Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising
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Writing his preface from a postwar perspective in 1919, Shaw claims that “Irish recruiting was badly bungled in 1915” because, while “it was quite easy to enlist them by approaching them from their own point of view[,] the War Office insisted on approaching them from the point of view of Dublin Castle.” Hence, the “placards headed ‘Remember Belgium’ … led Irishmen to remember Limerick and its broken treaty” while, in response to “a fresh appeal [of] ‘Irishmen: Do You Wish to Have the Horrors of War Brought to Your Own Hearths and Homes?’, Dublin laughed sourly” (986). In contrast, Shaw claims he, with his play, sought to “appeal to [the Irishman’s] discontent, his deadly boredom, his thwarted curiosity and desire for change and adventure.” In short, Irish recruitment will be successful when it seeks to capitalize on the fact that “an Irishman’s hopes and ambitions turn on his opportunities of getting out of Ireland.” 87
Shaw’s manifesto on recruitment is consistent with contemporary thinking about marketing in general. The J. Walter Thompson Agency revolutionized the practice before the war with a decision to “approach the reader from his own point of view, instead of the manufacturer’s,” a move that would accelerate the development of market research and focus group testing as well as significantly enhance the profile of the celebrity testimonial . 88 Unfortunately, as Shaw suggests, even though his “own [promotional] line was the more businesslike,” his “play thus carefully adapted to its purpose was voted utterly inadmissible” (987). Overall, the play’s deflation of recruitment rhetoric is consistent with “Shaw’s wartime prose [which], like his 1890s theatre criticism, is an attempt to educate the public to be good, alert, demanding critics instead of sentimental dupes.” 89
In Judging Shaw, Fintan O’Toole argues that, on the one hand, “the Great War marks the natural death of GBS [because] it revealed, through the scale of its horror, all the hidden truths that GBS delighted in exposing; the shock of ‘Common Sense About the War ’ … finished GBS.” 90 On the other, though, it was an opportunity to rebrand “G.B.S.” from a critic who “[shows] liberal society the beasts in its cellars” to a “saint and prophet of a new religion,” the Life Force:The killing off of the comic version of GBS had the odd effect of making GBS even more famous as a serious visionary. … To have been reviled for standing out against the hysteria of war fever was, as the war became ever more cataclysmic, a sign that Shaw saw things other people did not. In the disillusioned post-war atmosphere, he became less of a devil and more of a saint, less of a provocateur and more of a prophet. … He was popular before the war and even more so after it[, but] it was not the same kind of popularity. The dead version of GBS could not simply be resurrected – a different one took its place. 91
In this light, Shaw’s direct participation in the Harrods and Simmons campaigns in the late 1920s can be ascribed to a specific desire not so much to repair his popular reputation as to orchestrate a “brand reboot” and to affirm his ethos as a public advocate. Besides Formamint, every campaign in this study is marked by the playwright’s volitional and conspicuous participation. With the viability of public personality and marketing tactics in question, Shaw and modern advertising would have to continue to hone the testimonial to recover from “old mistakes of promotion.” 92
That both are unmistakably on the same page is clear from “O’Flaherty V.C.”. In its preface, Shaw discerns the British army’s recruitment failure to be a marketing miscalculation with regard to its target audience, and his proposed correction, illustrated through “O’Flaherty V.C.,” mirrors a significant, simultaneous shift in the world of commercial advertising to “approach the reader from his own point of view, instead of the manufacturer’s,” a move that rescues the testimonial technique from the patent medicine scrapheap. 93 The copy text in the recruiting poster that featured Michael John O’Leary was explicit in directly addressing its reader: “HAVE YOU NO WISH TO EMULATE THE SPLENDID BRAVERY OF YOUR FELLOW COUNTRYMAN? JOIN AN IRISH REGIMENT TO-DAY.” It boldly articulates the subtext of so-called “personality advertising ,” what Stanley Resor of the J. Walter Thompson agency deemed the “spirit of emulation” in which consumers seek to imitate “those whom we deem superior to us in taste, knowledge or experience.” 94 Before he turns to direct participation in product campaigns, Shaw’s place in the earliest moments of the genealogy of the personality testimonial and thus the history of modern advertising is evident in how he brokered print appearances to market both that “G.B.S.” was “a superior mind [who] therefore must be given the reader’s attention” and that “this superiority was a kind of temporary state, that the reader too, in learning how to be skeptical, could rise to the same level.” 95
Notes
1.“Comparative Values of Newspapers and Plays in Questions of the Day.” The Editor and Publisher 9.34 (19 February 1910): 8.
2.He notoriously argued that critics “have no qualifications”: We can say exactly what we like. Nobody will interfere with us at all. And we are irremovable. We are entirely irresponsible. … Under those circumstances men always do their worst and they always will do their worst. There is no remedy whatever for it. Revealing again his approach to criticism as marketing, Shaw felt “consolation” that, although his plays were subject to their mistreatment, “every notice I get advertises me.” Charles A. Selden. “Shaw Tells Critics They’re Never Good.” New York Times (12 October 1929): 7.
3.Gerry Beegan. The Mass Image: A Social History of Photomechanical Reproduction in Victorian London. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 16, 126, 127.
4.Ibid., 16.
5.Ibid., 17, 16.
6.Jonathan Goldman. “Celebrity.” In George Bernard Shaw in Context. Ed. Brad Kent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 255–64. 263, 255.
7.Michael Holroyd. Bernard Shaw, Volume One: 1856–1898: The Search for Love. New York: Vintage Books, 1988. 105.
8.Ibid., 104.
9.“Mr. Charles Chassé Investigates Bernard Shaw’s Philosophy.” New York Times (13 December 1908): SM4.
10.William D. Tyler. “The Image, the Brand, and the Consumer.” Journal of Marketing 22.2 (October 1957): 162–5. 162.
11.Roy Church. “Advertising Consumer Goods in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Reinterpretations.” The Economic History Review 53.4 (November 2000): 621–45. 633.
12.Ibid., 633–4.
13.Beegan, 4–5.
14.Church, 636, 640.
15.Felix Orman. “Picture Advertising Is “Flash” Advertising.” Advertising & Selling 28.28 (15 March 1919): 11.
16.Beegan, 16.
17.Marlis Schweitzer and Marina Moskowitz. “Introduction.” In Testimonial Advertising in the American Marketplace: Emulation, Identity, Community. Eds. Marlis Schweitzer and Marina Moskowitz. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 1–22. 5.
18.Ibid., 1.
19.Ibid., 7.
20.William M. Freeman. The Big Name. New York: Printers’ Ink Books, 1957. 12.
21.Goldman, 256.
22.Schweitzer and Moskowitz, 7.
23.James W. Egbert. “What Makes a Good Testimonial.” Printers’ Ink 77.2 (12 October 1911): 44, 46.
24.Schweitzer and Moskowitz, 5.
25.Joel H. Kaplan and Sheila Stowell. Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 11, 10, 2.
26.“Fifty Years 1888–1938.” Printers’ Ink 184.4 (28 July 1938): Section Two, 49.
27.Beegan, 102.
28.Bernard Shaw. Dramatic Opinions and Essays with an Apology from Bernard Shaw, vol. 2. New York: Brentano’s, 1928. 189.
29.Beegan, 5.
30.Marlis Schweitzer. “‘The Mad Search for Beauty’: Actresses’ Testimonials, the Cosmetics Industry, and the ‘Democratization of Beauty’.” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 4.3 (July 2005): 255–92, 264. During his days as a critic, Shaw periodically wrote about renowned opera singer Adelina Patti . Her biographer writes that the playwright “admired the perfection of her voice [but] disapproved o
f her unambitious repertoire and her way of courting applause.” Yvonne Rogers. Adelina: A Biography of Opera Star Adelina Patti. The Book Guild Ltd., 2017. Patti was an early and eager participant in product endorsement and contributed so many endorsements for myriad products that she garnered the sobriquet “Testimonial Patti.”
31.‘Fifty Years 1888–1938,’ 111, 118.
32.Kerry Segrave. Endorsements in Advertising: A Social History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2005. 4.
33.Schweitzer, 264
34.Ibid., 273.
35.Ibid., 257.
36.T. R. Nevett. Advertising in Britain: A History. London: The History of Advertising Trust, 1982. 159–60.
37.Schweitzer, 274.
38.“E. P. Downing and C. Downing .” In Shaw the Villager and Human Being: A Biographical Symposium. Ed. Allan Chappelow. London: Charles Skilton Ltd., 1961.
39.Dublin Journal of Medical Science 125 (January–June 1908). Dublin: Fannin & Company, Ltd., 1908. 239–40.
40.“An Epitome of Current Medical Literature.” The British Medical Journal 2 (1908): 40.
41.“A Case of Poisoning by Formamint Tablets.” The British Medical Journal 2.2494 (17 October 1908): 1224.
42.Charles W. Hurd. “How Price Maintenance of One Article Helps Another.” Printers’ Ink 83.2 (10 April 1913): 65–6, 69.
43.“Formamint : The So-Called Germ-Killing Throat Tablet.” Journal of the American Medical Association 58.8 (24 February 1912): 572.
44.Bernard Shaw. Collected Letters 1911–1925. Ed. Dan H. Laurence. New York: Viking, 1985. 89.
45.Ibid., 112.
46.“E. P. Downing ,” 235. Curiously, Shaw asks for riboflavin if the Formamint is unavailable. Downing believes that him to be “a bit mixed up here” since the former is not “a substitute” for the latter. While the two products are “quite dissimilar in action,” the chemist asserts that “both substances have in common some action on the taste-buds in the tongue.”
47.Bernard Shaw. “The Life Force: Mr. Bernard Shaw’s reply to Mr. Campbell.” The Christian Commonwealth (3 July 1912): 655.
48.Alice McEwan. “George Bernard Shaw and his Writing Hut: Privacy and Publicity as Performance at Shaw’s Corner.” Interiors 2.3 (2011): 333–56. 344.
49.“Mr. Bernard Shaw on Formamint .” Collier’s 53 (5 December 1914): 26.
50.Alice McEwan. “Commodities, Consumption, and Connoisseurship: Shaw’s Critique of Authenticity in Modernity.” SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies 35.1 (November 2015): 46–85. 73.
51.Harold Lister. “Health for Intellectuals.” The New Age 13.9 (26 June 1913): 228.
52.Pierre Loving. “Autumn.” The Drama 13 (November 1922): 61–3. 61.
53.“Formamint .” Journal of the American Medical Association 65.9 (28 August 1915): 816–9. 819.
54.“Formaldehyde Lozenges.” Journal of the American Medical Association 73.14 (4 October 1919): 1077.
55.“German Patents and Trademarks in England.” Scientific American 3.20 (14 November 1914): 402.
56.Formamint’s patent had been annulled in November of 1913 in Berlin when the courts determined it was not, as claimed a “new” chemical compound.
57.“Purchase of the Santogen Company.” The Journal of the American Medical Association 67.25 (16 December 1916): 1861–2. 1861.
58.“Chesterton on Shaw.” The Nation (21 October 1909): 375. Quoted in Eric Bentley. Bernard Shaw. New York: Applause, 2002. 212.
59.Augustus Hamon. Bernard Shaw: The Twentieth Century Molière. Trans. Eden and Cedar Paul. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company Publishers, 1916. 108.
60.A. M. Gibbs. Bernard Shaw: A Life. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. 349.
61.Michael Holroyd. Bernard Shaw Volume Two: 1898–1918, The Pursuit of Power. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. 356.
62.Bernard Shaw. Collected Letters, vol. 3. Ed. Dan H. Laurence. New York: Viking, 1985. 239–40.
63.Michael Holroyd. Bernard Shaw: The One Volume Definitive Edition. New York: Random House, 1997. 453, 452.
64.Fintan O’Toole . Judging Shaw: The Radicalism of GBS. Dublin: Prism, 2017. 245.
65.A. M. Gibbs, ed. Shaw: Recollections and Interviews. London: Macmillan, 1990. 231.
66.Lee Simonson. “Mobilizing the Billboards.” New Republic 13 (10 November 1917), 41–43. 43.
67.Nevett, 139.
68.Terry Phillips . “Shaw, Ireland, and World War 1: ‘O’Flaherty V.C.’, An Unlikely Recruiting Play.” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 30 (2010): 133–46. 89.
69.John Strachan and Claire Nally. Advertising, Literature and Print Culture in Ireland, 1891–1922. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 226.
70.John Kinder. “Marketing Disabled Manhood: Veterans and Advertising since the Civil War.” Phallacies: Historical Intersections of Disability and Masculinity. Eds. Kathleen M. Brian and James W. Trent, Jr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 93–125. 103.
71.Strachan/Nally, 231–2.
72.Kinder, 103.
73.Strachan and Nally, 228.
74.Holroyd, The One Volume Definitive Edition, 466.
75.Bernard Shaw. What Shaw Really Wrote About the War. Eds. J. L. Wisenthal and Daniel O’Leary. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. xviii.
76.Bernard Shaw. “Preface” to “O’Flaherty V.C .” In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 4. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 985–7, 985.
77.Terry Phillips refers to “one study of the recruiting posters collected in the Trinity College collection that concludes that ‘in 1914 no poster referred to Ireland, while in 1916–17 Irish and unspecific posters were evenly balanced’” (135).
78.Lauren Arlington. “The Censorship of ‘O’Flaherty V.C.’ .” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 28 (2008): 85–106. 90.
79.Phillips, 142.
80.Bernard Shaw. “O’Flaherty V.C. ” In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 4. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 983–1014, 988.
81.Ibid., 989–90.
82.Arlington, 91.
83.Phillips, 141.
84.Letter to Lady Gregory, quoted in Shaw, Lady Gregory, and the Abbey. Eds. Nicholas Grene and Dan. H. Laurence. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1993. 95
85.Murray Biggs. “Shaw’s Recruiting Pamphlet.” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 28 (2008): 107–11. 110.
86.Phillips, 134.
87.Incidentally, “O’Flaherty V.C. ” again became a “recruiting poster in disguise” in another sense when Shaw, in 1924, read the play over the airwaves as part of British radio broadcasting’s efforts to enlist the playwright “to lend his international reputation to its struggle for credibility.” Robert G. Everding. “Shaw and the Popular Context.” In The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw. Ed. Christopher Innes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 309–33. 319.
88.“Mr. Resor Leads Discussion on ‘Personality Advertising.” The J. Walter Thompson News Letter 10.8 (13 April 1928): 137–50. 139.
89.J. L. Wisenthal and Daniel O’Leary. “Introduction.” What Shaw Really Wrote About the War. Eds. J. L. Wisenthal and Daniel O’Leary. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. 12.
90. O’Toole , 240, 244.
91.Ibid., 290, 251, 248.