by Tim Wu
Demand engineering, too, found itself refitted for women consumers, as the “whisper” or “scare” campaigns, which warned of a social disgrace or judgment, from which the product at hand offered deliverance. Consider J. Walter Thompson’s 1922 advertisement for P&G’s laundry detergent targeting mothers. The copy reads, “If little Molly should be in an accident, what would the neighbors think of those ‘clean’ underclothes? Molly’s underclothes are supposedly clean, but actually they are gray and untidy.” Targeting the unwed, Listerine would retrofit its wildly successful “halitosis” campaign. In the “poor Edna” series, it is Edna’s stale breath, which of course no friend would tell her about, that has left her lovelorn, or in the enduring expression coined for the campaign, “often a bridesmaid but never a bride.”26
Edna’s case was really a pathetic one. Like every woman, her primary ambition was to marry. Most of the girls of her set were married—or about to be. Yet not one possessed more grace or charm or loveliness than she. And as her birthdays crept gradually toward that tragic thirty-mark, marriage seemed farther from her life than ever….That’s the insidious thing about halitosis (unpleasant breath). You yourself, rarely know when you have it. And even your closest friends won’t tell you.
And sometimes the power of the suffragette movement itself was harnessed to sell to women. Imagine a floor cleaner with a feminist agenda; that is precisely what Old Dutch Cleanser claimed to be: a “Champion of Women’s Rights,” among which it included “freedom from household drudgery” and “the right to a clean home and the leisure to enjoy it.” By similar logic, an advertisement for Shredded Wheat argued that the cereal was a “Declaration of Independence” from cooking. Here, then, in the Women’s Editorial Department, we witness the birth of a nexus between products and the individual, one that serves advertisers to this day. Going far beyond the question of usefulness or even quality as a matter of brand development, advertisers began to imbue products with traits and associations that consumers could identify with.
The Women’s Editorial Department at J. Walter Thompson was also responsible for pioneering a final technique that made its way into all advertising by the end of the 1920s. Both Helen Lansdowne and Stanley Resor believed that women were in particular likely to notice and imitate the behavior of the rich, high-born, and famous. And so, over the 1920s, they took a rarely used practice—the paid endorsement—and turned it into a mainstay for women’s products, from which it later spread to all products. Resor explained the strategy this way at an executive meeting. “The desire to emulate is stronger in women than in men,” he said. “Lombroso, the celebrated psychologist, explains it in terms of woman’s ability to excite her imagination with external objects. It enables her to become princess or movie queen by using the cold cream or toilet soap they recommended.”27
Of course the power of celebrities and stars to capture attention was hardly new, much less an invention of advertising. By the 1910s, upstart film studios like Famous Players (later to become Paramount) and United Artists had built themselves on the unusual power of big stars like Charlie Chaplin or Mary Pickford to attract large audiences. Lord Kitchener, as we have seen, leveraged his personal fame to coax a great many young British males to an early death. And when Henry Luce founded Time magazine in 1923, he drove circulation with endless stories and pictures of famous and powerful men, like President Calvin Coolidge and Benito Mussolini, a Luce favorite, who was featured eight times before the war. (“Remarkable self-control, rare judgement,” wrote Time of Il Duce in the 1920s, “and an efficient application of his ideas to the solving of existing problems.”)28
Advertisers themselves had, in limited ways, been using celebrity endorsements—as early as the nineteenth century, Pears’ soap billed itself as the choice of the royal family. But the testimonials for patent medicines from renowned “doctors” as well as grateful patients had queered the practice of testimonials for the most part. And so it took a bit of daring for J. Walter Thompson Company, at Lansdowne’s direction, to resurrect it for Pond’s cold cream, originally marketed not as a beauty product but as a spot remover.
Alva Belmont, famous for marrying and divorcing one of the Vanderbilts, was the first to endorse Pond’s, in exchange for a $1,000 donation to the National Woman’s Party; her 1924 testimonial is an odd mixture of advocacy and cold cream. “Mrs. Belmont not only has given lavishly to women’s causes from her colossal fortune, has been and is a tremendous worker, but also is particularly interested in woman’s special problem of how to keep her force and her charm through middle life and later.” Pond’s cold cream turned out to be the answer to both problems.29
Later ads relied on Alice Roosevelt Longworth (eldest daughter of Theodore Roosevelt), Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt (who had married another Vanderbilt), and later European royals and aristocrats, like the Queen of Romania, Lady Diana Manners (reputedly the most beautiful young woman in England), and most popular of all, Princess Marie de Bourbon of Spain, who was quoted as saying, “Happily…no woman’s skin need fade if she faithfully uses Ponds’ Wonderful Two Creams.”30
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Through its variously “scientific” techniques like demand engineering, branding, or targeting, the advertising industry had become an increasingly efficient engine for converting attention into revenue. It did so by beginning its now familiar practice of giving consumers, particularly women, a constantly receding ideal to strive after. Perhaps social practice had always done so, but now new strategies of attention capture were doing so in the service of commerce, an infinitely more insatiable and unyielding force than social convention.
Ultimately despite the role that many of the “Lady Persuaders” also played in the women’s rights movement, their work at J. Walter Thompson tended mainly to reinforce the condescending biases and stereotypes they had once been at pains as activists to undo. Frances Maule, once in advertising, opined that whether they knew it or not, women usually suffered from a sense of “unimportance, insignificance, [and] inadequacy.” Successful advertisements for soap or cold cream worked by promising a remedy for such emotions, so that by buying the product a woman might achieve that “ ‘grand and glorious feeling’ which we are seeking all the time.” The president of the advertising trade association described the effect more cynically: “It is an illusion, of course…still it is a means to that end and its proper use [is] a very desirable practice.”31
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* The baby’s mother, employed as a wet nurse at the hospital where the experiment was conducted, was paid $1 for her troubles.
CHAPTER 5
A LONG LUCKY RUN
George Washington Hill owned two dachshunds: one was named Lucky; the other was named Strike. He was born in 1884, the son of Percival Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company. The father gave the son the Lucky Strike brand to manage as his own, and Hill took to it the way some take to a sports team. He smoked Luckies incessantly, and his Rolls-Royce had packs of them taped to the rear windows. “I would not call him a rounded man,” said Albert Lasker. “The only purpose in life to him was to wake up, to eat, and to sleep so that he’d have strength to sell more Lucky Strikes.”1
In 1925, the elder Hill died, leaving the American Tobacco Company entirely in the hands of George Washington, who was determined to make Lucky Strike, his pet brand, America’s leading cigarette, and to spend as much as necessary to do it. Whatever the merits of the product, his money was good, and he believed in the power of advertising. By 1931 he would be spending nearly $20 million per year on it, up from $400,000 in 1925; it was at the time an unprecedented outlay, and possibly the most spent on advertising a single product up until that time.2
Both in its rich success and a number of its excesses, the Lucky Strike campaign of the late 1920s would mark a kind of culmination of advertising’s might and arrogance at decade’s end. Hill’s man for the job was Lasker of Lord & Thomas, the firm that had rescued Claude Hopkins from patent medicine’s collapse and then largely a
bsorbed his methods of the hard sell. (An aged Hopkins was by this point retired, living in a forest mansion and writing his memoirs.) To round out the team, Hill also hired Edward Bernays, who had just released his most acclaimed work, Propaganda, espousing his ideas of how the techniques government had developed during the war could now be applied to the purposes of business. The two got down to work, though not always together.
What might make Lucky Strike stand out? In 1917, the brand had gotten its start with an idea conceived by Hopkins.3 “It’s toasted” was the slogan, the “secret” step supposedly yielding a better flavor. In the mid-1920s, Lasker built on the concept with a campaign borrowing from patent medicine’s playbook: the brand was presented as a health tonic—specifically, a cure for the problem of sore throats caused by most cigarettes. With a new claim that toasting “removes harmful irritants that cause throat irritation,” including “harmful corrosive acids,” the Lucky Strike slogan became: “Your throat protection—against irritation—against cough.” There was even a secret process involved: “the ‘TOASTING’ process includes the use of the Ultra Violet Ray…heat purifies and so ‘TOASTING’—that extra, secret process—removes harmful irritants that cause throat irritation and coughing.”4 To drive home the hygienic benefit, Lasker ran a “precious voice” campaign, with testimonials from opera stars and other singers. What could be more persuasive than the Metropolitan Opera’s lead soprano attesting that she smoked Luckies to protect her livelihood?5
The testimonials were, of course, paid for, but it is still startling that Lasker was able to coax the singers into the effort. Even by the late 1920s, there were inklings that cigarettes might be bad for you. So, to preempt the truth, Lasker deployed another old patent medicine trick: he tried to co-opt medical authority. The American Tobacco Company sent doctors free cartons of Luckies in exchange for a vague nod that they might be less abrasive than other brands.6 Whether or not the doctors knew what they were agreeing to, Lord & Thomas went ahead with ads that portrayed them as, in effect, touting the health benefits of smoking Lucky Strikes. One advertisement features a doctor in a white coat holding up a packet, with the copy: “20,679 physicians say ‘LUCKIES are less irritating’…Your throat protection.”7
To sell the smoking of cigarettes as a healthful habit had a certain genius to it and might have had a long fruitful run, but at some point George Washington Hill, like so many others, got converted to the feminine principle of the 1920s. He decided, abruptly, that the real secret to Lucky Strike’s success would be persuading women to smoke them, especially in public. In his diary, Bernays recalled the day that the boss had this epiphany. “Hill called me in. ‘How can we get women to smoke on the street? They’re smoking indoors. But, damn it, if they spend half the time outdoors and we can get ’em to smoke outdoors, we’ll damn near double our female market. Do something. Act!’ ”8
In the late 1920s, it was still taboo for women to smoke in public; in some cities, including, for a brief while, New York, it was even against the law.9 But to the monomaniacal Hill, the idea was sheer commercial opportunity. “It will be,” he told Bernays, “like opening a new gold mine right in our front yard.”
Good soldiers both, Lasker and Bernays soon caught the spirit of women’s liberation, or at least noticed its utility. Lasker allowed that, after his wife had been asked to refrain from smoking in a restaurant, he was determined “to break down the prejudice against women smoking.” But it was Bernays, the public relations man, who took more seriously the idea of a commercial cause in social-activist clothing. He was in fact a critic of advertising in the Hopkins mold, and believed that ideally one should seek to make it obsolete. “The old-fashioned propagandist,” wrote Bernays, “using almost exclusively the appeal of the printed word, tried to persuade the individual reader to buy a definite article, immediately.” In contrast, Bernays believed it possible to create demand at an even more fundamental level, by changing customs and norms. He asked:
What are the true reasons why the purchaser is planning to spend his money on a new car instead of on a new piano? Because he has decided that he wants the commodity called locomotion more than he wants the commodity called music? Not altogether. He buys a car, because it is at the moment the group custom to buy cars. The modern propagandist therefore sets to work to create circumstances which will modify that custom.
The skilled propagandist could be not merely an engineer of demand, then, but a maker of manners, bringing a multiplier effect to the commercial use of attention capture.
Bernays sought to overthrow the taboo against women smoking outside the home by framing it as an abridgement of their freedom. Relying on some back-of-the-envelope Freudian analysis, including the idea of cigarettes as phallic objects and a source of oral satisfaction, he presented smokes as vital to a fuller life. And he hired a group of attractive women to march in the 1929 New York City Easter Day Parade, brandishing their Lucky Strikes, or “torches of freedom.”10 He had paid Ruth Hale, a prominent feminist, to sign the letter inviting the women to the march. “Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!” it thundered.11
The historical record is somewhat muddled as to the real effect of the stunt, precisely because of Bernays’s natural tendency to take credit as the mysterious puppet master behind the scenes.12 Perhaps seduced by an irresistible story, many have accepted his version of events, in which the “Torches of Freedom” parade marks a kind of social turning point. No less astute a critic of propaganda than Noam Chomsky allows that Bernays’s “major coup, the one that really propelled him into fame in the late 1920s, was getting women to smoke.”13
It is of course impossible to assign—or deny—definitive credit for something as complex as a change in social norms. Suffice it to say that contemporary reporting of the “Torches of Freedom” event was relatively thin. The New York Times buried its account of the protest halfway through its story on the presumably more urgent subject, the Easter Parade itself: “About a dozen young women strolled back and forth [on Fifth Avenue] while the parade was at its peak, ostentatiously smoking their cigarettes….One of the group explained that the cigarettes were ‘torches of freedom’ lighting the way to the day when women would smoke on the street as casually as men.”14 The Washington Post would not mention the demonstration until 1991, by which time the event had gathered significance by reason of the story’s propagation; in the end, Bernays’s signal triumph may have been the particularly good job he did capturing the attention of historians.
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At roughly the same time that the boss called in Bernays, Lasker was also tasked with engineering greater demand among women for Lucky Strike. This was the beginning of the “Reach for a Lucky” campaign. Far cruder and more conventional than Bernays’s effort, it also likely sold more cigarettes to women than all the torches of Easter. Lasker started from advertising’s most tried and true premise, borrowed from patent medicine: cigarettes needed to be a cure for something—if not sore throats, then what? Noticing that women often expressed concern about their weight, he came up with the idea of selling Lucky Strike as a remedy for excess weight, a diet aid. The original slogan “Reach for a Lucky instead of a Bon-Bon” soon became “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet,” and would long be remembered simply as “Reach for a Lucky.”15
In a typical ad, a glamorous flapper is puckering up, blowing smoke perhaps, with her eyes shut tight; the copy reads, “To keep a slender figure, no one can deny…Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.” A number of others invoke “The Shadow which pursues us all”; in these, a matronly silhouette ominously frames the profile of a lithe young woman. For good measure, Lasker added Hopkins’s coda to nearly all these ads: “It’s toasted.”
Lasker may never have been at J. Walter Thompson, much less the Women’s Department, but his imitation of their approach worked wonders. Sales of Luckies exploded, increasing by 8.3 billion units in 1928 alone. As other brands followed suit, rates of smoking among women tripled fro
m the 1920s to the mid-1930s.
In this way, George Washington Hill got what he wanted. By the end of the decade, Lucky Strike had overtaken Camel as the nation’s leading cigarette for no evident reason than its advertising spending. To succeed, propaganda must be total. But along the way, the campaign crossed some lines, resorting to the sort of dangerous misrepresentations that had made patent medicines so successful. Just as before, the success had been based purely on advertising, and won at the expense of public health. Perhaps predictably, then, “Reach for a Lucky” and campaigns like it began to provoke a wave of public resentment that would reach full force by the beginning of the 1930s. For the American Tobacco Company, it would begin when the Federal Trade Commission called in Hill and Lasker to have a talk about those medical testimonials.
By 1928, Claude Hopkins, now in retirement, would announce that his trade had reached its own end of history. “Human nature does not change,” he wrote, and the principles of scientific advertising “are as enduring as the Alps.” Nothing bolstered this assertion like the institutional sophistication of the modern agency itself, which had ably sold itself, apart from much else. No longer peddling primitive space ads in penny papers, the advertising executive was now deftly marrying word and image across the spectrum of print media on behalf of burgeoning giants of manufacture and service, wielding the power of life and death over consumer products.16 As the 1920s closed, advertising had grown itself from a dubious activity and negligible industry into a major part of the economy. American companies went from spending an estimated $700 million in 1914 to almost $30 billion a year by 1929, then about 3 percent of gross domestic product.17 Advertising was now as big as many of the industries it served.