The Attention Merchants

by Tim Wu

  None of this was rocket science. Take “demand engineering,” which while sounding arcane, in practice relied on just a few simple devices. Among the simplest was the method that had worked for patent medicine. Also known as “reason-why” advertising, this approach presented the product as the miraculous cure to some existing problem.8

  Consider Claude Hopkins’s campaign for a new invention called orange juice, which presented it as an elixir for infants. A doting mother is pictured seated with a rosy-cheeked newborn, a posture for nursing, but this mother is feeding her baby with a spoon. “Orange juice is regularly prescribed for the diet of tiny babies because physicians know its purity and food value.” In another advertisement, a “DR. WILEY” says “Oranges…Are Better Than Medicine.” The consumer is informed that “practically every well-known physician advises orange juice for the diet of little children—even tiny babies.” Later, with the discovery of “Vital Amine C” (what we now call vitamin C), orange juice would acquire its magic ingredient, and a daily glass would become necessary for everyone’s good health. “You need orange juice every day.”9

  The similarities with patent medicine advertising run deep, for the link between orange juice and the health of infants was based on nothing and ultimately proved to be highly dubious. Today the American Academy of Pediatrics strongly cautions against feeding babies orange juice, because it “could risk having juice replace breast milk or infant formula in the diet,” resulting in malnutrition; in addition, “excessive juice consumption may be associated with diarrhea, flatulence, abdominal distention, and tooth decay.” These side effects may have been unknown in the 1920s, but so was any proof of a supposed health benefit. While not as dangerous, orange juice was no more an elixir than Liquozone had been.10

  As consumerism grew, it also became possible to sell products solving problems that were hardly recognized as such, let alone matters of life and death. Demand was engineered by showing not so much that the product would solve the problem but that the problem existed at all. Bringing subconscious anxieties to the fore was the inspired brilliance behind the great campaigns for mouthwash and toothpaste, two products largely unknown before the 1920s.

  “Halitosis—Makes you Unpopular” was the headline of Listerine’s campaign. Originally a disinfectant, invented for medical usage on the battlefield, the brown liquid had also been marketed as a floor cleaner. But in the 1920s, under new management, the manufacturer presented it as a cure for a devastating problem countless Americans were unwittingly afflicted with. “No matter how charming you may be or how fond of you your friends are, you cannot expect them to put up with halitosis (unpleasant breath) forever. They may be nice to you—but it is an effort.”11

  The ominously clinical-sounding “halitosis” was a largely unheard of word when Listerine introduced it. But they rightly gauged the human psyche and the tenor of the times by stirring fears about a problem everyone encounters in others from time to time without comment. Directing this kind of scrutiny to it can’t help but make one wonder about one’s own breath (as you yourself may now be doing). The campaign was a masterpiece of demand engineering, and between 1922 and 1929, the Listerine company’s annual earnings rose from $115,000 to over $8 million.12

  “Just run your tongue across your teeth,” read another classic newspaper ad, in big print, offering an irresistible challenge. “You’ll feel a film—that’s what makes your teeth appear ‘off color,’ and invites decay and gum troubles.” Here was Hopkins’s most famous campaign, which brilliantly tapped into another subconscious fear, that of decay and aging. For this problem, Pepsodent, a new “film-removing dentifrice,” was just what the doctor ordered.13

  The manipulation of public fears for profit did not go unnoticed. In 1926, the newly founded Time magazine declared:

  The omnipotent buying public carries in its mind only a dim conception of the part played in its daily life by this enormous new pseudoscience, advertising. How did that tube of Pepsodent toothpaste, for instance, reach your bathroom shelf?…It got there, obviously, because somehow Lord & Thomas had at least made you suspect that of all toothpastes Pepsodent is the one most imperative to your health and happiness. You may not remember but somewhere you read that you had a film on your teeth and that gritty Pepsodent was the thing which would polish that film away.14

  Nevertheless, the public was generally satisfied with what it was being sold. And Hopkins was more than satisfied. As part owner of the toothpaste company he made a killing, though perhaps the former preacher couldn’t enjoy that kind of success. He wrote that he considered his Pepsodent campaign a form of public service. “So the commercial aspect has been largely hidden in the altruistic….The advertisements breathe unselfishness and service.” And while he allowed, “I made for myself a million dollars on Pepsodent,” he would complain about the difficulty of finding ways to spend the money.15

  It is right to pause here to acknowledge that the psychological premises of these and other advertisements may owe something to Sigmund Freud, who was coincidentally at the height of his productivity and whose books, especially The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, were widely available in translation. Indeed, it is often argued that Freud’s elucidation of the unconscious must have driven the new techniques of advertising over the 1910s and 1920s. This is a central contention, for instance, of the 2002 documentary series The Century of the Self, which gives great credit to Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays of the Creel Committee for introducing appeals to the unconscious mind to product marketing.

  The simple narrative of Freud’s nephew transforming American advertising is an appealing stereotype, in Lippmann’s sense of the term; but, alas, the historical record does not bear it out. Of course, one can’t deny that Freud’s ideas were in the air; and one can hardly prove that advertisers were not unconsciously drawing on them. But the facts suggest that the leading advertising firms of the time, to the extent they tipped their hand, put their faith in Freud’s American competition, the behavioral school of psychology. Its main objective would surely have sounded like the name of the game to men like Hopkins: “the prediction and control of behavior.”16

  “Whenever one of us goes to the theatre or picks a necktie, we are responding to definite laws,” wrote Stanley B. Resor, president of New York’s J. Walter Thompson and perhaps the most influential proponent of behavioral science. “For every type of decision—for every sale in retail stores—basic laws govern the actions of people in great masses.” Resor was serious enough about the discipline to hire John B. Watson, the famous author of the 1913 Behaviorist Manifesto. Watson was more ethologist than psychologist, more concerned with hardwired human traits and conditioned responses than the Freudians, who were more interested in the individual psyche and its personal experience. For Watson, unlike Freud, mental states and moods were irrelevant. “The time seems to have come,” he said, “when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness.” Instead, he pursued a unitary theory of animal response, for the behaviorist “recognizes no dividing line between man and brute.”17

  Watson believed that humans, like other animals, could be conditioned to respond in predictable ways, and his most famous experiments were conducted on human infants. In the one on “Little Albert,” a human version of Pavlov’s experiments on dogs, Watson induced a phobia of rats in an eleven-month-old. He did so by striking a metal bar with a hammer behind the baby’s head every time a white rat was shown to him. After seven weeks of conditioning, the child, initially friendly to the rodent, began to fear it, bursting into tears at the sight of it. The child, in fact, began to fear anything white and furry—Watson bragged that “now he fears even Santa Claus.”18 *

  At J. Walter Thompson, Watson was, in some sense, given a chance to perform his experiments on a larger population. As he maintained, “To make your consumer react, it is only necessary to confront him with either fundamental or conditioned emotional stimuli.” Soon Resor made Watson an �
�ambassador-at-large” and an account executive. When not advising on campaigns, he traveled America and the globe to sell executives on scientific advertising, and on his firm, which possessed all the tools necessary to control the minds of the public. As he said it plainly in one speech: “Since the time the serpent in the Garden of Eden influenced Eve and Eve in turn persuaded Adam, the world has tried to find out ways and means of controlling human behavior. In advertising, we call the process selling.”19

  We have said that creating demand for new products was the first great goal of the early advertising industry. Otherwise, as Resor once explained, “the achievements of American mass production would fall of their own weight.” The second great objective realized in the 1920s was the engineering of reputation, also known as branding.

  Brands hardly existed before mass production; in a prior age, it was the reputation of the individual merchant that did the work, much as it still does today for doctors, accountants, and other professionals. But by the 1920s, advertisers came to understand that a reputation, once necessarily earned, could now be manufactured like a war-will or any consumer good. And so over the early part of the century, American and European firms invested millions to create associations with names that previously had no broad connotations, names like “Cadillac,” “Kraft,” “Lucky Strike,” “Heinz,” “Coca-Cola,” and so on. The fact that all of these remain familiar and enjoy enviable sales nearly a hundred years on shows how that initial investment, if properly husbanded, can pay dividends indefinitely.

  Theodore MacManus was the dean of this soft-sell approach, credited with building brands like Cadillac, Dodge, Chrysler, and General Electric. Born in Buffalo, New York, and raised as a devout Catholic, MacManus mostly frowned on the harder-edged reason-why approaches favored by his Protestant rivals. As for Claude Hopkins, his main intellectual rival, MacManus viewed him as an unscrupulous con artist who seemed to believe that “all men are fools.” Hopkins’s way, thought MacManus, was not only contemptuous but bad for the client, for it “yielded glittering advertising successes which shortly become business failures.”

  MacManus’s alternative was an advertising of iconography. He built up his brands to be trusted, even revered. He sought not so much to persuade customers but to convert them; to create a lasting loyalty. In his hands, the Cadillac meant something, and its drivers were meant to identify with their vehicles. He famously wrote an advertisement telling Cadillac’s drivers that, as the greatest car in the world, Cadillac necessarily bore the “penalty of leadership.” For to become a “standard for the whole world” was also to be “a target for the shafts of the envious few.” Still, quality will out: “That which is good or great makes itself known, no matter how loud the clamor of denial. That which deserves to live—lives.” For the Dodge brand, MacManus invented a new word: “dependability.” He claimed to believe that “while men may be fools and sinners, they are everlastingly on the search for that which is good.”20

  MacManus’s “suggestive” style was an advertising that “implants thoughts not by force but by infiltration.” He aimed to create the impression that “the man manufacturing the product is an honest man, and that the product is an honest product, to be preferred above all others.” The projection of a “substantial and more or less virtuous character” did depend on some blandishments, such as beautiful illustrations; but otherwise he saw himself as simply delivering the unvarnished Truth. To that, the honorable advertising executive could add the newly discovered powers of propaganda, an accelerant to the natural process by which that Truth is duly recognized.

  Whether MacManus truly believed in the inherent goodness of all that he sold is impossible to know, but his writings in the voice of Cadillac or Dodge Motors, for example, have the undeniable ring of authenticity. And of course, MacManus was a company man, not an agency man; he was not required to sing the praises of whoever walked through the door. As a loyal employee of the General Motors company during its rise to greatness, he was after all promoting what were, in the 1920s, among the best cars on earth. His position, then, came with a license to indulge in poetic praise that the seller of toothpaste might not enjoy.

  Perhaps we’ll never know his mind. He did promise his clients, with no apparent Faustian anxiety, that “we have found a hothouse in which a good reputation can be generated, as it were, over night. In other words, the thing for which men in the past have been willing to slave and toil for a lifetime, they can now set out to achieve with semi-scientific accuracy and assurance of success, in periods of months instead of years.” Perhaps the most impressive proof of his theory is that, to this day, “Cadillac” is a general superlative (as in Cadillac health plan), even to those who don’t esteem it as the finest car money can buy.21

  During this period it also struck businessmen, as if all at once, that if America was becoming a consumer society, most of this new purchasing of household goods was being done by the lady of the house. “In the purchase of things for personal use,” declared one authority in 1921, “men do very little on their own initiative.” Companies, run mostly by men, therefore, came to see cracking the code of the female consumer as the key to commerce. As an advertisement in Printer’s Ink put it, “The proper study of mankind is man…but the proper study of markets is women.” To men of industry, however, the promised land was mostly a terra incognita.22 Hence, advertising’s third major development was a great new effort to appeal to women—through what would later be called “targeted” advertisements.

  A famous early advertisement for Woodbury soap, crafted by a woman named Helen Lansdowne, typified the new approach. When she was given the account, the product had long been sold by patent medicine principles. Its advertisements had a branding visage, consisting of the mustachioed Dr. John Woodbury, the dermatologist who invented it in 1877. The face, which was also stamped into each bar, was accompanied by the slogan “a pure antiseptic toilet soap—for the skin, scalp, and complexion.” Some versions tried for the softer touch with the tag line “Women should be beautiful.” But the grim Dr. Woodbury still loomed large, producing a rather creepy dissonance.23

  The ineffectiveness of the old Woodbury’s advertisements reflected a clueless dependence on a series of broad stereotypes for advertising to women. “Women as a whole are more suggestible than men,” declared the contemporary textbook Advertising, Its Principles and Practice. “They are more easily influenced by their emotions.” Robert E. Ramsay, the author of Effective Direct Advertising, wrote that “women are more responsive to appeals made by illustration and by use of color than men are.” Whatever the validity of such claims, they didn’t exactly have women figured out.24

  Lansdowne went in an entirely different direction. In her advertisement, a dashing clean-shaven man in white tie is pictured with his arm wrapped around a beautiful woman, whose hand he holds. His cheek rests against her temple; he appears enthralled, while she stares pointedly at the viewer, her skin aglow.

  “A Skin you love to touch,” reads the copy. “You, too, can have the charm of a radiant, velvety skin.”

  A good deal of Woodbury’s soap was sold on the strength of this concept, which, however simple, captured something that had eluded the imaginations of copywriters like Hopkins and MacManus. No, it isn’t sex. The “Skin” advertisements are sometimes described as the first to make use of it, but the French posters of the late nineteenth century alone prove that simply isn’t true. What is really most notable about this marriage of word and image is that, unlike the traditional ads, which offer a cure for a problem—new snake oil in old bottles—Lansdowne’s advertisement holds out the promise of a better life. It sells the reader on herself, a new self, better than the old. Here was an innovatively oblique way of pushing the product by connecting it to the consumer’s deepest yearning to be beautiful and desired. Lansdowne’s promise may not have exhausted the full range of female aspirations, but the ones she chose to fulfill have hardly been improved upon, at least for selling facial soap. Still
, other such promises of fantasies fulfilled began to be made by Woodbury and other purveyors of various crèmes and unguents, for instance, that using them would vault one into the glamorous purlieus of high society.

  On the strength of her Woodbury’s advertisements and other achievements, Landsowne, after the war, was asked to run a new Women’s Editorial Department at J. Walter Thompson in New York, the largest firm in the United States and the most obsessed with scientific advertising. (Its president, Stanley Resor, also asked for Helen’s hand in marriage.) This amounted to a “scientific” or at least institutionalized effort to develop the art and science of targeting women by designating an entire department to understand their wants and needs.

  The new department was staffed entirely by women—“Lady Persuaders”—who were physically segregated from the rest of editorial, with their own office space, accounts, and even distinct style manual; they were asked to wear hats to distinguish themselves from female secretaries. Helen Lansdowne identified as a suffragette and hired for her staff many leaders of the women’s suffrage movement, like Frances Maule, a prominent New York activist. Maule, who became the department’s most frequent public speaker, declared, on behalf of the department, that it was time to jettison the “good old conventional ‘angel-idiot’ conception of women” and remember “the old suffrage slogan—that ‘Women Are People.’ ”25

  As people, however, they were subject to some of the same sorts of manipulation that worked on the general population. One type of targeted advertisement, like the Woodbury soap advertisements and countless others, in which the right soap or treatment or crème would, the advertisements seemed to suggest, land one at fancy dinner parties, surrounded by admiring men, or otherwise make one the belle of an actual or figurative ball. As the president of the advertising trade association later explained, “When advertising invests a prosaic article like soap with the sentiment of feminine attraction, it adds color and perfume to a menial thing. It also stirs in women the renewed desire to be comely, [and] appeals to a deep-seated hope.”