunching at the Vanderbilt Hotel, along with Percival’s son, George Washington Hill, then in charge of advertising for the company.
Percival Hill told Lasker that he was so impressed with the Blue Boar marketing plan that he wanted Lord & Thomas to take over the Lucky Strike account. Lasker—a nonsmoker with little feel for the tobacco trade—hesitated, pondering this unexpected development.25 He asked Hill with whom Lord & Thomas would be dealing, and Percival told Lasker that his son George would be supervising the account. After further discussion, the group struck a deal. George Washington Hill would come to Chicago for a week and check out Lord & Thomas. If by the end of the week he wanted the agency to take the account, a contract would be signed.
It was a bold stroke on Lasker’s part. He may already have sensed the younger Hill’s fiery temperament and impulsive nature. He surely was sensitive to the plight of the ambitious son laboring in the shadow of a powerful father. And Lord & Thomas would need George as a strong ally if they were to enjoy long-term success as the company’s advertising agents.
The wisdom of Lasker’s move became even more evident in 1925, when Percival Hill died, and George Washington Hill prepared to take the reins of the entire company.
Percival Hill had been a solid, steady, dependable manager, with a good mind for figures and a strong inclination to delegate. His son, however, was a tobacco baron of another stripe.
George Washington Hill’s passion for cigarettes—and especially Lucky Strike cigarettes—knew no bounds. Twenty-one years earlier, during his sophomore year at Williams College, he had dropped out of school and gone to work for American Tobacco.26 His first job involved hauling recently purchased leaf from the company’s warehouse in Wilson, North Carolina, at the unimpressive salary of $5 per week. But he worked his way up through the ranks of the company: making cigarettes in Wilson; going on the road as a “drummer,” or salesman; and eventually becoming head of advertising. Unlike his father—who had made his own reputation with the wildly successful Bull Durham plug tobacco—George believed that manufactured cigarettes (as opposed to hand-rolled cigarettes, cigars, or chewing tobacco) were the future of the company. Now he had the chance to prove himself right.
In an era of grey fedoras, Hill showed up for work every day wearing a broad-brimmed Stetson—white or black—which he rarely removed during business hours. He was chauffeured everywhere, and his staff always knew when he was holding court at American Tobacco’s Fifth Avenue headquarters because his Cadillac limousine, with its stacked cartons of Lucky Strikes visible through the windows, was waiting for him curbside.
Hill was notoriously brusque, short-tempered, and volatile. He might be speaking calmly about some subject when, “without warning, he would explode in a tirade at his stenographer, advertising executive, or anyone else who happened to be there.”27
Hill stayed closely involved in every facet of Lucky Strikes, especially its advertising—an approach that created major headaches for Albert Lasker, who tried many times to pull back from his own deep involvement in American Tobacco; only once was he successful, and then only temporarily. The rest of the time, Lasker and Hill alternately fought, made up, and wore each other down. In a 1935 letter to Lasker, George Washington Hill acknowledged his own excesses—“I know I have tried your soul”—but immediately reverted to form, reminding Lasker that “times like these” (i.e., the Depression) imposed an increased burden on all those in positions of responsibility.28 In other words, Lasker should stop complaining and work harder.
Whatever the psychic costs, Hill and Lasker were extremely successful collaborators, mounting campaign after campaign of innovative advertisements. Lasker claimed that he was the creative sparkplug. “Lasker said to me again and again, in the first years,” recalled Sheldon Coons, head of Lord & Thomas’s New York office in the early 1930s, “that Hill made no contribution to the advertising, that Lasker did it all.”29 But Hill, like Lasker, possessed a native genius for marketing. He embraced the Lord & Thomas mantra of “salesmanship in print,” often expounding its fundamentals in his correspondence and conversations with Lasker. He knew and loved his product and had keen insights about how to talk to consumers who could be persuaded to share that passion.30
Lord & Thomas’s first piece of advice to American Tobacco must have come as a surprise: Stop advertising most of your brands.
Lasker argued that rather than maintaining many modestly successful small brands, the company needed to create one overwhelmingly powerful product that could compete with Camels and Chesterfields. “You can’t live unless you have this one brand,” Lasker recalled saying, “because 80 or 90 percent of the cigarette business in this country today is on this one type of cigarette. These other cigarettes and other products were a different type of goods . . . Instead of spending a little money and a moderate amount of money on each of these fifty products, milk them all. Take what you spend on them and the milking of their profits and put it in a big push behind Luckies.”31
Hill agreed. As a result, the money formerly spent advertising Blue Boar—the original Lord & Thomas account—and most of the other minor American Tobacco products was diverted to support Lucky Strike.
The first Lord & Thomas campaign on behalf of the now-favored brand built upon the earlier concept of “toasting,” which attempted to differentiate Luckies based on the preparation of the tobacco. The copy stressed the unique benefits of toasting, including improved flavor and reduced acidity, supposedly making it easier on the throat. It was classic Claude Hopkins: true, the tobacco used in Lucky Strikes was heated to somewhere between 260 and 300 degrees during the manufacturing process—but this was common practice in cigarette manufacturing.32
The brand still wasn’t doing well enough to satisfy the hugely ambitious Hill, so in 1927, Lord & Thomas began complementing the “toasted” theme with a series of advertisements that became known as the “Precious Voice” campaign. This new campaign argued that, in addition to making cigarettes easier on the throat, the vaunted toasting process actually helped protect the throat and voice.
One thing that distinguished “Precious Voice” was its target audience. At that time, the social stigma against women smoking was still powerful. Although Philip Morris had introduced the first women’s cigarette in 1924 (claiming that it was “mild as May”), few women smoked openly, and most restaurants and other public places prohibited smoking by women. But women were beginning to smoke in the home, and Lasker realized that a vast new market was ready to open up. This was brought home to him one afternoon at the Tip Top Inn, a restaurant near his Chicago home, where he was lunching with his wife. Flora tended toward obesity, and her doctor had suggested that she take up smoking to curb her appetite. But on this particular day, when she attempted to light up after lunch, the restaurant’s proprietor rushed over and said that he could not permit a woman to smoke in the main dining room. If Flora wished to smoke, he continued, the Laskers would have to retire to a private room.
“It filled
me with indignation,” Lasker recalled, “that I had to do surreptitiously something which was perfectly normal in a place where I had gone so much. That determined me to break down the prejudice against women smoking.”33 No doubt the prospect of doubling the potential market for Luckies also influenced his thinking. Lasker took his idea to George Washington Hill, and told him that if American Tobacco acted decisively, the women’s market might be theirs for the asking.
Precious Voice—one of the few postwar campaigns that was largely conceived and directed by Lasker—grew directly out of this decision. Lasker decided that testimonials from well-respected foreign women might start to overcome the prejudice against women smokers, and he started with opera singers. “It was very natural that my mind went to the opera stars,” he explained, “because at that time there were only one or two American stars, and the rest were foreign. And if I [could] get the women of the opera, it [wouldn’t] be long until [I’d] be able to get the women of the stage.”34 The subtext, of course, was that women—sophisticated, worldly, even exotic women—who earned their livelihood by singing were willing to trust their precious voices to Luckies.
Precious Voice was one of the first Lord & Thomas advertising campaigns to rely heavily on testimonials, and very quickly, the campaign expanded to include almost all the stars of New York’s Metropolitan Opera.35 Just as Lasker had anticipated, stage and screen stars (both women and men) also rushed to join the chorus of artists praising Luckies. Incredibly, none of the individuals testifying for Luckies were paid for their contributions; they considered the free publicity compensation enough.
The campaign enjoyed immediate success. “Overnight,” Lasker later boasted, “the business of Luckies went up like the land in a boom field where oil has just been found.”36
But it was another campaign that not only catapulted Luckies to the forefront of the women’s market across the United States but also fundamentally revolutionized the cigarette market. There are differing accounts as to which fertile brain conceived this new effort; George Washington Hill claimed that he came up with the idea and pitched it to Lasker, while the Lord & Thomas accounts state that both men came up with the idea independently.
Hill’s version of the story begins in his chauffeured limo. As he was being driven down New York’s Fifth Avenue, he happened to glance out of his car window and see a heavyset woman on a street corner “munching chocolates” (although alternate versions have her chewing gum). Hill then glanced into a taxicab next to him, where he spied a svelte woman smoking a cigarette. Hill rushed to the office and summoned Lasker.
Lasker—as he told the story—was taking a train through Pittsburgh one day when he noticed an article in one of the morning papers reporting that candy manufacturers meeting in the area had appropriated $150,000 to run an advertising campaign against cigarette smoking. “[The candy manufacturers] wanted to stop the growth of cigarettes,” Lasker recalled, “so that money could be used for candy.”37 The candy manufacturers’ campaign, explained the article, would argue that smoking was bad for the nervous system, and that substituting a piece of candy would help quell the appetite for a cigarette. Reading this account, Lasker remembered that the doctor who was then treating his wife had told her that smoking would suppress her appetite—including her taste for sweets.
Lasker’s account suggests that by the time he and Hill next met in New York, they had both hatched more or less the same scheme. Hill said that he didn’t want to hear about Lasker’s new idea until he had shared his own. He pulled a sheet out of his desk drawer on which was written, “Reach for a Lucky instead of a bon-bon.” Lasker was amazed to see his own concept on the page in front of him, but his trained ear caught one mistake. “I think it could be terrific,” Lasker admitted, “but as it is, it’s no good. One word would have to be changed.” He then took a pencil, crossed out “bon-bon,” and wrote “sweet.”38
At the end of 1928, the slogan was added to the Precious Voice campaign, with the women now testifying that they used Luckies to protect both their voices and their figures. The surge was immediate, and overwhelming. Lucky Strike sales increased by 8.3 billion units in 1928 to capture second place among cigarette brands, and by an additional 10 billion in 1929. In that same year, Lord & Thomas’s billings for Lucky Strike ads totaled $12.3 million, or roughly 30 percent of the agency’s entire billings.39
The candy manufacturers screamed. A Brooklyn-based candy maker, Wallace & Co., organized the “National Food Products Protective Committee” to mount a vigorous protest against the campaign. Newspaper editorials, particularly in conservative parts of the country, condemned American Tobacco for exploiting women. Competitors piled on, with R.J. Reynolds mounting an opportunistic campaign of its own: “With a cigaret as good as Camels, the truth is enough.”40
In 1929, the Federal Trade Commission—then investigating American Tobacco for alleged unfair business practices—ordered the tobacco giant to discontinue the mention of “sweets” in its advertisements. The National Better Business Bureau also weighed in, complaining that the Lucky ads had “perverted the judgment and character of the advertising industry.”41 American Tobacco grumbled and backed down, but by then the point had been made many millions of times over. Subsequent campaigns simply stated, “Reach for a Lucky instead.” Savvy consumers knew what was implied, and Lucky Strike sales continued to soar.
Albert Lasker’s return to Chicago after his stint in Washington reunited him with a large network of friends and business acquaintances. At first, this meant gatherings at his Glencoe mansion, twenty-four miles north of Chicago near Lake Michigan. But in the early 1920s, Lasker—flush with cash and eager to realize a long-standing dream—decided to build a grand estate in the lakeside town of Lake Forest, eight miles north of Glencoe.
The estate, which was eventually named Mill Road Farm, comprised just under five hundred acres of land purchased for about $1,000 an acre from meatpacker Louis Swift, and took three years and uncounted millions to complete.42 Lasker impishly suggested that the estate should be called “Nonwentsia”—a play on Onwentsia, an exclusive local country club that barred Jews. When completed, the sprawling estate included an impressive residence, a working farm, several greenhouses, a garage and superintendent’s residence, a swimming pool, an 18-hole golf course, and—eventually—a movie theater.
The mansion was designed by David Adler, a prominent residential architect known for his exquisite country houses, which combined the French classical, English Tudor, and Italian Renaissance styles, and the Mill Road Farm mansion was completed during Adler’s heyday. As the centerpiece of an estate of its size, the residence itself was relatively informal, because Lasker was as much interested in comfort as in grandeur. The mansion was enormous, but many of Adler’s architectural touches were chosen to deemphasize its massive scale.
Edward Lasker, who was a teenager when the family first occupied Mill Road Farm, described the stunning estate:
The drive, which had trees every twenty feet or so on each side, was some three-eighths of a mile curving to the main house, which I would guess was thirty thousand square feet. It contained suites, consisting of bedroom, dressing room, bath, and in mother’s case, a boudoir, for each family member, as well as half a dozen guest rooms, about four sitting rooms, an office for father, a wine cellar, pressing room, silver room, and a dozen or so servant’s rooms . . .
The exterior was white-washed brick with red awnings. To the east of the house was a swimming pool which was 100 feet by 40 feet, flanked by two commodious bath houses with red tile roofs.
South from the house to the end of the property’s end was another drive which bisected the two nines of the golf course, which was generally considered one of the three or four finest championship courses in the United States. There were two tennis courts, a guest house accommodating eight overnight residents and manned by a full-time couple. Adjoining the guest house was a practice tee and a nursery conducted for the U.S. Golf Association to test different
types of grasses.
Bordering Old Mill Farm Road were the Farm’s barns, housing seventy Guernsey cattle, my polo ponies, as well as coops for approximately 10,000 white leghorns, and space for ducks and pigeons. The Farm operated a daily route selling milk, chickens, and eggs.43
The estate—and especially the 180-acre golf course designed by William S. Flynn—became a sensation among the Chicago elite. John Hertz, the taxicab magnate and intermittently a close friend of Lasker’s, lived fifteen miles down Old Mill Road. In a 1938 interview, he described the thrill of being invited to play eighteen holes at the Lasker estate: “Of course everyone wants to play on his course. There isn’t anybody in Chicago who doesn’t want to play his course . . . There isn’t any set-up like it in America. He had two, three hundred people out there to play golf, maybe more. He gives them a card, and he has locker rooms for them, and he furnishes them with food at a dollar a head, and good food.”44
The “card” deserves a word. According to Edward, Albert devised a scheme to make his friends feel welcome on the course: in the first year that the course was open, Albert sent out “golf membership cards” to his friends. Each card was conspicuously marked “1A,” implying to the recipient that he was first in Albert’s affections. The one-dollar charge for food was also purposeful; Lasker calculated that his guests would feel free to indulge themselves at his sumptuous table if they had “paid for” their meals.
The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century Page 32