Less than a year before his death, Newspaper World & Advertising Review noted the reboot of the periodical Public Opinion under the auspices of The Daily Mirror. The January 1950 premiere issue “follow[ed] the style of the political weeklies” with content that “cover[ed] political and current affairs with special features on films, books, television, and the open air.” On the front page,what was described as a letter of the week … stated that George Bernard Shaw stood out like a sore thumb from the ruck of contemporary publicists because he preserved “the unaffected, lucid, vigorous style of the uninhibited Victorian.” The question is then asked: “Can Public Opinion in 1950 regain the tone and get away from the mealy mouthed pomposity that distinguishes the ‘serious’ half of the Press today from the mindlessness that is foisted on us as the popular style?” The editor’s footnote comments: “Let the shining past be the guide to the future. We can but hope to learn.” 85
Coincidentally, Shaw’s very first publication (in April 1875) appeared “in the correspondence column of Public Opinion, a London weekly news digest” at the time. 86
Combining sustained public visibility in the earliest forms of modern mass media with shrewd cultivation of his persona, Shaw’s branding of “G.B.S. ” was part of the vanguard ofthis concept of celebrity as commodity when highly visible people who were known for their creations – whether as artists, poets, writers or performers – received orchestrated publicity … to popularize their outputs and enhance the extent to which they could be monetized [as part of] the emergence also of an increasingly “commoditized” cultural environment that characterized capitalist societies. 87
During the period that Shaw was directly participating in product marketing,advertisers found that initially many established celebrities from the world of film, stage, and even television were reluctant to “lower” themselves to making public appearances as brand promoters [due to] a deeply ingrained feeling among stars of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s that their public image could be damaged if they lent their names as endorsers of commercial products. 88
Throughout his career, Shaw modeled a different relationship to the marketplace and public media, one that anticipated the proliferation of celebrity endorsement in the second half of the twentieth century into itself a multi-trillion dollar-a-year industry staged across a staggering array of media platforms. The lucrative profit margin of its evolution though has regretfully obscured what for Shaw was the central actuating force of his campaign: the prophet motive.
Notes
1.Jackson Lears. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. New York: Basic Books, 1994. 204, 205.
2.Quoted in Lears, 205.
3.Lears, 219.
4.James Playsted Wood. The Story of Advertising. New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1958. 418.
5.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. 9.
6.Ibid., 9.
7.“Why London Department Store Advertised in New York.” Printers’ Ink 146.12 (21 March 1929): 73–4. 74.
8.H. S. Gardner. “The Paid Testimonial Is Taking the Cure.” Advertising & Selling 13.12 (17 April 1929): 17–18, 46. 17, 46, 18.
9.Ibid., 46.
10.Amos Stote. “G.B.S. Joins Us.” Advertising & Selling 15.10 (17 September 1930): 32.
11.Mark Tungate. Ad Land: A Global History of Advertising. London: Kogan Page, 2007. 26.
12.Dan H. Laurence. Bernard Shaw: A Bibliography, vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. 252.
13.“Copywriter.” The New Yorker (31 July 1948): 13–14. 13.
14.The misattributed quote proliferates, from Holiday Haunts in England, Wales and Channel Islands: The Official Guide to the Holiday Resorts Served by the Great Western Railroad (1928) to Brendan Lehane’s The Companion Guide to Ireland (2001).
15.William M. Freeman. The Big Name. New York: Printers’ Ink Books, 1957. 38.
16.Ibid., 14. Also: “‘Plug’ for Airways Written by Shaw.” New York Times 28.4 (17 June 1948): 28.
17.Ibid., 14.
18.Laurence, 252.
19.“Copywriter,” 13–14.
20.Ibid., 14.
21.Bizarrely, in Fifty in 40: The Unofficial History of JWT London, 1945–1995. Rayfield Writers, 1996, Tom Rayfield puzzles over the gap of time between Shaw’s initial letter (dated 16 October 1946) and his copy correction letter (dated 20 October 1948), noting the insertion date of March 1948. He concludes that “it seems unlikely that it took the Testimonial Department two years to get final approval, but rather that the 90 (or 92)-year-old author may have been a bit confused as to the year” (39).
22.The Saturday Review 31 (17 July 1948): 6.
23.“‘As Corrected’ By G.B.S.” Tide: The News Magazine of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations (23 July 1948): 17.
24.The J.W.T. News 3.25 (21 June 48): 1. The piece ends with a teaser, that “the story of how the copy and free endorsement were obtained, together with a reproduction of the original manuscript as personally revised and inscribed by GBS will be reported next week.” However, it doesn’t seem as if a follow-up appeared, perhaps because the “story” was so prominently and publically recounted elsewhere.
25.The J.W.T. News 3.28 (12 July 1948): 1.
26.Ibid., 1.
27.Another odd detail that pops up in various reviews of the campaign (both within the industry and outside of it) is the claim that Shaw was brand new to the world of commerce. Editor & Publisher proclaimed that, “so far as is known, Mr. Shaw has never associated himself with a commercial service or product before” (24). The New York Times article, in its final paragraph, also emphasizes that “Pan American believes this is the first time Mr. Shaw has lent his name to a commercial product or venture” (28). These statements, perhaps intended to boost the credibility of the product via Shaw’s participation belie the playwright’s previous and prominent participation in commodity advertising.
28.“Copywriter,” 13.
29.“Free Irish Air.” Time 51.25 (21 June 1948): 90.
30.“‘Plug’ for Airways Written by Shaw.” New York Times 28.4 (17 June 1948): 28.
31.Moskowitz and Schweitzer, 9.
32.J.W.T. News 3.31 (2 August 1948): 5.
33.“How Well Do You Know Your JWT’ERS?: ‘Thumb-Nail Sketch’ of Gelston Hardy.” The J.W.T. News 3.49 (6 December 1948): 6.
34.Even before her encounter with Shaw, “Bill” Blaker’s life was quite extraordinary. Born in the fall of 1886, she spent much of her childhood in British Columbia, and her young adulthood was marked by dramatic shifts in professional focus with stints as a barrow-girl, owner/operator of a nursing home, a secretary, and a ballet/fencing instructor in Brussels. During the first world war, she was one of the first to join the Women’s Volunteer Reserve, beginning her journey to becoming Major and Adjutant. During the second world war, Blaker became second-in-command of the Auxiliary Territorial Service while still continuing work in the streets with the Fire Service and the Red Cross. Blaker retired from her JWT position in 1954 and died in1976.
35.Round the Square 3.2 (1953): 6.
36.“How Well Do You Know Your JWT’ERS?: ‘Thumb-Nail Sketch’ of Dorothea Campbell Blaker (London).” The J.W.T. News 2.43 (27 October 1947): 6.
37.Round the Square, 6.
38.Peter Yeo. Reflections on an Agency. Published Privately, 1988. 24.
39.In the image, the reflected glare from the camera flash on the Shaw display indicates its contents are under glass in contrast to the materials on the corkboard immediately behind the seated Blaker.
40.JWT News 4.34 (8/22/49): 1.
41.Bernard Shaw. Back to Methuselah. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 5. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 340–684. 496. The Elderly Gentleman’s characterization of Ireland as a “mental health resort” itself seems slig
htly to adapt tourist rhetoric, and “British Baghdad” has a theme park sense to it.
42.Bernard Shaw. John Bull’s Other Island. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 2. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 893–1027. 909.
43.Bernard Shaw. Too True to Be Good. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 6. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 429–528. 510.
44.Bernard Shaw. “Preface” to Too True to Be Good. In The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, vol. 6. London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 399–428. 409.
45.Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, 893–4.
46.Kathleen Ochshorn. “Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and the Shadow of a New Empire: John Bull’s Other Island.” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 26 (2006): 180–93. 192, 181.
47.Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, 1015.
48.Bernard Shaw. “Dear Harp of My Country.” In Dramatic Opinions and Essays, vol. 1. New York: Brentano’s, 1906. 326–32. 330.
49.Colin Graham. Deconstructing Ireland: Identity, Theory, Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001. 171.
50.Ibid., 166–7.
51.Mark Phelan. “‘Authentic Reproductions’: Staging the ‘Wild West’ in Modern Irish Drama.” Theatre Journal 61.2 (May 2009): 235–48. 245.
52.Rod Rosenquist. “Copywriting Gertrude Stein: Advertising, Anonymity, Autobiography.” Modernist Cultures 11.3 (2016): 331–50. 341.
53.Elizabeth Outka. Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 4.
54.Shaw, Too True to Be Good, 510.
55.Graham, 144.
56.See Dean MacCannell. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
57.Ning Wang. “Rethinking Authenticity in Tourism Experience.” Annals of Tourism Research 26.2 (1999): 349–70. 349–50.
58.Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island. London: Constable, 1927. v.
59.Brad Kent. “Shaw’s Everyday Emergency: Commodification in and of John Bull’s Other Island.” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 26 (2006): 162–79. 164.
60.Wang, 349–50.
61.The final version of the caption was: “Dublin is an architecturally noble metropolis of over half a million people. Wild mountain scenery is nearby—and a tram drive takes you to a seaside that rivals the Bay of Naples.”
62.Graham Huggan. The Post-colonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge, 2001, 13.
63.Gareth Griffiths. “The Myth of Authenticity: Representation, Discourse and Practice.” In De-scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and Textuality. Eds. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson. London: Routledge, 1994. 70–85. 71.
64.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, 78.
65.“Focus: The Legal and Personality Department.” Round the Square (August 1956): 7–9. The originals of these documents have not survived, framed or otherwise. They are not contained among the Pan-American materials within the JWT London client account files (held by the History of Advertising Trust in Norfolk), and any separate records kept by the JWT London Legal & Personality department itself were not retained.
66.“Copywriter,” 14.
67.Laurence, 253. This variation on Shaw’s copy is also cited on page 863 in volume two of Archibald Henderson’s George Bernard Shaw: Man of the Century. New York: Da Capo Press, 1972. Henderson also indicates that the text was provided “gratuitously.”
68.Kent, 175.
69.Cited in John Strachan and Claire Nally. Advertising, Literature and Print Culture in Ireland, 1891–1922. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 19. The blurb also appears as the heading of the “Index to Advertisements” at the back of W. F. Wakeman’s Dublin: What’s to Be Seen, and How to See It, 2e. Dublin: Hodges and Smith, Grafton Street, 1853.
70.“Story of British “Communism”: Mr. Shaw on the Need to Advertise.” In The Letters of Bernard Shaw to “The Times.” Ed. Ronald Ford. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007. 286–7.
71.“Advertising Angle.” World’s Press News and Advertisers’ Review 44.1121 (8 September 1950): 12.
72.“ADVERTISE! ADVERTISE! ADVERTISE!” The Economist 159 (1950): 590.
73.Gardner, 17–18.
74.Marlis Schweitzer and Marina Moskowitz, 5.
75.Ibid., 5.
76.Ibid., 19.
77.Winston Fletcher. Powers of Persuasion: The Inside Story of British Advertising. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 27, 22.
78.William D. Tyler. “The Image, the Brand, and the Consumer.” Journal of Marketing 22.2 (October 1957): 162–5. 163.
79.Ibid., 163.
80.Fintan O’Toole . Judging Shaw: The Radicalism of GBS. Dublin: Prism, 2017. 96.
81.Bernard Shaw. “Criticism on the Hustings.” In Bernard Shaw: The Drama Observed, vol. 2 (1895–1897). Ed. Bernard F. Dukore. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. 395–401. 397.
82.Bernard Shaw. “How to Become a Man of Genius.” In Selected Non-dramatic Writings of Bernard Shaw. Ed. Dan H. Laurence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965. 341–6, 344–5.
83.Bernard Shaw. Collected Letters, vol. 4 (1926–1950). Ed. Dan H. Laurence. New York: Viking, 1988. 290.
84.Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters, vol. 4, 560–3. 562.
85.“An Addition to the Journals of Opinion.” Newspaper World & Advertising Review 2712 (12 January 1950): 43.
86.A. M. Gibbs. A Bernard Shaw Chronology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. 33.
87.Barrie Gunter. Celebrity Capital: Assessing the Value of Fame. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 3–4.
88.Ibid., 61.
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